Category: Language Activists

Highlights stories from leaders in the field of language activism in the home, community, and/or classroom

Remembering Dr. George Wasson who passed Wednesday March 19, 2013

Posted on by rossa@uoregon.edu

We as a community at the University of Oregon have been blessed to have been mentored by Dr. George Wasson for so many years. To have been touched by his guidance and his inspiring storytelling – we are particularly fortunate to have experienced his stories just last week at a traditional storytelling event hosted at the University of Oregon’s Many Nations Longhouse.

Dr. Wasson was responsible for launching the Southwest Oregon Research Project where he led the efforts that stitched together tribal history between the 1800s and mid-1900s using thousands of historical documents. As one of the first Oregon tribal PhDs, Dr. Wasson will continue to be an important figure to tribal people throughout Oregon and the Northwest. He was revered for his craft at traditional storytelling.
As the Register Guard details, Dr. Wasson received his B.A in music in 1969, a Master’s degree in counseling in 1971, a Master’s degree in Anthropology in 1994, and then his doctorate in Anthropology afterwards. He worked as an adjunct instructor in anthropology at the UO from 2003-2011 before retiring. NILI offers our condolences to his family and loved ones. Truly, his work and contributions will be valued and remembered into the ages.

Welcome to the NILI Blog

Posted on by rossa@uoregon.edu

NILI is happy to announce a new online tool to share ideas and information. This email is to introduce you to the new NILI Blog! And we hope you like it and will use it.

For those new to blogs, we’ve organized it so that the newest posts come at the top. Older posts are stored lower down in the pages, and all posts are filed by categories for browsing or later reading. We have been working hard to make categories that the various communities we serve will find useful and interesting. So far we have the following: Current Literature and Research; Curriculum Corner; Feature Projects; Language Activism; Native Language Phrases; and Tech Tips. We look forward to adding more ideas under each category and building a valuable resource. If you think of other categories we might want to add we would love to know.

Our goal is to make this a group effort. NILI faculty and staff will be contributing their various ideas and expertise periodically and over time. However, we hope to also have contributions from *YOU* as well. Feel free to send us any ideas, tips, advice, or interesting things you are working on so we can include your voice to the blog. We are happy to work with you on any article ideas. We’d like to limit the postings to a few paragraphs or roughly in the 200-350 word range.

Send postings and ideas to Ross Anderson at rossa@uoregon.edu. If you are not up for an article, we hope you will at least add a comment to some of the articles in the blog.

We look forward to “seeing you” and sharing ideas online! Please visit our website for more information about NILI: http://pages.uoregon.edu/nwili/

Janne and all of the NILI team

Multilingualism: A Northwest Native Social Norm

Posted on by rossa@uoregon.edu

I am a student who has been involved with NILI for the last seven years. I recently completed my undergraduate thesis. This thesis is intended to benefit the Native language movement by examining the motivation and methods of Native language learners working together at NILI. Drawing on interviews, my thesis explores what motivates this community of speakers and in doing so provides insight into the significance of Indigenous languages in maintaining Native identity and worldview. My work focuses on home-based learning to demonstrate how methods centered on language use as opposed to accumulation of knowledge create a space for Indigenous languages to exist in daily life and may serve as an effective model for endangered language learners. Lastly, my thesis advocates for collaboration across critically endangered languages through the use of multilingualism as a strategy to create viable speech communities.

Multilingualism has a great deal of potential for critically-endangered language learners because it addresses the most pressing obstacle to increasing language use in daily life: the lack of a speaking community. My research draws heavily from ongoing work at NILI to highlight how multilingual speaking groups, support meetings and workshops have the potential to increase Native language use. Working together between languages is a great opportunity for learners to expand their speaking community, normalize language use, become multilingual, and revitalize a Northwest Native social norm (being multilingual!).

Contributed by Carson Viles

Please contact Carson with any questions at: cviles@uoregon.edu

Welcome to NILI!

Posted on by rossa@uoregon.edu

Situated at the University of Oregon in Eugene, OR, the Northwest Indian Language Institute (NILI) provides Native language teachers and community members with training in language teaching, materials and curriculum development, benchmarks creation, and linguistics. With tribal partners, NILI supports and strengthens language preservation and revitalization efforts by establishing collaborative, on-going projects which meet the specific needs and desires of each language community.