Indigenous Languages Across the Community


Book Description

Conference papers examine efforts by Indigenous communities, particularly Native American communities, to maintain and revitalize their languages. The 27 papers are: "Ko te reo te mauri o te mana Maori: The Language Is the Life Essence of Maori Existence" (Te Tuhi Robust); "The Preservation and Use of Our Languages: Respecting the Natural Order of the Creator" (Verna J. Kirkness); "Maori: New Zealand Latin?" (Timoti S. Karetu); "Using Indigenous Languages for Teaching and Learning in Zimbabwe" (Juliet Thondhlana); "Language Planning in a Trans-National Speech Community" (Geneva Langworthy); "The Way of the Drum: When Earth Becomes Heart" (Grafton Antone, Lois Provost Turchetti); "The Need for an Ecological Cultural Community" (Robert N. St. Clair, John A. Busch); "Building a Community Language Development Team with Quebec Naskapi" (Bill Jancewicz, Marguerite MacKenzie, George Guanish, Silas Nabinicaboo); "Methods of Madness: The Tuscarora Language Committee" (Francene Patterson); "Daghida: Cold Lake First Nation Works towards Dene Language Revitalization" (Heather Blair, Sally Rice, Valerie Wood, John Janvier); "The Jicarilla Apache Language Summer Day Camp" (Maureen Olson); "Report on the Workshop 'World of Inuktitut'" (Janet McGrath); "Awakening the Languages: Challenges of Enduring Language Programs; Field Reports from 15 Programs from Arizona, New Mexico, and Oklahoma" (Mary S. Linn, Tessie Naranjo, Sheilah Nicholas, Inee Slaughter, Akira Yamamoto, Ofelia Zepeda); "A Native Language Immersion Program for Adults: Reflections on Year 1" (David Kanatawakhon Maracle, Merle Richards); "The Importance of Women's Literacy in Language Stabilization Projects" (Jule Gomez de Garcia, Maureen Olson, Melissa Axelrod); "Teaching Reading with Puppets" (Ruth Bennett); "Assessing Lakota Language Teaching Issues on the Cheyenne River Reservation" (Marion BlueArm); "Incorporating Traditional Nehiyaw/Plains Cree Education in the University" (Myron Paskemin, Donna Paskemin); "Collecting Texts in Craho and Portuguese for Teaching" (Sueli Maria de Souza); "Early Vocabularies and Dictionary Development: A Cautionary Note" (Blair A. Rudes); "The Process of Spelling Standardization of Innu-Aimun (Montagnais)" (Anne-Marie Baraby); "Maintaining Indigenous Languages in North America: What Can We Learn from Studies of Pidgins and Creoles?" (Anne Goodfellow, Pauline Alfred); "Ojibway Hockey CD ROM in the Making" (Shirley I. Williams); "The Use of Multimedia and the Arts in Language Revitalization, Maintenance, and Development: The Case of the Balsas Nahuas of Guerreo, Mexico" (Jose Antonio Flores Farfan); "The Languages of Indigenous Peoples in Chukotka and the Media" (Galina Diatchkova); "Language Revitalization Using Multimedia" (Peter Brand, John Elliott, Ken Foster); and "Meeting of the Inuktitut and Yup'ik Family of Languages, May 12, 2000" (Guy Delorme, Jacques Raymond). (SV)




The Languages and Linguistics of Indigenous North America


Book Description

This handbook provides broad coverage of the languages indigenous to North America, with special focus on typologically interesting features and areal characteristics, surveys of current work, and topics of particular importance to communities. The volume is divided into two major parts: subfields of linguistics and family sketches. The subfields include those that are customarily addressed in discussions of North American languages (sounds and sound structure, words, sentences), as well as many that have received somewhat less attention until recently (tone, prosody, sociolinguistic variation, directives, information structure, discourse, meaning, language over space and time, conversation structure, evidentiality, pragmatics, verbal art, first and second language acquisition, archives, evolving notions of fieldwork). Family sketches cover major language families and isolates and highlight topics of special value to communities engaged in work on language maintenance, documentation, and revitalization.




Senćoten


Book Description

The SENĆOŦEN language historically has been spoken on the Saanich Peninsula of southern Vancouver Island and islands in the Strait of Georgia, today divided by the US-Canada border. SENĆOŦEN--also known as Saanich--is now the first language of fewer than ten people, as English has replaced it in everyday use. However, because of revitalization efforts that began in the 1970s with David Elliott Sr., who developed a unique SENĆOŦEN writing system, a large and growing number of people are learning to speak it. SENĆOŦEN is increasingly being used in both ceremonial and casual settings and, thanks to the W̱SÁNEĆ School Board, classes in the language are taught at all levels, with an immersion curriculum also offered. This volume is the first complete SENĆOŦEN-English dictionary and also includes a brief introduction to the language and English-SENĆOŦEN, affix, and root indexes. SENĆOŦEN: A Dictionary of the Saanich Language is based on audio recordings made with twenty-six elders, all native speakers. Their words, sentences, and stories made this dictionary possible.




The Unicode Standard 5.0


Book Description

"Hard copy versions of the Unicode Standard have been among the most crucial and most heavily used reference books in my personal library for years." --Donald E. Knuth, The Art of Computer Programming "For more than a decade, Unicode has been a foundation for many Microsoft products and technologies; Unicode Standard Version 5.0 will help us deliver important new benefits to users." --Bill Gates, chairman, Microsoft Corporation "The path W3C follows to making text on the Web truly global is Unicode." --Sir Tim Berners-Lee, kbe, Web inventor and director of the World Wide Consortium (W3C) "Without Unicode, Java wouldn't be Java, and the Internet would have a harder time connecting the people of the world." --James Gosling, Inventor of Java, Sun Microsystems, Inc. These and other software luminaries recognize that Unicode has become an indispensable tool for supporting an increasingly global marketplace (see inside for more acclaim). A comprehensive system of standards for representing alphabets throughout the world, Unicode is the basis for modern programming-- Windows, XML, Python, PERL, Mac OS, Linux--and every major search engine and browser in operation today. New to Unicode Version 5.0 A stable foundation for Unicode Security Mechanisms Property data for the Unicode Collation Algorithm and Common Locale Data Repository Improvements to the Unicode Encoding Model for UTF-8 Rigorous stability of case folding and identifiers for improved interoperability and backward compatibility--enabling additional new ways to optimize code A systematic framework for improved text processing for greater reliability--covering combining characters, Unicode strings, line breaking, and segmentation This new edition of Unicode's official reference manual has been substantially updated to document the latest revisions to the Unicode Standard, with hundreds of pages of new information. It includes major revisions to text, figures, tables, definitions, and conformance clauses, and provides clear and practical answers to common questions. For the first time, the book contains the Unicode Standard Annexes, which specify vital processes such as text normalization and identifier parsing. These improvements are so important that Version 5.0 is the basis for Microsoft's Vista generation of operating systems, and is included in upgrade plans for Google, Yahoo!, and ICU, to name but a few. This is the one book all developers using Unicode must have.




Learning and Teaching Together


Book Description

Across Canada, new curriculum initiatives require teachers to introduce students to Aboriginal content. In response, many teachers unfamiliar with Aboriginal approaches to learning and teaching are seeking ways to respectfully weave this material into their lessons. Learning and Teaching Together introduces teachers of all levels to an indigenist approach to education. Tanaka recounts how pre-service teachers enrolled in a crosscultural course in British Columbia immersed themselves in indigenous ways of knowing as they worked alongside indigenous wisdom keepers. Transforming cedar bark, buckskin, and wool into a mural that tells stories about the land upon which the course took place, they discovered new ways of learning that support not only intellectual but also tactile, emotional, and spiritual forms of knowledge. By sharing how one group of non-indigenous teachers learned to privilege indigenous ways of knowing in the classroom, Tanaka opens a path for teachers to nurture indigenist crosscultural understanding in their own classrooms.




Indigenous People and Mobile Technologies


Book Description

In the rich tradition of mobile communication studies and new media, this volume examines how mobile technologies are being embraced by Indigenous people all over the world. As mobile phones have revolutionised society both in developed and developing countries, so Indigenous people are using mobile devices to bring their communities into the twenty-first century. The explosion of mobile devices and applications in Indigenous communities addresses issues of isolation and building an environment for the learning and sharing of knowledge, providing support for cultural and language revitalisation, and offering the means for social and economic renewal. This book explores how mobile technologies are overcoming disadvantage and the tyrannies of distance, allowing benefits to flow directly to Indigenous people and bringing wide-ranging changes to their lives. It begins with general issues and theoretical perspectives followed by empirical case studies that include the establishment of Indigenous mobile networks and practices, mobile technologies for social change and, finally, the ways in which mobile technology is being used to sustain Indigenous culture and language.




Animals In Human Society


Book Description

Including the work of 12 authors from institutions such as Colorado State University, Frostburg State University, Michigan State University, Salisbury University, Texas Woman’s University, University of Birmingham, University of California; Irvine, University of California; Merced, and William Jessup University, Rocklin; California, the collection of essays explores the broad range of animals who share our planet and attempts to recognize our responsibility as humans to take their interests seriously.




The Praeger Handbook on Contemporary Issues in Native America


Book Description

Most Americans know very little about Native America. For many, most of their knowledge comes from an amalgam of three sources—a barely remembered required history class in elementary school, Hollywood movies, and debates in the news media over casinos or sports mascots. This two-volume set deals with these issues as well as with more important topics of concern to the future of Native Americans, including their health, their environment, their cultural heritage, their rights, and their economic sustainability. This two-volume set is one of few guides to Native American revival in our time. It includes detailed descriptions of efforts throughout North America regarding recovery of languages, trust funds, economic base, legal infrastructure, and agricultural systems. The set also includes personal profiles of individuals who have sparked renewal, from Sheila Watt-Cloutier, a leader among the Inuit whose people deal with toxic chemicals and global warming, to Ernest Benedict and Ray Fadden, who brought pride to Mohawk children long before the idea was popular. Also included are descriptions of struggles over Indian mascots, establishment of multicultural urban centers, and ravages of uranium mining among the Navajo. The set ends with a detailed development of contemporary themes in Native humor as a coping mechanism. Delving occasionally into historical context, this set includes valuable background information on present-day controversies that are often neglected by the news media. For example, the current struggles to recover Native American trust funds and languages both emerged from a cradle-to-grave control system developed by the U.S. and Canadian governments. These efforts are part of a much broader Native American effort to recover from pervasive poverty and reassert Native American economic independence. Is gambling an answer to poverty, the new buffalo, as some Native Americans have called it? The largest Native American casino to date has been the Pequots' Foxwoods, near Ledyard, Connecticut. In other places, such as the New York Oneidas' lands in Upstate New York, gambling has provided an enriched upper class the means to hire police to force anti-gambling traditionalists from their homes. Among the Mohawks at Akwesasne, people have died over the issue. This two-volume set brings together all of these struggles with the attention to detail they have always deserved and rarely received.




The Earth's Blanket


Book Description

This is a thought-provoking look at Native American stories, cultural institutions, and ways of knowing, and what they can teach us about living sustainably.




Salish Archipelago


Book Description

The Salish Archipelago includes more than 400 islands in the Salish Sea, an amalgamation of Canada’s Georgia Strait, the United States’ Puget Sound, and the shared Strait of Juan de Fuca. The Salish Sea and Islands are named for the Coast Salish Indigenous Peoples whose homelands extend across the region. Holiday homes and services have in many places displaced pristine ecosystems, Indigenous communities, and historic farms. Will age-old island environments and communities withstand the forces of commodity-driven economies? This new, major scholarly undertaking provides the geographical and historical background for exploring such questions. Salish Archipelago features sections on environment, history, society, and management, accompanied by numerous maps and other illustrations. This diverse collection offers an overview of an embattled, but resilient, region, providing knowledge and perspectives of interest to residents, educators, and policy makers.