The community radio station La Voz de Palestina is located in the highland community of Palestina de los Altos, Quetzaltenango, Guatemala. Founded just over a year ago, the station is has been little by little gathering the equipment and personnel to broadcasting. Nestled into a tiny room in the corner of the town’s public library, the radio station has just enough to get by, but no more.
Participants from Cambodia, Russia, Thailand, the United States, and Uruguay gathered at 2 UN Plaza last week during the final week of the United Nations Forum on Indigenous Issues in New York City for Cultural Survival’s workshop "Indigenous Language Survival and Revitalization: Film, Radio, Web, and Growing Speakers from the Grassroots.” Hosted by Cultural Survival’s Endangered Languages Program with staff from Cultural Survival's Community Radio Program, and the Smithsonian Institution’s Film and Video Center (FVC) of the National Museum of the
Cultural Survival’s Endangered Languages Program and Makepeace Productions are teaming up once again, with support from the National Endowment for the Arts’ ARTWORKS program and the Center for Independent documentary, to develop enhancements for the OurMotherTongues.org companion website to the award-winning documentary Âs Nutayuneân—We Still Live Here. The film
The film We Still Live Here - Âs Nutayuneân tells the inspiring story of the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project’s work to bring their language home after nearly 150 years without fluent speakers in their tribal communities.
On Tuesday, May 15, 2012, at the 11th session of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in New York, Cultural Survival, Living Tongues Institute, National Museum of the American Indian Film and Video Center, and Underrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization (UNPO) Montagnyard Youth Project are organizing a side-event on language revitalization tools. Join us.
The following is a guest blog post by anthropologist Lisa Maya Knauer, who does fieldwork with Cultural Survival's Guatemala Radio Project and the larger community radio movement in Guatemala.
More than 600 Native American youth from tribes across Oklahoma and beyond gathered this month at the University of Oklahoma’s Sam Noble Museum in Norman for their tenth annual two-day Youth Language Fair.
“Our language is the number one source of our soul, our pride, our being, our strength and our identity.”-- Indigenous Language Instructor, Cultural Survival Quarterly, 2010
Languages are vanishing
Language experts believe that 90% of the world’s estimated 6,000 languages could disappear entirely by the end of this century. Indigenous Peoples face myriad socio-economic pressures and discriminatory policies forcing youth and adults alike to replace tribal languages with the dominant languages of the larger societies in which they live.
Land Acknowledgement
We acknowledge that we are headquartered on Massachusett land, in Cambridge, MA, and we thank the past, current, and future Indigenous stewards of this territory.
