Seminole Language Revitalization 11/9

[Harold F. Schiffman]

Forwarded from edling at ccat.sas.upenn.edu

Seminole Language Revitalization 11/9

The following talk will be held as part of the provost's "Dialogues Across
Indian Country" and will take place at the University of Pennsylvania
Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.  For more details follow the link:

http://www.museum.upenn.edu/new/events/calitem.php?which=1127

Dialogues Across Indian Country : Saving Native American
Languages, For Whom?

               Thu November 9, 4:30 pm

Richard Grounds (Yuchi/Seminole)

Project Director for the Euchee (Yuchi) Language Project based in Sapulpa, Oklahoma

 After centuries of inestimable losses of land and resources, patterns of
physical genocide, legal attacks on ceremonial continuity, and assaults on
cultural vitality through assimilationist policies, Native nations are
only now facing, perhaps, their greatest loss: the silencing of their
original languages. This presentation examines the nature of this
potential loss and clarifies strategies for revitalizing Native languages
in relation to available financial, institutional, and cultural resources.
As the scholarly community awakens to the prospect of losing the essential
language connection to the ancient and rich worlds of Indigenous
knowledge, the questions become: who will benefit from the efforts that
are being made to preserve Native languages, and are there effective
schemes of cooperation to overcome the political challenges in academia
and within Indigenous communities?