Breath of Life 2.0: Indigenous Language Revitalization through Enhancement of the Miami-Illinois Digital Archive

FAIN: HAA-261218-18

Miami University (Oxford, OH 45056-1846)
Daryl W. Baldwin (Project Director: January 2018 to June 2022)
Kara Strass (Project Director: June 2022 to present)
Gabriela Perez Baez (Co Project Director: May 2018 to present)

The expansion and improvement of an existing digital archive for indigenous languages, the development of software to identify and analyze archival materials, and two training workshops for tribal representatives and scholars engaged in language revitalization efforts.

The Miami-Illinois Digital Archive (MIDA) is critical to the educational development of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma’s language revitalization efforts: it is the only software for the organization, storage, retrieval and analysis of digital surrogates of archival language documentation. The proposed Breath of Life 2.0: Creating a ‘Second Breath’ for Indigenous Language Revitalization (BoL 2.0) project will enhance the proven functionality of MIDA by providing a stable and secure data platform to share this powerful tool with Native American communities engaged in archivally-based research and analysis for language revitalization. The resulting Indigenous Languages Digital Archive will be disseminated in two one-week training workshops for alumni from the National Breath of Life Archival Institute for Indigenous Languages who seek to engage in the type of advanced archivally-based research that has enabled languages such as Miami-Illinois to be spoken again after decades of silence.

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