Cultural Survival and the National Alliance to Save Native Languages partnered last week with the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) to pass an NCAI Resolution declaring Native languages in the U.S. in a state of emergency, and to express support for a proposed presidential executive order on Native language revitalization.
Members of Cultural Survival staff and the Community Radio Movement held discussions Monday at the Congress of the Republic in Guatemala City.
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.
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.
