Observing International Mother Language Day - February 21 from Cultural Survival
2. Help language advocates in Wisconsin reach their goal of 20,000 signatures! Sign the petition in support of a 7th grade student from the Menominee Nation in Wisconsin who was punished by teachers and coaches at her parochial school for "attitude problems" after teaching a fellow Menominee students how to say "hello " and "I love you" in the Menominee language, an endangered tongue spoken in North America for thousands of years. Learn more. 3. Watch scenes from WE STILL LIVE HERE (Âs Nutayuneân), celebrate the power of dreams, "leaving children possibilities," and meet the nearly twenty year-old Wopanaak Language Reclamation Project, which is "bringing language home" to the Wampanoag Nation of southeastern Massachusetts after many generations passed without fluent speakers. Order copies of the film for personal, institutional, or activist use at Makepeace Productions, with a portion of the proceeds benefiting WLRP. Read more. 5. Connect the dots. Value all languages and participate in language learning. "I think people are passionate about language because it's about sovereignty and nationhood," says Ojibwe scholar and historian, Jean O'Brien, author of Dispossession by Degrees: Indian Land and Identity in Natick, Massachusetts, 1650-1790. "A language is not just words," says scholar Noam Chomsky, professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. "It's a culture, a tradition, a unification of community all rolled into one." Visit Cultural Survival's and Makepeace Productions' companion website to WE STILL LIVE HERE, OurMotherTongues.org, to hear more from Drs. Chomsky and O'Brien, and to hear community leader Earl Mills, Sr., in Why Learn Your Mother Tongue? video clips. Also look for additional Found in Translation video clips about the precision of the Navajo language in describing positions of the moon, and meet a young family intent on restoring the chain of language transmission, connecting a grandmother and grandson through the educational opportunities available at the Tséhootsooí Diné Bi'ólta' Immersion School in Fort Defiance, Arizona.
5 Things You Can Do to Observe Mother Language Day:
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