The goal of the Breath of Life Institute is to help Native Americans involved in language revitalization find and make use of materials on their languages that are in the National Anthropological Archives and Library of Congress. Under the leadership of Lisa Conathan and Leanne Hinton, this two week workshop allowed teams of participants (Native American heritage language learners, teachers and activists) paired with mentors (experts in linguistics who help guide the participants' work) to explore the language resources in archives in the District of Columbia area. Visits to the archives were supplemented by lectures and workshops on linguistics, language teaching and learning, and related topics.

The Institute was funded by the National Science Foundation's Documenting Endangered Languages program. It was co-hosted by the Smithsonian Institution's National Anthropological Archives (NAA), National Museum of Natural History (MNH) and National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), and the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress (AFC).

To learn more about the recent Breath of Life Archival Institute, review the BOL FAQs.

1 The name and Institute design is based on the Breath of Life Language Workshop for California Indians, a biennial event designed and organized by the Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival and hosted at the University of California at Berkeley.