UA News

The American Indian Language Institute will host a benefit dinner at Desert Diamond Casino Tues., April 21 to raise funds to help cover tuition for their summer institute.

Nineteen years ago The University of Arizona began an effort to give voice and assistance in developing written foundations to indigenous languages at risk of being lost forever.

The American Indian Language Development Institute, or AILDI, a part of the department of language, reading and culture in the UA College of Education, works to assist in developing written systems for individual American Indian languages and helps to develop curriculums and trains tribal members to teach those systems to members of the community.

Now the institute is asking the community to join them in a benefit dinner to be held at the Desert Diamond Casino on Tuesday, April 21, to raise funds to help ensure that language revitalization and maintenance efforts are not lost to the economic downturn and the rising cost of tuition.

"The need and desire to learn and teach others is at its most critical," said Ofelia Zepeda Regents' Professor of linguistics and AILDI director.

The funds raised during the benefit dinner will go toward helping students pay tuition cost for enrollment in the institute's month-long intensive summer program. The program is open to anyone interested in training in all areas of indigenous language revitalization and maintenance and gaining undergraduate or graduate level credit.

The institute has thrived through the interest and need of indigenous language teachers, practitioners and researchers who travel from around the world each summer to Tucson to learn how to keep their languages, culture and history alive.

The institute was founded in 1978, an era when indigenous language study entailed research and documentation of languages, history and culture. Foundations that were handed down through generations orally, but had no written form.

The institute's founding members ensured that the cultural and historical aspects of American Indian languages would not be lost in translation as community teachers worked to preserve their own languages while teaching American Indian children to speak and read English.

Lucille Watahomigie (Hualapai), Akira Yamamoto (University of Kansas), Ofelia Zepeda (Tohono O'odham) and Leanne Hinton (University of California at Berkeley), were the founding members who came together to create the program once it became evident there was nothing in existence that would help tribal language educators help their communities.

"The 80's were a boom for indigenous languages. During that time, tribes were asserting their political and cultural rights, and language fell into that category. Language makes us who we are and we were flexing our right to use it and practice it and to teach it," Zepeda said.

Zepeda was at the time pursuing a master's degree in linguistics at the UA. She recalls Watahomigie's desire and efforts to try and find an educational program for teachers that combined American Indian cultural and linguistic knowledge and teaching skills to teach monolingual Native children.

No such program existed.

Watahomigie and her colleagues decided to join together and start their own program. Each of them brought an element of expertise to the program including linguistics, education and anthropology.

They worked to assess needs and developed the training elements of the institute, and found growing interest from Native American language teachers, parents, tribal leaders and elders. Included also in that group were university students whose interest in indigenous language education, endangered languages and research became an additional foundation for the institute.

During the program's first year, a meeting was set up to bring together language teachers, parents and elders who were speakers of languages belonging to the Yuman Language Family, which  Zepeda said has many related languages in the Southwest.

The institute's meetings grew to include representatives from other languages such as the O'odham, Navajo, Hopi, Yaqui and Pima and now include Native languages spoken in Canada and other parts of the world.

"We focused on creating training in Native American linguistics, literature, language policy and curriculum development, the basics of any school curriculum, and opened the program to anyone teaching on the reservations or in communities with a high Native population," Zepeda said.

The summer institute is known for its unique format of Native American linguistics and education. Basic and advanced Native American linguistics courses are offered during morning sessions and focus on phonology, morphology, syntax and pragmatics of American Indian languages, English in American Indian bilingual settings and language immersion.

The afternoon sessions focus on education, particularly curriculum development. "What is learned in linguistics during the a.m. sessions, students are taught how to apply by developing appropriate curriculum for their schools and communities during the p.m. sections," Zepeda said.

The institute also serves as a gateway to higher education within the Indigenous community as many of those who enroll start out at AIDLI then continue on to complete undergraduate or graduate studies at the UA.

Candace K. Galla is the institute's program coordinator and is currently working on a doctorate in the department of language, reading and culture with a concentration on indigenous language education, revitalization and technology. She came to the UA as an undergraduate, was a student in AILDI in 2004 and a co-instructor in 2005, teaching introduction to computer applications for indigenous communities.

She is from the island of Hawaii and understands that "many indigenous communities are in the same situation in terms of language loss. In Hawaii, language revitalization support is strong. However, like many indigenous communities, there is a need for material development, creation of new texts, and new media to engage our learners and to maintain our language," Galla said.