2010 Native Voices Endowment Projects
The Endangered Language Fund is pleased to announce the NVE grant recipients for 2010. Six projects were selected for funding during the 2010 grant cycle. ELF supports endangered language preservation and documentation projects that benefit both the indigenous community and the field of linguistics. These awards are funded by the generous support of our donors. If you would like to help ELF make such awards available in the future, please visit the donor information page
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Tammy DeCoteau Association on American Indian Affairs (AAIA) / Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate
“Dakod Iab Unspepta” (They Will Learn the Dakotah Language)
This project focuses on the Lake Traverse Reservation in northeast South Dakota and Southeast North Dakota, home of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota (Sioux) Oyate. The tribe has an enrollment of approximately 13,000 members, 4,000 of which live on the reservation. The average age of the 100 known fluent speakers of the Dokotah language on the Lake Traverse Reservation is 74, making efforts to maintain its use quite urgent. ELF funds will help support the development of a master-apprentice program aimed at teaching the language to tribal members. The program will employ a Dakotah language teacher (Dakod Unspekiya) and allow for two apprentices. One will be a new language learner (Unspekta), and the other will be one of the estimated 400 people living on the reservation that can understand but do not have a sufficient command of the language. They will be given the title Ho Iyekiyakte, meaning “they will find their language.” By giving significant command of the language to even one speaker, the tribe hopes to add an additional 25 years to the viability of the language, securing more time to move forward with revitalization efforts.
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Ben Black Bear Lakota Language Consortium
New Lakota Dictionary Audio Recording Project
This project seeks to create high-quality audio recordings of 20,000 Lakota words published in the New Lakota Dictionary (2008). This will benefit 47 tribal schools and 6 non-tribal schools which regularly use the dictionary in both print and digital format for classroom instruction in the Lakota language, as well as 2,000 members of the international community that access the interactive version of the dictionary online. Some of those who stand to benefit from this project include Lakota tribal members, non-tribal learners, researchers, and linguists. The words will be spoken and recorded by native Lakota speaker and project manager Ben Black Bear, who has extensive experience in audio recording and is well known as one of the most fluent Lakota speakers of his generation.
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Virginia Beavert and Sharon Hargus University of Oregon / University of Washington
Northwest Sahaptin Textual Transcription and Translation
With support from ELF, Yakama Nation member and University of Oregon graduate student Virginia Beavert and Prof. Sharon Hargus of The University of Washington will continue their efforts to transcribe and translate Northwest (Yakima/Yakama, Kittitas, Upper Cowlitz) Sahaptin recordings. Some of these recordings come from Beavert's personal collection, which mostly consist of the recorded speech of her late near-monolingual mother Ellen Saluskin, Others have been given to Hargus by outside researchers. According to information given to Hargus, no fluent speakers remain. However, Beavert is widely acknowledged to be the one of the best of the remaining speakers, and is most qualified to translate her mother. This project is of great value to both the Yakama Nation and to the fields of linguistics, cultural anthropology and history. Many of these recordings have historical focus on the time period when Beavert's mother was a young woman. Some particularly interesting recordings are labeled 'Yak History', 'Flu Epidemic', and 'History of Wyáwikt, Early Explorers, and Morality'. Transcription and translation of these recordings will also aid in current linguistic studies involving intonation, word order and plural inverse, and relational nouns, and will allow Beavert and Hargus to continue development of a second edition of the dictionary they published in 2010, which is to include new material from these recordings.
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Joshua Brown and Lucy Vanderberg Salish Kootenai College / Salish - Pend d'Orielle Culture Committee
Building Blocks - Documenting the Salish Language
The Bitterroot Salish / Pend d'Oreille language is critically endangered. Fewer than 80 speakers live on The Flathead Reservation in Montana, and of that total fewer than 30 can be considered fully fluent speakers. In collaboration with faculty and students from The Salish Kootenai College, The Salish-Pend d'Orielle Culture Committee, Salish language speakers, and Salishan linguists, this project aims to document and describe the Salish language, making substantial contributions to both the preservation of Salish culture and to linguistic knowledge. Project goals include fieldwork focused on Salish language and culture, as well as transcription, description, and archiving of the Salish language. Crucial aspects of this well planned effort include the involvement of fully fluent speakers, documentation procedures that ensure materials are recorded and archived in a stable, permanent format, its contribution to the Salish language archival record maintained by the Culture Committee, indexation of the created database of Salish language materials, contributions to a stronger infrastructure and support network for Salish language documentation, promotion of a stronger understanding of the value of the language and the need for further preservation efforts with the community, and the involvement of tribal college staff and students in order encourage intellectual growth and help develop a clear awareness of the need for ongoing documentation efforts within the tribal community.
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Drusilla Gould and Katherine Matsumoto-Gray Shoshone-Bannock Tribes / University of Utah
Recent language change in Shoshone: Structural consequences of language loss
One area of research that has developed out of work in the endangered language communities is the effect of language obsolence on linguistic structure. The goal of this project is to examine structural changes in Shoshone, a language whose community is undergoing a language shift. The focus for this study is two-fold: first, partticular morphosyntactic structural changes in Shoshone will be examined; second, the social and linguistic forces affecting its structure will be evaluated. Shoshone is an endangered Northern Uto-Aztecan language. During the 1960s and 70s, Wick Miller collected over 400 stories, songs, and oral histories from speakers of various Shoshone dialects. His collection is housed at the Center for American Indian Languages at the University of Utah. The availability of this collection for comparison with present-day data that will be collected makes Shoshone an ideal case for investigation of change over a period where the language has gone from relatively viable to extremely endangered. The resources available for Shoshone at the University of Utah provide a timely test case for an initial investigation into the phenomenon on structural consequences of language loss. Future work and testing of this study's findings may add to our understanding of the linguistic processes unique to endangered languages. The Shoshone situation makes this project a perfect starting point for such a research program.
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Tachini Pete Nkwusm Salish Language Institute
Salish Conversational Language Project
When Tachini Pete began his work on Southern Interior Salish an estimated 200 speakers of the language remained. Today, after 16 years, only an estimated 50 speakers remain, the large majority of which are over the age of 70. Tachini has been instrumental in supporting the maintenance of Salish language and culture, co-founding The Nkwusm Salish Language Revitalization Institute in 2002 which opened a Salish language immersion school for preschool and kindergarten students. He now aims to progress from high competence in the language to full fluency. He aims to be able to interject common speech and regular manipulation of words into his vocabulary, and thereby be able to provide students with instruction at the level of proficiency that the creation of fluent speakers requires. Through further one-on-one instruction and language immersion, he hopes to gain the knowledge and proficiency required to meet his goal. Tachini will record and analyze authentic conversational and narrative language to better understand the intricacies of the language. Resulting data will become part of the Adult Immersion curriculum, the Salish Grammar Project and Nkwusm's pre-school to 8th grade curriculum, and he hopes will also aid scholars studying Salish linguistics.