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WHAT: |
A week-long
"Breath of Life" workshop - the fourth of its
kind - devoted to resurrecting extinct Native American
languages by training tribal descendants to use UC Berkeley's
century-old archives, the world's largest repository of
information on California Indian languages.
Daryl
Baldwin of Indiana's Miami Nation, will give a public
address about resurrecting his ancestral language, in
part by teaching his four children to speak fluent Miami,
two of them as their first language.
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WHEN: |
Workshop:
Monday through Friday June 12-16, 8:30 am to 5 p.m., with
concluding presentations on Saturday morning, June 17
at 8 a.m.
Public
address: Tuesday evening, June 13, at 7:30 p.m. Baldwin's
address is titled "Bringing a Lost Language Home:
A Native American Success story in Language Revitalization."
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WHERE: |
Workshop:
Room 370 in Dwinelle Hall on the UC Berkeley campus
Public
Address: Room 145, Dwinelle Hall
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WHO: |
Forty
participants representing 20 languages will attend the workshop
under the direction of Leanne Hinton, UC Berkeley professor
of linguistics and board member of Advocates for Indigenous
California Language Survival. Twice the size of past years,
the workshop includes new participants from such California
language groups as Mono, Eastern Pomo, Sierra Miwok and
Maidu. Returning participants come from such groups as coastal
Miwok, Rumsen, Wiyot and Northern Pomo. |
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BACKGROUND:
Throughout the past century, California Indians who saw
their languages and cultures disappearing agreed to work
with scientists to preserve their knowledge in university
archives. Now descendants of those individuals are coming
back to resurrect these traditions. Participants at the
Breath of Life workshops have begun to read, speak, tell
stories and even conduct weddings in their ancestral languages.
Participants are paired with graduate students in linguistics
who help them reconstruct the sounds and words of extinct
languages through old anthropological fieldnotes, tapes
and other documents. |
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