Building Capacity in Documentation of Language and Traditional Ecological Knowledge for Hualapai, a Native American Language, and Other Pai Languages

Hualapai Indian Tribe, Peach Springs AZ

Investigators

Abstract

The state of Arizona is home to 15 Native American languages belonging to 5 distinct language families, thus representing tremendous diversity. The Native American Languages Act, passed by the U.S. Congress in 1990, enacted into policy the recognition of the unique status and importance of Native American languages. The Pai subgroup of the Yuman language family is spoken on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, in Arizona, and in the Baja California state of Mexico. The Pai language communities have maintained strong connections and exchanges of knowledge, especially in the ecological and environmental domains. Whether academic (linguists, anthropologists) or indigenous (elders, traditional culture bearers), these experts know language encodes a tremendous amount of specialized traditional ecological knowledge (TEK). Unfortunately, as languages become endangered, that traditional knowledge is often the first to be lost. This project will investigate how this traditional indigenous scientific knowledge, here encoded in Pai languages, should best be documented and will develop protocols for accessibility of the appropriate knowledge. The Pai languages are spoken in a region of significant biological diversity, where harvests, the lifespan of plants, and the temporal boundaries of seasons are undergoing rapid transition. This, together with the severely endangered status of all Pai languages, makes this work highly urgent. The team is led by and composed of indigenous scientists and language scholars, meaning activities will be conducted with community benefits foremost. Other broader impacts include broadening participation of Native Americans in the language and ecological sciences, the development of intellectual property (IP) protocols regarding sensitive material like TEK, and the expansion of a binational collaboration between its Pai-speaking tribal nations. Led by the Hualapai Indian Tribe, the project brings together six Pai nations, five from Arizona -- the Hualapai, Havasupai, Yavapai-Apache, Yavapai-Prescott, Ft. McDowell Yavapai -- and the Paipai tribal people of Baja California, Mexico. This project will situate training and collaborative decision-making as a methodology for this kind of comparative language and TEK documentation. The interdisciplinary team includes biologists, linguists, ethnobotanists, and elders and experts from each of the 6 Pai communities. Project activities focus on collaboratively training in skills essential to documentation of TEK through language: transcription and annotation, vouchering and specimen collection; comparative analysis of phonology and variation; databasing; and data management and archiving. Botanical species and the indigenous ethnoscience associated with them represent a sensitive and proprietary area. Stakeholder communities possess significant knowledge of the local ecology and its traditional calendar cycle, weather patterns, and uses of botanical species, with such knowledge deeply embedded in ceremonial or religious activities. That sensitivity is compounded by the potential for commercial benefit through pharmaceutical and other uses, which adds potentially contentious issues when documenting TEK. The project will advance an indigenous-based approach toward documentation of botanical and linguistic knowledge. The team will disseminate how they develop IP protocols for this specialized documentation and disseminate the protocols themselves. The project will establish a foundation for future documentation of the rich linguistic and cultural heritage of the Pai communities, both individually and from a comparative analysis. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.