The National Breath of Life Archival Institute for Indigenous Language: growing the forest in language awakening
Presenter: Gabriela Perez Baez
The National Breath of Life Archival Institute for Indigenous Languages (NBoL) works with Native communities to build capacity around methods in archives-based research for community-directed revitalization of awakening languages. Since 2011, we have offered four introductory biennial workshops and two advanced archival data processing workshops and served 141 Community Researchers from 65 Native communities. In this presentation we offer an overview of the introductory workshops, of a program assessment that guided the development of advanced tools and training, and the Native American philology model. We demo the Indigenous Languages Digital Archive (ILDA) software and the open access, self-paced, asynchronous online training and summarize our current apprenticeship program which funds Community Researchers to carry out the time and energy-intensive processing of archival materials for revitalization.