The revised telecommunications law that would legalize community radio in Guatemala is closer than ever to being passed. On August 24th, the county’s president, Alvaro Colom, summoned radio operators and Cultural Survival to a meeting at the presidential palace, where Roberto Alejos (president of the Congress), and members of the Supreme Court were to discuss how to grant long-promised broadcast licenses to community radio stations. Unfortunately, the president failed to show at the meeting, and only the head of the judicial branched appeared.
Cultural Survival and the Sauk Language Department, based at the Sac and Fox Nation of Oklahoma, sent our master-apprentice team on a week-long language immersion field trip to their sister language community, the Meskwaki Nation, based in Tama, Iowa. Team members return from Iowa today, and have spent over 8 hours each day during the past week communicating exclusively in the Sauk/Meskwaki language. They also participated in a language conference designed for local Meskwaki community members to set priorities for long-term language revitalization efforts.
Cultural Survival and the National Alliance to Save Native Languages partnered last week with the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) to pass an NCAI Resolution declaring Native languages in the U.S. in a state of emergency, and to express support for a proposed presidential executive order on Native language revitalization.
Members of Cultural Survival staff and the Community Radio Movement held discussions Monday at the Congress of the Republic in Guatemala City.
Jessie little doe Baird, Mashpee Wampanoag tribal citizen and an advisor and partner to Cultural Survival’s Endangered Languages Program, was honored today with a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, popularly known as a “genius grant” for her extraordinary efforts to revive Wampanoag as a spoken language after it disappeared 150 years ago.
Attendees at the National Indian Education Association's annual convention and language revitalization forum will be treated to film screenings featuring two of Cultural Survival's partner and advisor Native language programs--the Northern Arapaho Tribe's immersion schools, the Arapaho Language Lodges on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming, and the Wampanoag Nation's Wopanaak Language Reclamation Project (WLRP) in Massachusetts.
Land Acknowledgement
We acknowledge that we are headquartered on Massachusett land, in Cambridge, MA, and we thank the past, current, and future Indigenous stewards of this territory.
