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Breathing New Life Into Algonquian Languages: Lessons from the Breath of Life Archival Institute for Indigenous Languages

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Breathing New Life Into Algonquian Languages: Lessons from the Breath of Life Archival Institute for Indigenous Languages Breathing New Life into Algonquian Languages: Lessons from the Breath of Life Archival Institute for Indigenous Languages OLIVIA N. SAMMONS AND WESLEY Y. L EONARD University of Alberta and Southern Oregon University The year 2011 marked the ¿rst Breath of Life Archival Institute for Indigenous Languages held in Washington, DC, the primary goal of which was to enable participants to explore, interpret, and utilize archival language resources in the District of Columbia area for revitalization purposes. The Institute was noteworthy in that it marked the ¿rst time that Algonquian languages were signi¿cantly represented at a Breath of Life program, and hence offered the opportunity to conduct a case study on how interaction among members of groups from different but similar languages and cultures can further language revitalization and reclamation efforts. This paper reports on our investigation of several Algonquian-related aspects of the Institute, emphasizing the bene¿ts of collaboration among the Algonquian language teams. Despite signi¿cant diversity in the status, demographics, and extent of documentation for the languages in question, participants bene¿ted greatly from the sense of shared Algonquian identity present at the Institute. As discussed in more detail below, members of Indigenous language communities apply to participate in Breath of Life through a competitive process, and successful applicants are grouped into language teams that are then paired up with a volunteer linguist. Within the discourse of Breath of Life, the people in these two roles are referred to as “participants” and “mentors,” respectively. However, for the purposes of this paper, we will use “participant” to refer to everybody who attended the Institute, and “learner-teacher” to refer to those who applied to the program to research their languages. The Institute also included professional staff members who took on organizational roles, gave lectures, and led workshops on topics related to archival language documentation. We follow the convention of the Institute in referring to this last group as “faculty.” Beyond this, there 207 208 OLIVA N. SAMMONS AND WESLEY Y. L EONARD were additional stakeholders, such as archive staff members, representatives from sponsoring agencies, and others who were involved with the planning or implementation of the Institute. This case study begins with our own perspectives as participants in the 2011 Institute, as the ¿rst author was a co-mentor for the Central Algonquian team, and the second author was a member of both the faculty and the organizing committee.1 The ¿rst author is a linguist with previous involvement in language documentation and revitalization with Algonquian communities in Canada and the United States. The second author is a Miami tribal member and linguist specializing in language reclamation. We have both also participated in earlier Breath of Life programs, the design of which informed the 2011 Institute and is outlined below. Beyond our participant- observation in the 2011 Institute and in related programs, this case study is also informed by the following three additional sources. First, we consulted formal written evaluations of the 2011 Institute, which were completed by the majority of participants. The second source consists of ongoing conversations with Institute participants. Lastly, we solicited additional feedback speci¿cally from the Algonquian participants in the form of questionnaires. These were distributed electronically and included questions about levels of interaction with other participants, ideas about perceived bene¿ts of those interactions, views on the overall experience, and ideas for future workshops. Space was also provided to comment on any aspects of the Institute that were not speci¿cally addressed in the questionnaire. The quotations used in this paper are from responses to these questionnaires. 1. Although the status of “Central Algonquian” as a linguistic subgroup of the Algonquian language family has been challenged (see, e.g., Proulx 2003), we adopt this term for two reasons. First, it was the name assigned by the Institute organizers for the group comprised of learner-teachers investigating Sauk, Meskwaki, and Shawnee, as well as their three mentors, and was thus the label used throughout the Institute. Second, the similarities among these languages facilitated many discussions among participants and contributed to their sense of solidarity. 2. Unless otherwise speci¿ed, the term “Breath of Life” will be used as a general term to refer to the model as applied both in California and Washington, DC, while “2011 Institute” or “Institute” will refer speci¿cally to the Breath of Life program held in Washington, DC. BREATHING NEW LIFE INTO ALGONQUIAN LANGUAGES 209 HISTORY OF BREATH OF LIFE As a name and metaphor, “Breath of Life” reÀects the focus of the series of archival language workshops from which the 2011 Institute evolved.2 The workshop in its original form began in 1993 at the University of California, Berkeley (UCB) with the name “Breath of Life––Silent No More Native California Language Workshop,” and has since evolved into a biennial one- week program for up to 50 learner-teachers representing various sleeping languages of California. “Sleeping languages” are those that are not known by any living person, but that exist in documentation and are claimed by a heritage community (Leonard 2008). In other words, these are languages that have potential future use but for which many common revitalization methods, such as full immersion, are not possible. The knowledge contained in documentation therefore becomes crucial, and archival materials such as ¿eld notes, unpublished grammars, and audio recordings become essential sources for language learning. A corollary is that linguistic training becomes important to this process. Because most of the archival materials in question involve signi¿cant technical terminology and description, Breath of Life programs incorporate a series of lectures and workshops on such topics. The programs’ general goals are to use this knowledge to ¿nd relevant documentation, interpret it, and then apply it to learning and speaking these languages. The model that has developed for Breath of Life reÀects these goals. After promotion in various Native-oriented media and the application process, the program begins with the formation of language teams. Learner- teachers working on the same language (or in some cases a single person) form a team with a volunteer linguist mentor whose role is to assist in the interpretation of linguistic materials.3 Aside from those who are local, participants stay in campus housing for the duration of the program, each day of which is structured around issues in using archival language 3. These mentors are professionally trained linguists, most commonly graduate students or university faculty. Some are assigned to a language team based on previous experience with the language in question, either through their own research or from previous Breath of Life programs, while others do not have experience with the language to which they are assigned. 210 OLIVA N. SAMMONS AND WESLEY Y. L EONARD documentation. Mornings involve lectures and workshops on topics such as identifying and retrieving archival materials, reading phonetic writing, principles of grammatical analysis, and various issues associated with language learning and teaching. These are followed up with homework assignments in which the teams investigate and report on these issues for their own languages. Afternoons consist of tours of the four archives on the UCB campus, with the full group of teams split into four smaller ones, which visit a different archive each day. One evening usually has a cultural sharing event, but most other evenings are devoted to homework and research. The program culminates with the presentation of projects that each team develops over the week. Projects have included conversations, skits, and songs in the languages. Participants report that these presentations are very inspiring, particularly since many of the languages are still referred to as “extinct” by wider society. Unlike programs that focus on learning from speakers, the original purpose of Breath of Life was to bring these “extinct” languages out of historical documentation, and this is a de¿ning part of its history. While the complete history of Breath of Life is beyond the scope of the current paper, certain details become important in that they explain why no Algonquian languages had been formally investigated until 2011.4 This story originates with the people and the institutions involved in the program’s establishment, both of which inform its goals and regional focus. One instigator was L. Frank Manriquez, a Native California artist and founding member of the Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival (AICLS), an organization that creates, promotes, and funds programs for language revitalization and maintenance in California.5 She comes from a community whose language was sleeping prior to the efforts that she and others made to learn and speak it, and she recognized that other revitalization programs excluded languages like hers because they focused on methods of learning from speakers. While neither author of this paper was involved with Breath of Life at that time, others present at the beginning note that L. Frank asked “What about the languages with no speakers?” In response, L. Frank, Leanne Hinton, and other language activists created Breath of 4. A more thorough overview of the California Breath of Life’s design and development is provided by Hinton (2001). 5. For more information about the AICLS language programs, see <http://www.aicls. org>. BREATHING NEW LIFE INTO ALGONQUIAN LANGUAGES 211 Life. Sponsored by UCB and AICLS, it began and continues to be held at UCB, whose Department of Linguistics was founded primarily to research California languages. As much of the resulting material is housed in campus archives, Breath of Life developed as a workshop for the revitalization of California’s sleeping languages. It is because of this focus that Algonquian languages have previously fallen outside the scope of Breath of Life.
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