Chiwere is a critically endangered Native American language belonging to the Siouan family. While missionaries, anthropologists, and linguists have recorded valuable information about Chiwere over the past 150 years, Chiwere lacks essential documentation, and no fluent speakers remain to contribute new data. The Chiwere Audio Archive Project (CAAP) will give linguists, Indian communities, and the general public access to audio recordings and texts from a collection of Chiwere oral literature told by the last fluent speakers. Since the collection was made during the 1960s-1990s using fragile cassette tapes and reel-to-reels, the project will convert these analogue recordings to digital files. Project personnel will then transcribe the recordings in Chiwere, translate them into English, and annotate them with linguistic, historical, and cultural information. Finally, the recordings and texts will be made available online and distributed to archives and stakeholder tribes.
Chiwere is a heritage language for three federally recognized Indian tribes in Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska. CAAP benefits these communities by providing resources to support their language revitalization goals. While no fluent speakers remain, a few individuals learned to speak and understand Chiwere from their relatives, and the language is still used in certain settings today. Many tribal members want to learn more of their traditional language from the voices of their elders, but there are few audio-based pedagogical materials to meet this need. CAAP will remedy this situation by giving Native communities access to recordings and texts of traditional stories, oral histories, and songs. CAAP will also employ tribal members as project assistants and train them to become language curators in their communities. In addition to benefiting tribal members, CAAP also benefits linguists. Chiwere is less understood than many Siouan languages, especially others in the Mississippi Valley subfamily. CAAP facilitates further research on Chiwere grammar and comparative Siouan topics and will be of broad interest to linguists. Overall, CAAP will meet the needs of linguists, tribal stakeholders, and the general public by preserving and making available Chiwere recordings and texts with irreplaceable linguistic and cultural significance.
