The fourth National Breath of Life (BOL) Archival Institute for Indigenous Languages 2017 hosted by the Smithsonian Institution and the Myaamia Center successfully concluded on Friday June 9, 2017. The week ended with each group of community researchers presenting their final projects, demonstrating what they had learned, discovered or what their future plans were beyond BoL. Presentations, like the rest of the 2-week workshop, demonstrated what has now become an increasingly high caliber of knowledge, expertise and scientific rigor employed by Breath of life participants.
Over the past four iterations of the National Breath of Life Archival Institute for Indigenous Languages community researchers have redefined the perception of what a community researcher means. On the one hand, they are indeed community members of various professions, trades, backgrounds, traveling together from their home communities to work on rebuilding, reclaiming or revitalizing their native language. On the other hand, they are experts, professionals, Masters and Doctoral students and PhD holders. They are scholars of their language. And after 2 weeks of linguistics instruction, they demonstrate a sound understanding and command of a number of linguistic tools and methodology and naturally draw on them and actively utilize this science throughout their research projects.
For their final project, the Hupa group chose a seemingly simplistic project to translate the meaning of a number of the Breath of Life participants’ names. To achieve this, they required an analysis of sociocultural particulars (death taboos, sociocultural roles), cultural values and equivalents across cultures (ethnographic analysis), community origins and archeological evidence for it (i.e. carved writing on stone at community house dated 10,000 years), as well as cross-linguistic etymological research. Further, they required knowledge of lexicon in Hupa and sentence structure including argument structure and semantic roles (ex. explicit vs. omitted agent in etymological forms) and to note markers with semantics contrast such as deixis, genitive relations, shape classifiers, and verbal inflection.
The Haida participants chose to present on a Haida narrative that they found in the archives, connecting it to new learnings about Haida grammar and cultural information, which they in turn presented with the help of photos from the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) collections. To do this, they determined that they needed to jointly transcribe into Haida the practical orthography in a text from the J.R. Swanton 1900-1901 materials in the National Anthropological Archives (NAA) collection - (Stiidgaa Ḵ’amaalaa #22), then find interesting grammatical forms - in particular Haida instrumentals and shape classifiers, but in particular directionals that are not commonly known to and used by contemporary adult learners of X̱aad kil, and present and explain these. Finally, they identified interesting cultural contexts of the story as it relates to place, artifacts and knowledge, and present these with help from what they found in the NMAI collection and others. This project demanded analysis of orthographic representation in archival documentation and understanding of current orthographic practices, as well as careful analysis of syntax and semantics across two very structurally distinct languages. All of this accomplished in just a few days’ time.
These two groups represent just two examples of community researchers that demonstrated an ease of use of linguistic scientific methodology to further their language revitalization efforts during Breath of Life, and likely well beyond. One distinguishing feature of BOL is setting the researchers up for success post-BOL. After four years of workshops and follow up with participants, organizers Gabriela Pérez Báez and Daryl Baldwin recognized a need for a very precise tool that community researchers could use beyond BOL to manage their data and make the most of the historical documentation. In response to that need, this year they piloted the Recovering Voices Indigenous Digital Archive (RVIDA) tool. Baldwin and Pérez Báez are now actively planning a roll out of RVIDA to be available to communities across North America.
It could be said that Breath of Life represents a snapshot of a growing trend in language reclamation and revitalization in North America and globally (Hinton 2010; Schwartz and Dobrin, 2016). Tribes and communities are seeking opportunities and support, and seizing them to both prevent further loss of culture and language, and to also rebuild their communities and the language they share. Breath of Life is one program held every two years attempting to meet this growing demand and provide the training groups need to get to the next level. It is the hope that the Breath of Life model will continue to serve language revitalization and inspire the next generation of community research scientists.
References:
Hinton, l. (2010), Language revitalization in North America and the new direction of linguistics. Transforming anthropology, 18: 35–41. Doi:10.1111/j.1548-7466.2010.01068.x.
Saul Schwartz & Lise M. Dobrin (2016) The cultures of Native North American language documentation and revitalization, Reviews in Anthropology, 45:2, 88-123, DOI: 10.1080/00938157.2016.1179522.
By: Laura Sharp
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