Myaamiaki Conference

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Since 2011, the National Breath of Life Archival Institute for Indigenous Languges (NBoL) has provided training to more than 60 tribal communities engaged in archive-based language revitalization. In 2014, the Myaamia Center became the institutional home for National Breath of Life in order to provide long-term stability and development to the program.

Today, NBoL is the only nationally focused program in the United States to advance archive-based revitalization across Indian Country. Started in 2022, and with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Mellon Foundation, the NBoL Apprenticeship Program has provided support and ongoing training to community language workers from ten tribal communities from across the country.

Apprentices worked with their communities to design meaningful archival language projects for their two years in the program and have made significant progress towards achieving their goals. Their projects range from transcription of original archival documents in order to build a community-curated archive using the Indigenous Languages Digital Archive (ILDA) software to utilizing contemporary audio and video to populate their ILDA dictionaries.

Their important work for their communities supports their tribes’ language and cultural revitalization efforts, much as the Myaamia Center’s archival work supports the Miami Tribe community. In this presentation, we will provide an overview of NBoL’s work and hear from several of the apprentices in a moderated panel about their experiences and work with NBoL.

The Office of Assessment and Evaluation recently developed a theoretical framework for understanding nahi meehtohseeniwinki ‘living well,’ a myaamia-specific, perspective on wellbeing. Our team now turns toward creating practical tools that Myaamia citizens can utilize to support their individual journey of nahi meehtohseeniwinki. The first step involves the creation of an online repository of recipes that use foods that Myaamiaki ‘Myaamia people’ have utilized for many years (e.g. hominy, persimmons, etc.). This presentation will share the theoretical underpinnings of the project, demonstrate the online repository and its health-promoting features, and outline the future goals of the project.

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