Breath of Life (BOL) is a two-week workshop with 70 participants (40 Native American researchers and 30 mentors, lecturers and organizers) to take place in Washington, D.C. in the summer of 2011. The purpose of the workshop is to breathe life into endangered languages of the Americas by connecting members of heritage communities with primary source material that documents their languages. BOL has been very successful in the context of indigenous California languages and this model is now being brought to a national level. Central to the workshop is collaboration between researchers (Native American heritage language learners) and mentors (experts in linguistics who guide the researchers' work), supplemented by lectures and workshops on linguistics and related topics. The workshop will be co-hosted by the Smithsonian Institution's National Anthropological Archives and National Museum for the American Indian, and the Library of Congress. The workshop will be the inaugural one in a biennial series that will be hosted at various archives throughout the country.
Breath of Life benefits three groups: endangered language communities, linguists who study and document endangered languages, and archives that preserve and provide access to documentation. Endangered language communities benefit from the expertise that researchers gain. Based on previous BOL experiences in California, Breath of Life stimulates language learning, teaching and research within heritage communities, sometimes resulting in long-term collaborative research. Linguists benefit by forging new or stronger relationships with endangered language communities, and by learning how documentation can be used effectively within heritage communities. Some linguists find that their approach to documentation and dissemination of data changes significantly after collaborating with endangered language communities. Archives benefit from the relationships developed during Breath of Life and from the associated publicity. Activities that highlight endangered language archives affirm their importance within their institutions and to the general public.
took place June 13-24, 2011, with over 50 participants, including about 35 Native language activists and about 20 linguists, each partnering with a language group. The primary goal of the Institute is to breathe life into archival documentation of Native American languages by training Native people to carry out research on their languages, and use the materials they find in archives for their language revitalization goals. In order to effectively use archival material in language revitalization, we train participants in the fundamentals of linguistics. We also seek to expose both Native participants and linguists to best methods in language revitalization. Our activity is situated within the continued evolution of documentary linguistics toward new ways of collaboration between academic linguists and the Native people whose languages they study, redefining the relationship as a partnership rather than a hierarchy. We seek to train linguists and linguistics students in a deeper understanding of the human side of language endangerment and revitalization, and to connect them with Native people involved in these processes. Since many if not most indigenous communities now expect that linguists will be of assistance to them in language revitalization, it is also important that the linguists learn to make their skills useful to the communities in which they research. The two-week Institute took place at a number of venues in Washington, D.C., and was hosted by the National Museum of the American Indian, the National Museum of Natural History, and the Library of Congress. Each weekday morning, the participants gathered for lectures and workshops on archival research, basic linguistics, and language revitalization processes. After lunch, groups were bused to one of four archives and collections. Homework was assigned the first week, for practice with linguistic analysis. At the end of the second week, each language group presented the results of a specific research project. We stayed together in one of the dormitories at George Washington University, and during the evenings groups gathered to work on homework or their research projects. Each language group had the assistance of a linguist who could help them learn the phonetics, phonology and grammar of their language from a linguistic point of view. The final day of the Institute was devoted to a presentation of the results of each group's research. The projects addressed topics ranging from applied linguistics (e.g. the development of teaching material), to historical and comparative linguistics (e.g. the comparison of historically documented dialects) and word formation (e.g. an examination of the formation of personal names). The results of this experience were clearly seen in the projects that the participants presented on the final day of the conference. The projects were exciting and sophisticated, in each case showing that the participants had fulfilled the workshop’s objectives. We passed out evaluation forms on the last day and found that the participants saw this as a tremendously exciting and fulfilling event, and were looking forward to taking home the materials, research methods, and new ideas to their communities. Many people found personally meaningful materials, including some that were tangential to language but nevertheless important, such as photos and biographical material on their ancestors. Most reported that their own mastery and understanding of their ancestral languages had been enhanced. The linguists felt that coming to understand the human side of language and the emotion the participants exhibited toward their endangered ancestral tongues was an important part of their own maturation as linguists. According to the staff of the partner institutions, the use of archival collections documenting Native languages during the Institute was unprecedented. The Institute also stimulated much conversation among the participants about the roles of linguists, heritage language learners, and Native community members in language documentation and revitalization. The organizers took away from this conference ideas on how to improve the next one (June 2013), primarily in terms of organizational details and prior training of the linguists about their role and responsibilities. With our lectures, workshops and mentoring, the Native participants were able to take home new skills in archival research and new knowledge of methods in language teaching and learning, and lesson and materials development. Similarly, the linguists learned ways to assist communities in their language revitalization efforts and how to train community members in the fundamentals of linguistics. The Native participants and linguists also learned a great deal about reaching across the divide between academics and community to develop strong, positive and trusting relationships.
