WASHINGTON, DC.- The Smithsonian’s National Anthropological Archives has received a $323,000 “Save America’s Treasures” grant from the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities. The grant will ensure long-term preservation and better access to the Archives’ endangered-languages manuscripts. The National Anthropological Archives is the nation’s principal repository of original documentation for spoken, endangered and extinct Native American languages. Approximately 250 American Indian languages are represented in the collection. For many of these languages documentation exists nowhere else. The collection traces its origin to an 1879 Act of Congress creating an official repository for documents concerning American Indians that were collected by the Great Western Surveys of the United States. The archive was directed by John Wesley Powell, himself an explorer deeply committed to t