In the last decades, the documentation of endangered languages has advanced greatly in the Americas. In this paper we survey the role that international funding programs have played in advancing documentation in this part of the world, with a particular focus on the growth of documentation in Brazil, and we examine some of the major opportunities and challenges involved in documentation in the Americas, focusing on participatory research models. *This paper is in the series Language Documentation in the Americas edited by Keren Rice and Bruna FranchettoNational Foreign Language Resource Cente