Planning Grant: Tohono O'odham Language Center

Tohono O'Odham Community College, Sells AZ

Investigators

Abstract

This project supports a one-year planning grant to develop a Language Center at Tohono O'odham Community College (TOCC) in Sells Arizona. This planning grant will provide a springboard toward a larger grant for an Enterprise Advancement Center (TEA), a program offered by the Tribal Colleges and University Partnership Program at the National Science Foundation. This project is consistent with the goals of the Native American Languages Act, passed by the U.S. Congress in 1990, which enacted into policy the recognition of the unique status and importance of Native American languages. This center would serve the Tohono O'odham Nation as a clearing house for information about the Tohono O'odham language, an endangered Indigenous language spoken on both sides of the Arizona / Mexico border. The center will provide a support for teachers and students throughout the speaking community and a site for continued documentation and development of material resources for those seeking to teach or learn the language and / or for those with research interests related to the Tohono O'odham. Broader impacts also include the potential to enhance economic activity for a tribal nation, and to broaden participation for Native Americans, who are underrepresented in all the sciences, including linguistics. When completed, the Tohono O'odham Language Center will provide a hub for all intellectual activity related to addressing the endangered status of the Tohono O'odham language. This includes building the capacity of students at TOCC and language workers throughout the community through training in language recording, language data management, language archiving, and in language-processing technology appropriate for community use in both language documentation and language teaching. There is also intellectual merit in the securing of appropriate academic resources and archival materials needed to support these activities. A center of this type will have language and language-related activities at its core, but will also be a center for community networking and media outreach. The broader impacts will ripple throughout the tribal college system at all levels, throughout the Tohono O'odham community and its related tribes, throughout other Indigenous communities in Arizona and around North America. Other stakeholders within Arizona Universities and state colleges, in tribal government and other entities charged with ensuring a future for Indigenous languages, will notice and feel the effects of centralizing language work for the betterment of all. Such a center is truly transformative and the vision is very much geared toward creating a replicable model, complete with state-of-the-art equipment and methods. There will be wide-ranging publicity from the planning stages onward as the research team gathers and shares information about the literal construction and the growing list of resources that will be included. 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.