Clash of Cultures & the Discovery of Gold      123456

Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival

California was and still is one of the most linguistically diverse parts of the world; at least 100 different languages were spoken here even before Europeans arrived. Presently there are about 50 indigenous languages that still have one or more native speakers, though the number of native speakers is decreasing quickly. There are also at least 30 languages with no native speakers left whose descendents  desperately want to regain them.

In 1992 the nonprofit organization Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival (AICLS) was founded. Its goal is to assist California Indians in language maintenance and renewal. The organization has an all-Indian board of directors, with University of California, Berkeley, linguist Leanne Hinton as a consulting member of the board. The organization believes that the documentation of endangered languages is important, but the main goal of the organization is the development of new speakers. To this end the organization sponsors workshops, conferences, a grant program, and a master-apprentice language-learning program.

The master-apprentice program trains teams consisting of one speaker of an indigenous language and one learner. The goal is to develop an immersion program that works for learners and encourages them to “live daily life” in the new language. Since the program started more than 70 teams have been trained in more than 25 different languages.

But for at least 35 California Indian languages, there are no living speakers. In these cases the organization sponsors what it calls the Breath of Life workshop at the University of California, Berkeley, where linguistics professors and students show language students how to access and use linguistic archives, including fieldnotes and recordings of the languages they are studying. In addition, the organization provides mini-grants to California natives involved in language work and provides language and cultural material to imprisoned California natives through the Seeds of Light program.

The events of colonization devastated California Indian tribes and marginalized their histories and cultures. But California Indians have not merely survived colonization, they have thrived: Their numbers have grown, and they have mounted movements to revive traditional arts, relearn their languages, and gain official recognition of their sovereignty.