Jessie little doe Baird, Mashpee Wampanoag tribal citizen and an advisor and partner to Cultural Survival’s Endangered Languages Program, was honored today with a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, popularly known as a “genius grant” for her extraordinary efforts to revive Wampanoag as a spoken language after it disappeared 150 years ago.
Attendees at the National Indian Education Association's annual convention and language revitalization forum will be treated to film screenings featuring two of Cultural Survival's partner and advisor Native language programs--the Northern Arapaho Tribe's immersion schools, the Arapaho Language Lodges on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming, and the Wampanoag Nation's Wopanaak Language Reclamation Project (WLRP) in Massachusetts.
The Cultural Survival Endangered Languages program is working with the Sauk Language Department in Stroud, Oklahoma, and the Meskwaki Historic Preservation Department in Tama, Iowa, to set up local archives and mentoring opportunities for language learners to work with the traditional stories and other cultural and linguistic knowledge contained within the 27,000 page document collection written by first-language Meskwaki speakers in the early 1900s.
Today, representatives of Cultural Survival, the Guatemalan Community Radio Movement, and several national Indigenous organizations are scheduled to meet with Alvaro Colom (president of Guatemala), Roberto Alejos (president of the Congress), and members of the Supreme Court to discuss how to grant long-promised broadcast licenses to community radio stations. The meeting is the strongest opportunity yet for government support of community radio and is the result of months of intense lobbying by Cultural Survival and our community radio partners.
Educators from the Cherokee, Muckleshoot, Native Hawaiian, Ojibwe, and other tribal language programs across Indian Country met for two days this week in the Senate Dirksen Building and at the U.S. Department of Education to press federal officials to uphold provisions in the 1990 Native American Languages Act (NALA) that have been undermined by No Child Left Behind—particularly, testing requirements that penalize Native language schools and teachers for providing students with Indigenous language instruction across all subject areas.
Reconocimiento de tierra
Reconocemos que nuestra sede está en la tierra de Massachusetts, en Cambridge, MA, y agradecemos a los administradores Indígenas pasados, actuales y futuros de este territorio.
