The Makepeace Productions documentary WE STILL LIVE HERE: Âs Nutayuneân, produced with the assistance of Cultural Survival’s Endangered Languages Program, travelled this month to a series of ten workshops in Bosnia and Herzegovina with director Anne Makepeace as part of the U.S. Department of State’s American Film Showcase program that hosts screenings and discussions at international embassies, universities, and diverse community organizations.

Christopher Columbus arrived as an immigrant to "the New World."

Seven co-sponsors in the U.S. House and Senate this month introduced reauthorizing legislation funding for The Esther Martinez Native American Language Act, first passed by Congress in 2006 and funded in 2008 through amendments to the Native American Programs Act of 1974 in order to provide support for Native language immersion and restoration programs in tribal communities.

This month WE STILL LIVE HERE: Âs Nutayuneân travels with director Anne Makepeace, to Sarajevo and four other cities in Bosnia and Herzegovina, taking the incredible story of Cultural Survival's Endangered Languages Program advisers at the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project (WLRP) to new audiences. The film will also screen on October 27 as part of the United Nations Film Festival at Stanford University.

This year’s call for grant proposals from the U.N. Trust Fund for the Second Decade highlights funding opportunities for “education (such as language revitalization)” for Indigenous organizations or organizations working for Indigenous peoples, noting that the “Trust Fund for the Second Decade was established to promote, support and implement the objectives of the Decade [for the World’s Indigenous People]” proclaimed by the U.N.

By Matthew Gilbert

Winds whistling through abandoned houses where Native families once lived. Village schools are closing down due to low student numbers. Over the last few years, a surge in energy costs in rural Alaska caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, has made it nearly impossible for many Native families to pay electrical and heating bills, and as a result, outmigration increased. Alaska Native leaders worry about the futures of their villages.

During a busy summer that included film screenings, summer youth camp sponsorships, and funding two Sauk Language apprentices’ attendance at programs like the Canadian Indigenous Languages Literacy Development Institute at the University of Alberta, Cultural Survival’s Endangered Languages Program also collaborated in-house with the Community Radio Project to help the Smithsonian Recovering Voices initiative in hosting a conference for Indigenous language radio producers.

At the Euchee Language Project, a partner of Cultural Survival's Endangered Languages Program, second language learners and fluent elder speakers in Sapulpa, Oklahoma are already preparing to resume their fall afterschool programming, after a busy summer of field trips, a well-attended Euchee Knowledge Bowl competition, and daily activities at the Yuchi House, sponsored in part by the Endangered Languages Program.

More than two years had passed since Cultural Survival last visited the Arapaho Language Lodge immersion classrooms in Ethete and Arapahoe, Wyoming, and program manager Jennifer Weston was eager to meet with elder fluent speakers, tribal leaders, educators, and youth on the vast 3.2 million acre reservation in west central Wyoming held in common by the Shoshone and Northern Arapaho Tribes. 

Cultural Survival’s Endangered Languages Program kicked off June with Makepeace Productions and the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project (WLRP), hosting packed screening and panel discussion of WE STILL LIVE Here: Âs Nutayuneân at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian at the two-day conference, “Language Revitalization in the 21^st Century: Going Global, Staying Local,” held at the City University of New York’s Endangered Language Initiative and Auckland University of Technology.