More than 600 Native American youth from tribes across Oklahoma and beyond gathered this month at the University of Oklahoma’s Sam Noble Museum in Norman for their tenth annual two-day Youth Language Fair.
More than 600 Native American youth from tribes across Oklahoma and beyond gathered this month at the University of Oklahoma’s Sam Noble Museum in Norman for their tenth annual two-day Youth Language Fair.
“Our language is the number one source of our soul, our pride, our being, our strength and our identity.”-- Indigenous Language Instructor, Cultural Survival Quarterly, 2010
Languages are vanishing
Language experts believe that 90% of the world’s estimated 6,000 languages could disappear entirely by the end of this century. Indigenous Peoples face myriad socio-economic pressures and discriminatory policies forcing youth and adults alike to replace tribal languages with the dominant languages of the larger societies in which they live.
By Pete Zrioka
Languages have a history of being lost in the United States. Through the process of cultural assimilation, many immigrants settle here and lose linguistic ties to their home countries in a few generations.
By Terri M. Baker
By Brandon M. Chapman, Ph.D. and John Goodwin
This past weekend Cultural Survival’s Endangered Languages Program Manager Jennifer Weston and Tracy Kelley, Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project apprentice hosted a day-long workshop on Indigenous language revitalization projects with more than seventy tribal youth at the Montagnyard Pinecroft Learning Center and Church in Greensboro, North Carolina. The high school students are part of an active refugee community numbering more than 4,000, and all speak one or more Indigenous languages originating in the central highlands of Vietnam, and are learning or already speak English.
By Natalia Cartney. Photos by Rodrigo Llauro.
By Rob Percival
A poem by Warajor Ojulu.
Sunset Over the Anuaks: What is Left?
What is left?
When the sun goes down
What is left?
January 2012 marked four years since Cultural Survival launched Endangered Languages Program partnerships with critically endangered Native American language communities. Since Spring 2008, Cultural Survival’s grassroots collaborative of four local language program directors and administrators serving 6 tribally-run programs has raised nearly three quarters of a million dollars in direct support for five partner programs, while leveraging nearly $2 million in total new investments in language revitalization efforts.
Mapunzugun is a language isolate spoken in Chile and Argentina by the Mapuche people. On February 21, 2012 in Temuco, the capital of Araucanía Region in Chile, several Mapuche organizations and communities organized a first regional march in support of the Mapunzugun language.
Reconocimiento de tierra
Reconocemos que nuestra sede está en la tierra de Massachusetts, en Cambridge, MA, y agradecemos a los administradores Indígenas pasados, actuales y futuros de este territorio.