>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. ^M00:00:04 ^M00:00:18 >> GUHA SHANKAR: Hello. Good afternoon. Welcome to the third and final program in the Native American Heritage Month Programs here at the Library of Congress. I'm Guha Shankar from the American Folklife Center. I've been working with colleagues in the Office of Equal Employment Opportunity. Roberta Salazar also Eric Eldridge, Carla David Catro [assumed spelling] from the Law Library. Jennifer in the back from CRS. In order to do a series of programs here at the library for this month. It gives me great pleasure to introduce Gabriela Pérez Báez, the curator of linguistics the Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution. I won't, obviously if I were to sit here and read out all of her accomplishments, that would take up half the time. So. I'm going to keep it brief and just let you know that Gabriela Pérez Báez has conducted research on Zapotec languages since 2002. She's devoted much of her work to studying factors of language maintenance and endangerment with a focus on the impact of migration. In the community of diasporic speakers of [foreign words] and the influences on its sort of sister mirror community in Los Angeles. Importantly for the Library of Congress, Gabriela is the co-PI of the Breath of Life Languages two about which she'll be speaking today. And it's important to the Library because the Library of Congress, and principally The American Folklife Center, but also colleagues in the Manuscripts Division, represented by Barbara Bear [assumed spelling] and Julia Miller, along with colleagues in the geography and maps division, as well as the Prints and Photographs Division host some of these community members who come and do research in the National Library Collections as part of their own programs of linguistic maintenance, cultural revitalization, and other purposes for which they use the collections here at the library. So, it's been a very fruitful collaboration for the last few years and Gabrielle will talk about that as well. And speaking of collaborations, one of our other principles in this enterprise is Judith Grey, head of reference at the American Folklife Center who's trying to walk in the door, I'm not sure what she's doing [laughter]. Thank you, Judy. Come on in Judy. So, after all of that, I will now turn it over to Gabriella. We will have about probably 25 minutes of presentation and then we'll have; 30, who's keeping count. And that will mean there will be ample room for questions and answers at the end. And please do make sure that you do ask questions. This is an interactive session. We appreciate all of you coming on your lunch hour. And without further ado let me turn it over to Gabriela Pérez Báez. ^M00:03:02 [ Applause ] ^M00:03:06 >> GABRIELA PÉREZ BÁEZ: Thank you very much for that introduction. It's a real pleasure to be here. I was just telling Guha that despite the fact that we've been collaborating for so long, because I'm always trying to get things running for Breath of Life at the Museum of Natural History, I don't get to be here. So, this is a real treat. So, I am currently serving as director of Recovering Voices. It's the initiative I want to talk to you about. And within that context, I will talk specifically about programmatic activities like Breath of Life and how they fit into our model. So, Recovering Voices is a priority interdisciplinary initiative of the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian. It's intended to respond to the global loss of linguist diversity. And not only that, it also focuses heavily on the loss of knowledge that is associated with the loss of linguistic diversity. The idea is to conduct and enable research on languages and knowledge systems, to understand the loss of cultural diversity and develop effective responses to reverse it. Access to collections is central to the recovery in generation of knowledge in the process. Global impact is achieved through partnerships with communities with academic institutions. We favor an interdisciplinary approach in recognition of the holistic approaches to knowledge that indigenous communities have. This initiative, Recovering Voices, originated within the anthropology department at the National Museum of Natural History, but it works with partners across the Smithsonian, you know partner units across the Smithsonian, as well as outside. And again, our focus of today's talk will be the partnership that we have with the Library of Congress. What distinctive competence do we offer? Why should the Smithsonian get involved in trying to address the issue of language endangerment? Well, it's our collections. That's why collections-based research is such a strong focus of Recovering Voices. We hold 9000 linear feet of manuscripts, which I've been told equals five times the height of the Washington Monument. Generally, when I make this analogy outside Washington, nobody knows what it means. But you guys know. We also have 144.5, I was told, million items in our collections that cover the spectrum of the seven disciplines at the National Museum of Natural History. So, there's anthropology, mineral sciences, zoology, etcetera, botany. So, the focus in very simple terms is to use these collections as stimuli to generate or regenerate knowledge and help revitalize languages. There's three of us. Three curators from the National Museum of Natural History behind this initiative. Myself, serving currently as director for another couple more weeks, and then my colleague, Gwen Isaac who you see at the front of this photo will be taking over. She, along with Joshua Bell and myself have been the three curators behind the initiative. And we have two program assistants. And we have fellows, interns, contractors depending on what activity, what special projects we have. We have collaborators across the disciplines in the museum. Again, collaborators across the Smithsonian Institution. Notably the National Museum of the American Indian, and the center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. And, we have a network of partners, starting with the Library of Congress, but also the Myaamia Center, who is a critical partner in Breath of Life, the UNESCO, University of Hawaii and so on. So, let's talk about the Recovering Voices model. So, again collections are central and our focus is to mobilize these collections to foster community-based research for language and knowledge revitalization. And by community-based research what we mean is community-driven, or community-directed, or research that is for community benefit and that is designed in close collaboration with a community. The model works for collections-based research both in the museum setting and in the field and I will talk about the two settings and how that works. Our research priorities are three. We run a community research program, which I'll talk about. The National Breath of Life Archival Institute for Indigenous Languages, which for short I'll refer to it as Breath of Life, and field research. So, let's start with the Community Research Program. The Recovering Voices has an operating fund that allows us to fund this. It's by community researchers. Three different visits per year, to come and carry out research on our collections. That is designed by the researchers. These researchers don't need to be affiliated with an academic institution. And they do not need to have an academic background. Provided they are involved in their community's activities to revitalize culture, language, knowledge. And are able to articulate a project around a particularly robust collection of any kind in our museum. We're able to fund. Right now, we're in the process of finalizing the selection of the community research visits for 2017. So, it's an annual competitive process. We don't get a ton of applications, but we do get about a dozen. Which is probably enough, because we're able to fund three and that way we're able to fund a higher percentage of the applications. The idea is that we have $10,000 that we're able to put towards covering the travel expenses, lodging, etcetera of these visits. We have so far funded 17 research visits since 2012. And I know you're not supposed to put, you know, heavy text slides here. But I figured this would give you a sense of the breadth of community research that has been conducted so far under this program. We recently, I'll mention for example, the last, the one at the bottom. ^M00:09:59 A group of Waija researchers, I'm sorry Waija chiefs who are also conducting research from the northern Amazon region were here in September, seems like a long time ago. But they were here in September. They were able to work out an arrangement with a local researcher so that they could extend their visit for up to a month because they were staying at this person's home. And so, they were able to be here visiting the film archives at the [inaudible] facility. They were also, they visited the entomology collecting, the birds collecting, the fish collection. It was really interesting. I was just telling Guha a few minutes ago that it was very revealing for the collections managers to be talking to people who know these species so incredibly well. One of the Waija chiefs had actually help collect some of the fish that are in our collections nowadays. And they were able to engage in a conversation about how climate change is impacting some of these species. So, it's very much a dialogue. Sometimes we feel that we gain more as collections managers, as curators from this interaction. But, of course all of these communities are walking away with the ability to utilize these collections, again as stimuli for generating, or regenerating knowledge. Now, let me talk about National Breath of Life. So, the National Breath of Life is based in DC because of the unparalleled collections that we have here across the institutions based in the region, in the city. Specifically, there's three partner institutions, the National Anthropological Archives at the National Museum of Natural History. The National Museum of the American Indian, and the Library of Congress. This is a program funded by the National Science Foundation. And therefore, we partner closely with other institutions outside the federal government system to be able to receive or use these grants. So, we have partnered with Yale University twice and now we have a very strong partnership with the Myaamia Center at Miami University. You might have heard from the recent McArthur Fellowship Awards, you might have heard about Darrell Baldwin, who was the recipient of one of these awards this year, for his work in reclaiming the Myaamia language. This is a language that used to be spoken in the 40s and through the work of Darrell Baldwin, in collaboration with a linguist from UC Berkeley, they were able to reconstruct the grammar phonology of the language based on archival materials, many of which are at the NAA. And to make a very long, 30, 40-year long story short, the community now has speakers of the language that have various degrees of competence. But in his home, Darrell and his family carry out the daily life in Myaamia. So, they've been effectively able to reclaim the language, something which we thought was not possible even 20 years ago. So, it's following that model, the relevance of archival materials for languages that no longer have speakers or have very few speakers, or where knowledge has been eroded significantly, that Breath of Life is designed. And the model was actually developed based on a document that was produced by a group in Australia called the Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Icelander Studies. Breath of Life is a program that has very long names throughout the entire process. So, they had recognized that archives were really valuable resources, and wrote a document to detail and model a method for using them for revitalization. That model was taken and further developed by, and here's another long name, the Advocates for Indigenous California Language Revival, in partnership with UC Berkeley. And we have been, now and UC Berkeley the focus was on California tribes only, that no longer have speakers of their languages. In DC, because of the breadth of the collections that are available here, we can go beyond that limited set of participants to serve any communities primarily in the US, but also Canada, and we might be hosting someone from Mexico this year. Independently of whether they have speakers of the language or not. Generally, because of the situation in North America, we hold participants whose languages have very few speakers, or no speakers left. But that's not always the case. So, the structure of Breath of Life, or the goal is to familiarize participants with the archives and provide them with the skills to be able to find materials on their languages. We teach fundamentals in linguistics so that they can begin to read and interpret the materials. And anyone who's ever looked at a manuscript knows that it's not very easy. There are idiosyncrasies in the documentation, there's handwriting quirks, and you need to interpret what's a noun, what's a verb etcetera. So, we provide fundamental, you know basics to be able to do that. And, we discuss and demonstrate ways that the materials can be utilized for language revitalization and we always have people like Darrell Baldwin and other people who have very similarly long-standing projects in revitalization that come and share their experience. So, again there are three core elements. Basic linguistics, archival research and applied approaches. So, Breath of Life, unlike Berkeley and other Breath of Life models that only last a week, the National Breath of Life takes two weeks, because again of the amount of materials that can be consulted here. During that time, the participants who are selected, it's a real competitive process as well. This year we received around 70 applications. And we'll be able to hose about 30 of them. So, every language group, and sometimes we get one single individual, but generally we get two or three people form one language community who come and work together. And each language group will get an academically trained linguist assigned to work with them one on one throughout the two weeks. On our end, the curators, the archivists, the librarians will teach the participants how to navigate the catalogs. Every institution has a different type of catalog, but overall the principles of catalog research are applicable across the board. So, we try to make sure that when the participants leave, they can still come back to the catalog and find stuff that they might be interested in. We, of course provide access to the materials. So, ahead of time we pull up everything for this language and that language, and the participants are able to work on the materials hands on. And we also produce archival quality materials. We were just actually talking about trying to make a more concerted effort to inform the Library of Congress about the languages that will be represented in the next Breath of Life, which by the way happens May 29th to June 9th in 2017. And that way the participants can leave with archival surrogates of their materials. So, Breath of Life national model has evolved over the last few years. We're going to have again the fourth iteration in May 2017 for two weeks. To date, so if you look at the number languages that we've had over the year, 22 was really a lot of languages; 14, 15 is more or less the scope that is manageable and we can attend to everyone's needs more effectively and efficiently. So, by the end of 2017 institute we will have served about 70 or so language communities. Every time provide digital surrogates, providing instruction, access to the materials. Now, we're trying to evolve, because you know yes we could keep doing this every 2 years if the NSF documenting endangered languages program is willing to continue to fund us. But we see a need to evolve in a couple of ways. First of all, one thing we're doing this year is we're doing an assessment of the program to make sure that indeed participants leave knowing that they can always go back to the catalogs and they know how to use them. That's something we haven't been able to measure easily without a structure to do so. A person dedicated to following up, and so on. ^M00:20:04 So, we're going be doing that assessment of the program, not of the participants, but of our program this year. The other thing we are doing also based on the experience, of serving the experiences of these researchers, is that we've come to the realization that we're asking these researchers to develop in two weeks the ability to research catalogs, the ability to carry out linguistic analysis and the ability to develop an implied linguistics and pedagogy, or language teaching approach. All of that in two weeks. So, that's a tremendous demand on these researchers and we're trying to figure out how to facilitate at least a part that we know how to do as curators, and archivist, and library scientist. So, in collaboration with Miami University, we are taking this tool MIDA, which is the Miami-Illinois Digital Archives developed by the Myaami tribe and apply it, or make it available to Breath of Life participants. What this tool does is it allows you to upload digital surrogates, high-quality archival tips. You're able to code the type of document that it is, transcribe the language material. Translate it, gloss it, do whatever level of analysis you need to do and it also allows you to output data from this analysis. So, the Myaami tribe is using it to develop a dictionary, which they don't yet have. But when I learned about this tool, which was developed through and NEH grant, I figured that we could tweak it to make it available to any community that is ready, that has the human resources and an interest to do that kind of work on their own language. So, we're planning to do a pilot this summer during the Breath of Life weeks to test it out, we'll work with one community that precisely had that experience. We were able to digitize everything on their language, deliver it to them. We thought, we were very proud and then they were very overwhelmed. So, now we're to work through the materials with this tool and see how we can make it usable within the Breath of Life context. Let me see how am I doing on time. I think I can still spend a little bit of time on field research. Maybe I wanted to do this because that's something I really like to do. So, many of us are out in the field. The three curators behind Recovering Voices have field sites that we've been working at for a very long time. We have community relationships that go back 15, 20 years and we work. We have fellows, and interns, and collaborators that are out in the field regularly. I want to tell you little bit about one project that I've been involved in for many, many years. Just to show you how collections-based research, how we conceive of collections-based research based on outside in the field. We're not just tied to the museum collections. I'm going to talk about the work that I've been doing to document the lexicon of Diidxaza, which is Zapotec language spoken in the south of Mexico. It's spoken by about 70,000 speakers, which sounds like a lot, but in reality, of the 22 municipalities where the language is spoken, only or two have kids that are learning the language. So, at this point, in the community that I work the most, the youngest speakers are in their late 20s already. So, in devising a dictionary for this I came upon; so, this is a dictionary with well over 10,000 entries. Now it's about 13,000. About 1000 of those entries were related to plants. And I had crazy entries like the one I have here. Where a tree would be called [foreign words], so different names. They would give me different names in Spanish for the for this one word in Zapotec [foreign words]. And the descriptions I had were all over the map. It's you know sometimes I would be told that the tree exfoliates, sometimes it doesn't exfoliate. Sometimes it has latex. Sometimes it has sap. Sometimes it has medicinal uses. Sometimes it doesn't. And that made me realize that the documentation I had collected, this was in 2010, was just not going to give me the documentation that would be adequate for a dictionary. So, because I was already at the Museum of Natural History, I start talking to botanists. I ran a pilot in 2012 to try to figure out how to conduct botanical research, which is something I did not learn in linguistics school. And, to make a long story short, we carried out a one-year plant documentation project, interdisciplinary looking at documenting the plants with two botanists in the project. Documenting knowledge with several knowledge bearers from the community, taking audio, taking photographs by a professional photographer. And in the end, we ended up with a huge database which we're tweaking, even today. We did 92 field collection sights. Lots of numbers that I don't need to bore you with. But we ended up with a collection; a huge collection of botanical samples like the one you can see there, housed at the National Museum of National History, at the National Herbarium in Mexico, and two herbaria in [inaudible], in the state where the community is located. And we have over 5000 high-quality, high resolution images of the plants. So, with that we were able to clean things up. And I learned that there's an entire, sort of the equivalent of a genus of [foreign word] trees. And indeed, they have very different properties because they're very different species. They belong to different families. So, they're going to look different and behave differently. And now, we have a clear understanding of why these trees, despite their very different properties, are all lumped into this one category. And it's the architecture of the tree that brings them all together. We did not realize that. These photos are from the very last day of one year of being in the field. So, now let me just go back here. This is a collection that did not exist before. Botanists, when they go out to the field, they come back with hundreds of plant samples, but the knowledge is not something they have the bandwidth to document. We were able to do that. We were able to also create resources that are meaningful to the community. The audios, the photographs. The entire collection is accessible online through the botany department's website. But also, there's a dedicated website for the collection. And we created educational materials for children, for schools that are being disseminated free of charge. And we also developed workshops around the topics of language and environmental conservation for children which have been a running monthly for over two years. We also had a community visit funded through the project. This was a project funded by the Museum of Natural History. So, you can see here, the gentleman in the photo, in the bottom photo, was our key knowledge bearer. He took us to the hills for a full year. And at the top, there's another gentleman with his hands like this. He is a historian and writer from the community who was here working with me to write definitions for the plants in Zapotec. So, we wrote, we didn't translate but wrote in tandem. I wrote in Spanish and English and he wrote the descriptions in Zapotec. So, again, a very robust collections-based research that is collaborative, beneficial to the community and that be done in the field. So, just to summarize, our research priorities. National Breath of Life is a top priority. The community research program, right now we're serving three communities. If we can serve six per year we'll be very, very happy. And collaborative field-based research. We of course, because of the type of institution that we are. We have a lot of dissemination and our reach. A lot of outreach in communities. As I mentioned the work on the plants led to workshops for children that keep going even two years after we finished the basic research. And we're constantly doing public outreach at the museum. We organize events such as the Mother Tongue Film Festival, which will be taking place around the February 21st, which is Mother Tongue Day, observed internationally. ^M00:30:06 So, keep an eye out for that. And that's it. I probably did; well, no 30 minutes. So, I'm available for any questions. ^M00:30:18 [ Applause ] ^M00:30:24 [ Inaudible Audience Question ] ^M00:30:35 Yeah, so the question was whether the [inaudible] community has participated in any of our programs. They haven't. But Jesse [inaudible] is of course very; her background and her contributions are very comparable to those of Darrell Baldwin. So, we follow her work closely because it informs a great deal of what we're doing. ^M00:31:00 ^M00:31:04 Yes? ^M00:31:05 [ Inaudible Audience Question ] ^M00:31:36 So, the question is whether across the tribes, there's support and networking for the purposes of language revitalization. They answer is yes. so, there's a couple of things. Again, I think that Darrell Baldwin's involvement in Breath of Life is very much an attempt to share the model that has worked so well for his tribe and his language and put it to the service of other tribes that might be doing similar work. One tricky thing with revitalization overall is that there's no one-size-fits-all. And what works with one community might totally bomb in another community. So, Breath of Life is a very effective way for the experience of people doing revitalization in language reclamation. So, in the cases where there are no longer speakers, or the base of first language speakers was lost at some point. And share those experiences so that other practitioners of revitalization can adapt those experiences to their own benefit. National Breath of Life, actually one of the main objectives of the program is to allow participants to become part of a growing network of revitalization practitioners. That's one of those things that are a little bit intangible. It's difficult to measure. But we know that over time, all of these practitioners will be talking to each other and learning from each other. And in Breath of Life we take participants with different backgrounds. We might have someone coming in who has been involved in the revitalization program for 20 years, and we might have someone who is just getting into it because now they have a baby and they want the baby to speak the language. And you know all the experiences in between. So, they're able to talk to each other with observed conversations when someone will say well and I really want to have a school in my community. I don't know how to do it. I'm really overwhelmed. And that's a conversation at the beginning of the two weeks. And by the end of the two weeks, the conversation is now I know what I need to tell my tribe. Now I know how to do it. Now I know people who have been doing it and who are willing to advise me. So, yeah, there's very much a lot of communication and we try to foster that as well. Yeah? ^M00:34:07 [ Inaudible Audience Comment ] ^M00:35:01 Yeah, there was another question here. ^M00:35:04 [ Inaudible Audience Question ] ^M00:35:42 So, you're asking whether in a case like the Quechua whether they would be able to benefit from some of these programs that we're running at Recovering Voices, or from Breath of Life, specifically? ^M00:35:56 [ Inaudible Audience Question ] ^M00:36:17 Okay, so this is where the one size. No one-size-fits-all comment comes into play. There are, actually one thing that we're doing within Recovery Voices, which is a separate line of you know research, is to try to document revitalization efforts around the world. Because we know a great deal about what's being done in the US, in Canada, in Australia, and New Zealand. Hawaii's the US, but it's slightly different context. But, we don't know much about what the situation is elsewhere, and yet there's a lot of revitalization happening around the world. The idea with this research is to be able to kind of get a sense of how people respond to their needs and challenges in a new revitalization process. Every community that wants to do revitalization faces the issue of not having materials to teach the language. And something that is very curious is that revitalization seems to have moved away from a natural transmission of the language from parent to child, or caregiver to child. To a language teaching practice. And the language teaching requires ancillary materials to support the work. What my suggestion would be in that particular case, I mean Quechua has a lot of support because there's been a lot of linguistics, anthropology research conducted on the various languages. So, it might just be a matter of looking actually locally what other communities have developed in the way of resources, and learn from those experiences. It's a long process and sometimes when you think, well it's really only the grandparents that are speaking the language and the kids need to learn it, and by the time we write the books we might have lost many of the speakers. And so, what might come in handy in that case is the master apprentice model. Which is when a language speaker gets paired up with a language learner. Generally, adults, but it could work with children as well, for the purposes of creating a kind of and immersion environment between these two people for the purposes of speaking the language, and having the person learn the language independently of whether there might be materials to support that process. And so, this model, specifically, wants to go back to the natural transmission of language and the development of an immersion environment. So, it sounds like maybe in this particular case, there can be an effort to develop materials, but maybe a master apprentice type of model would work. One thing we did in La Ventosa for those Zapotec language that I've been working on for the dictionary and the plants documentation is that, I mean I develop materials as part of the project, but we also, we were not going to write a grammar and you know a this and a that. So, really the workshops are designed to emphasize oral communication between these knowledge bearers and the children. And when you work with children it works like this. I mean you have to provide the child with sufficient input. ^M00:39:57 They need to be able to get well over 20% of their day in Quechua in order for them to have sufficient input for their brain to acquire the language and for the child to develop into a competent, especially confident speaker. If they are not confident, they're not going to speak. So, if there can be a combination on those elements, I think that, based on what you just told me maybe that can work. Yeah? ^M00:40:30 [ Inaudible Audience Question ] ^M00:40:37 Is there an audio or video component to the work? Yes. Audio has been critical for the longest time. And that's why you know, projects like the, or documentation as far back as when wax cylinders were the medium has been critical. You can annotate as much as you want, but you lose a lot of detail if the documenter missed a slight detail of the pronunciation, then you already have deficient documentation. So, audio is really critical and the audio needs to be done, recorded at a very high quality. So, yes. That's always an element. We, in Breath of Life we very much see the relevance of audio. Actually, one of the key reasons why the partnership with the Library of Congress makes so much sense is that you know the wax cylinders were moved here some time ago, and that's a tremendous resource for these communities. Just to give you an example, there are songs that are recorded that, for example, for me as a linguist they don't seem very interesting, because the vocabulary is limited. Maybe the syntax will be fairly simple and limited. But the performance of the song opens a domain of use of the language, which ultimately is what these communities need to do in order to bring back active use of the language. So, audio is critical. Now, video has now become a much more accessible medium of recording. And it allows for everything else. I mean I'm always, I always have my hands up in the air. You know, the cultural elements that dictate your body language, your disposition provide a great deal of information. I mentioned that the Waija chiefs that came in September spent a fair amount of time at the film archives. There are films produced in their community 50 years ago or so. That they never saw. The filmmakers never went back to the communities to share that work with them. So, they were able to see it. And granted there's no audio to go with it. But there was so much cultural information in that video that they were just ecstatic. And we were able to give them copies of the video finally to take back. So, long way to say, yes [laughter]. Yes? ^M00:43:25 [ Inaudible Audience Question ] ^M00:43:41 Sure. Well, I mean again Breath of Life is very much about outreach. It's, you know a community member that I'm never going to know about because I'm working in the south of Mexico. But because we have this programmatic activity, we you know, put out the call and you know people get to apply that otherwise we wouldn't be able to reach. So, it is very much about outreach. Now, the workshops that we designed for the community is entirely outreach. And the material. So, we curated in collaboration with the knowledge bearers in La Ventosa, we curated a selection of plants that they felt were the most representative, or the most important to know about. Because we documented, we collected 1300 botanical samples. Out of those, we documented 288 Zapotec names and so we brought that down to a selection of 54 Zapotec names that were the most important and we produced a, which I meant to bring and I forgot this morning. I'm very sorry. But we produced these very big, sturdy books that are actually like fact cards. So, you can distribute them in the classroom and you know they can get beat up and so on and they'll last. With information in Zapotec first, then Spanish. It has all the botanical information. You know, the family, genus types. So, that these materials can be appealing for the knowledge bearer without scholar-ization to the natural sciences teacher in the academic environment. And we can bridge the cultural knowledge and the academic approaches for the purposes of learning about the local plants. Learning about the names. Also, inviting people to read in Zapotec. This community has had a writing system since the 50s, but very few people actually read and write. So, you know my colleague there in pink, he's one of the most prolific writers ever in this region, but there are very few like him. So, the orange booklets there are literacy manuals that we produced. That was the one kind of applied linguistics, item that we produced for the project to invite people to, in an accessible manner to start reading more in their language. So, that's all. We also produced games, which the child is actually holding. It's like a Bingo card with plants. So, it's all outreach. You have to be very strategic about how you do it. You need to make sure that the outreach happens independently of whether you're present there. And that's really not easy to do. But I think that's one of the challenges that we're most happy about in terms of how we've been able to meet that. So, the same thing we can do here in the museum. We can do the whole thing, packaged, so-to-speak in the field. Yes? ^M00:47:05 [ Inaudible Audience Question ] ^M00:47:18 Okay, so amazing question. So, the question is how do you deal with the rich dialectology of Zapotec languages. So, the term Zapotec actually refers to a family of languages as diverse as the romance languages. So, you know someone who speaks [inaudible] La Ventosa like this gentleman and the kid will not be able to understand the person who is from the central valleys near the capital city of the state. Different tonal systems, different pronominal systems. Just like Spanish, and Portuguese, and Italian. So, what do we do? Actually, the approach, and this is the Zapotec and not necessarily the approach of Recovering Voices. The approach by Zapotec is to document as many of these language varieties as we possibly can, so that we can understand the differences and so that we can understand whether, you know, how we can make decisions about what materials to produce for each of these communities. And there's an army of linguists at this point in Waija tending to Zapotec languages, and many other languages. Mystic languages have the same level of dialectal diversity. But it's, you know, the materials that I produced in Zapotec can be used across 22 communities because of dialectal differences, they do not impede mutual intelligibility. But it is very much the case that from one town to the next, the tonal system will be different. So, it's a huge challenge. You really need a lot of customization for a situation as diverse as that. Yes? ^M00:49:08 [ Inaudible Audience Question ] ^M00:49:44 So, the question is can existing materials from one language or one community be used for another language and another community. That's very much the case. Yes. And I would say that definitely reclamation efforts in the US are very much based on that level of exchange. And Guha was mentioning the Wampanoag using the dictionary developed by the Passamaquoddy because they had documented words that the Wampanoag no longer had access to. Similarly, for the Myaamia language, they looked at Myaamia, they looked at Peoria and they looked at other related languages in a similar way. The [inaudible] they're always looking at all of the [inaudible] language, well not all of them, but a set of, closely related [inaudible] languages because they can draw from. And then they also share the materials and the approaches. So, you know again, there is no one size that fits all the situations, but the exchange and taking a little bit of here and applying it there, that's really how the communities develop their approaches. And it's a massive effort. And I do know. When I started studying linguistics a really long time ago, things looked pretty grim. And they don't look grim anymore. It's amazing how many people are so incredibly devoted to restoring their cultural knowledge, restoring their languages that it's really encouraging. Yes? ^M00:51:31 [ Inaudible Audience Question ] ^M00:51:57 Well, so the question is can language communities with just a couple speakers left, what resources or recourse they have. Breath of Life is very much geared towards assisting those communities. Also, community research program has already worked with the [inaudible] in California, and with the [inaudible] language out of the Warm Springs Confederated Tribes of Oregon. And the [inaudible] no longer have first language speakers. So, they're rebuilding a speaker base. For [inaudible], actually they don't have first language speakers any more. But the process is the same, they come here, they look at the materials, they go back. There's always someone in the community, or a group or people in the community who are dedicated to learning the language and becoming second-language speakers. And you know, the master apprentice program is a model that is often implemented when you have just a couple of speakers. You have a couple of speakers and you know someone pairs up with one of them and now you have an exchange of linguistic knowledge and you know people who can hold on to that language even if these two last speakers pass away. I mean it's a less than ideal situation. But Breath of Life is precisely named Breath of Life because it's so heavily focused on those kinds of situation. Yes? ^M00:53:35 [ Inaudible Audience Question ] ^M00:53:42 Yes. So, the question is what interaction have I had with the diaspora community of [inaudible] in Los Angeles. I dedicated my dissertation to the study of the diaspora community and the relationship between them and the home community and how that affected language vitality. And I carried out a couple of extra field research trips to the LA area after my dissertation. Much to my regret, it's the one project that has fallen beyond my bandwidth. And it's not something I've been able to follow up with. So, I've done it in a number of ways. I've maintained my contact in a number of ways. So, for example, the young woman in the checkered shirt, kind of on your right of the photography, she is a member of the [inaudible] community in the Los Angeles area. She is one of very, very few people in the community within the US or [inaudible] that have gotten an undergraduate degree. She got it in biology. And when I met her during one of my field research visits to LA, she told me that she was interested in cultural elements. Recovery of cultural knowledge, considering in the diasporic context. And we know one thing led to another and when I put together this project. I told her listen, this is an example of how you can bring your biology background and your interest in culture and do something very meaningful for many different stakeholders. And so, I was able to fund a trip for her to come to the project from LA. So, it's not something I've been able to follow up on. But, for example, I have it in my radar may be a year from now to replicate this project in three or four other communities. Zapotec communities in Mexico. And it's in my radar to keep track of this young woman. Because the community [inaudible] is one of the places where I would want to do the research. And she could be the person leading that effort. So, again it's not something that's going to happen like this, but yes, there's always a way to you know pull them in. Yes? ^M00:56:17 [ Inaudible Audience Question ] ^M00:56:35 Yes, absolutely. They have to. Sometimes we have invited linguists whose research is not in that language family. But, on the condition that they need to get up to speed on the literature and so on. So yes, absolutely that is a critical element of the selection of the linguist. And the linguist goes through a competitive process too. This year, God, I mean we're going to need 15 linguists. And we've got about 35 applications. So, it's just as competitive on that side. Which is great. ^M00:57:17 [ Inaudible Audience Comment ] ^M00:57:21 Yeah. Like I wouldn't be able to help someone working on an Algonquin language. But there might be, I'm hoping. There might be a Zapotec researcher coming this year. She happens to be at UMass Amherst. And we happen to have a huge collection of untapped materials from [inaudible], which is her town. So, all of us, and you know she speaks English and so she can be part of this. So, hopefully it will work out. ^M00:57:50 [ Inaudible Audience Question ] ^M00:58:35 How do you turn it around? So, the question is how do you turn around, you know attitudes that are, yeah, apathy or what's the word. Yes, indifference, or helpless ness, yeah I think that's a big issue. And also, you know there's other things, a lot of discrimination involved and so on. So, language attitude really is a critical factor. I mean after all it is language attitudes and similar types of displays of tolerance or intolerance that have driven these languages to the state of affairs that we have now. Changing them, as we know, social change is a very long-term project. So, awareness raising is really important. Raising awareness about the value of diversity. Because we've been taught since the 1800s when nations were being built around the model of one nation, one language, that that's the only way to sustain you know the unity of a nation. ^M01:00:00 And you know with that comes a lot of educational practices grounded on the notion that people; children can only learn one language and if they learn two or more, they'll be delayed. They'll go crazy, etcetera. So, now, we're in a different situation where we have to research backed data to show that a child not only can earn more than a language, but that the child will develop certain abilities beyond the levels that a monolingual child will be able to develop them. And these are abilities like executive function. The ability to focus on one thing despite the fact that we might have a lot of stimuli around you. That is much more developed in a bilingual child than in a monolingual child. So, we can start pushing that out and I think linguists are doing a decent job in doing that. It's just that perhaps there isn't a very good centralized way to do it. Although UNESCO has been trying to do so. That's why the Mother Tongue International Day exists. To just raise awareness internationally about the fact that there are 7000 languages. They all are important for a reason or another, and the reasons go of the spectrum of human rights to it's critical for the advancement of science. And you know so, again, I think that there are a lot of movements, perhaps not as widespread as we would want them. And certainly, revitalization cannot wait for all of these changes to happen. They actually have to happen at the same time and for example within the linguistics discipline seeing communities engage with the revitalization of their language just has pulled the entire discipline along. And there's still people who are armchair linguists who are not going to get involved. But an entire generation of linguists has emerged that is dedicated to documenting these languages and working in a collaborative way with these communities. So again, I think these are all things that are going to have to happen at the same time. I mean just to give an example, in Mexico, the last 10 years have been critical. Mexico has very progressive legislation in support of indigenous languages. The practice is a whole other issue. But because that legislation exists, an organization that is a law based, a legal consultancy, not-for-profit legal consultancy grounded on the observance of linguistic rights has emerged in Oaxaca that has entirely transformed the scene in Oaxaca. They work with judges to educate them, and so on and so forth. I mean it's work that is very removed from what we're doing in Recovering Voices, because we can't do it all. We're not going to go and save the world. But everybody is having to do you know what they know how to do and apply it to supporting the same goal. Any other questions? ^M01:03:24 [ Inaudible Audience Question ] ^M01:03:44 Yeah, very good question. So, the question is how many languages can we support with the collections that we have at the National Anthropological Archives. We can very safely say that we probably have something from every single language that has been spoken in the United States since the 1800s. How much do we have is a different question? We have very vast collections of Algonquin languages, for example. There's a language that was spoken in California that no longer has speakers and that was very poorly documented. The language is [inaudible] and in 2011 we hosted a researcher from the [inaudible] community. And at first when I saw what we had I was like well it's not a lot. I don't think that she's going to be able to do much with this material. But then I learned about the situation and this person was actually scouting the world for documentation on [inaudible], which meant that her coming to see these materials and this was before we had a more robust digitization element as we do now. But it made a lot of sense for her to come even though this was not a massive collection. But the other thing is that that's why we partner with the Library of Congress and NMAI, because sometimes we might have a little bit and they have a ton. So, yeah. So, right now, precisely right now, we're in the process of looking at the collection. So, we've already done our survey based on the 65 or 70 people who've applied we've already looked at our collections to determine what we. And there were a few cases where I noted that we didn't have a very robust collection. And so now our program assistant is going to look at what these languages and what library of Congress and NMAI have for these languages because that might change the picture entirely. Yeah. Yeah. And the thing is exchanging resources and making all of these resources, not just the NAA, but the resources in the three institutions available. ^M01:06:02 ^M01:06:06 Well, thank you for the great questions. ^M01:06:08 [ Applause ] ^M01:06:11 >> GUHA SHANKAR: So, thank you so much Gabrielle, that was an amazing presentation. Thank you all for coming and from the prospect of the Library of Congress, we are very happy and glad to be part of this enterprise that you have embarked on and we look forward to working with you and give us some food for thought here on how our collections might best serve, you know this enterprise that we're all in together. So, thanks again. ^M01:06:34 [ Applause ] ^M01:06:38 >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us@LOC.com