About Breath of Life
The National Breath of Life Institute for Indigenous Languages in Washington, D.C. is based on the model developed for California languages in the early 1990’s by the Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival (AICLS) in partnership with the University of California at Berkeley. The California workshop is held biennially for one week at UC-Berkeley. The national workshop is also held biennially, in alternate years.
Breath of Life 2013 Group Photo
The design of the California workshop and the national institute is approximately the same: the primary focus is to help indigenous people find and learn how to utilize the rich archival linguistic field notes and recordings that are available on their languages. Lectures and workshops are held on linguistics, language teaching and learning, and language revitalization, and at least half of every day is spent in the archives. Participants are also able to research historical, genealogical and photograph collections, as well as artifact collections in the museums. Each language group has one or more linguistic mentors assisting them in their work.
Dr. Lisa Conathan was one of the linguists at the California workshop when she was a graduate student at Berkeley. She and Dr. Leanne Hinton (who organizes the California Breath of Life) co-founded the National Breath of Life Institute in 2011, with funding from the Documenting Endangered Languages Program of the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the sponsorship of ELF. The National Institute is two weeks long; participants research at the Library of Congress, the National Anthropological Archives, the National Museum of the American Indian Collections, and the National Museum of Natural History Collections. At the 2011 institute, there were 31 native researchers representing 20 different languages from all over North America, assisted by 20 linguists. The group stayed together in the dormitories at George Washington University.
The “Breath of Life – Silent No More” concept and name has also spread to Oklahoma; since 2010, there has been a biennial workshop at the Sam Noble Museum at the University of Oklahoma.
For more information and frequently asked questions, please visit this page.
What is Breath of Life?
Collections & Language Revitalization
The Importance of Language Revitalization
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