Breath of Life Archival Institute for Indigenous Languages

Endangered Language Fund, Inc., New Haven CT

Investigators

Abstract

Breath of Life (BoL) invigorates the study of endangered Native American languages by connecting heritage communities with primary source material that documents their languages, and with linguists who mentor their academic research. The Institute provides much-needed training in linguistics and in research methods in order to facilitate community-driven research and revitalization. BoL builds durable collaborative relationships between linguists and heritage language learners. These relationships stimulate language learning, teaching and research within heritage communities, often leading to new insights based on previously under-utilized documentation. BoL trains linguists to produce documentation that is more relevant to and useful for community efforts through engagement in the process of identifying, interpreting and using archival documentation. The use of archival material exposes gaps in documentation, allowing future projects to effectively focus their efforts on filling these gaps. BoL has a direct and immediate impact on the training of linguists, both within the academy and without, and on the use of linguistics in indigenous communities. It greatly enhances the dissemination of previously-collected materials to those most interested in it and, through them, to the larger academic domain. BoL supports ongoing and future community-based language documentation efforts by teaching Native American participants about the importance of language documentation and its relevance to ongoing cultural initiatives. For both mentors and researchers, BoL demonstrates the critical importance of archiving materials that linguists or community members have collected. Activities that highlight endangered language archives and their central role in language documentation affirm the importance of archives to their larger institutions and to the public in general. The Breath of Life Archival Institute for Indigenous Languages will take place in Washington, D.C., in the summer of 2013. The Institute will be co-hosted by the Smithsonian Institution's National Anthropological Archives and National Museum for the American Indian, and the Library of Congress.