Indigenous Peoples in the Americas

Judge Yassmin Barrios, “Justice and Reparation in Guatemala: Challenges and Possibilities”

March 5, 2019
6:00 pmto7:30 pm

156 Straub Hall, 1451 Onyx St., UO campus
Free & open to the public

Justice and Reparation in Guatemala: Challenges and Possibilities

CLLAS Inaugural Lecture in Latinx and Latin American Studies

Please join us for the CLLAS Inaugural Lecture in Latinx and Latin American Studies with Judge Yassmin Barrios. Judge Barrios will deliver her address, “Justice and Reparation in Guatemala: Challenges and Possibilities,” in 156 Straub Hall at 6pm on Tuesday, March 5th.

Judge Yassmin Barrios is president of one of the two Guatemalan High Risk Crimes Tribunals. She was the presiding judge in the case of General Efraín Ríos Montt, convicting the dictator for genocide against the indigenous Ixil Mayans of Guatemala.

Sponsored by the Center for Latino/a and Latin American Studies and cosponsored by the President’s Office, the Oregon Humanities Center, the Center for the Study of Women in Society, the Latin American Studies Program, and the Departments of History, Political Science, and Romance Languages.

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Linguistics professor Gabriela Pérez Báez gets NEH grant to protect indigenous languages

Linguistics prof gets NEH grant to protect indigenous languages

Around the O / December 12, 2018 — To date, more than 7,000 languages are spoken around the world. As Gabriela Pérez Báez explains, languages hold critical knowledge about the history of survival of the communities of speakers, their ecological perspectives and their well-being.

Gabriela Pérez Báez

Pérez Báez is an assistant professor in the University of Oregon’s linguistics department and serves as the director of its new Language Revitalization Lab. She also serves as co-director for the National Breath of Life Archival Institute for Indigenous Languages and works with the UO’s Northwest Indian Language Institute, known as NILI.

Of the more than 300 languages spoken at the time of contact with Europeans in what is now the United States, more than half stopped being spoken as a result of colonization and state-building policies. These languages are considered to be dormant or sleeping. Many more are highly endangered today.

“The language communities recognize how critical the languages are and as a result have engaged in the arduous work of researching the languages in historical archives in order to reconstruct them and bring them back to use,” Pérez Báez said.

The Northwest Indian Language Institute provides training to Native American teachers working to revitalize many of these languages. Institute staff also partner with tribes to carry out on-site trainings and develop curriculum to teach highly endangered or sleeping languages in the classroom.

The institute’s efforts are being recognized with the announcement earlier in the fall that the National Breath of Life, of which the institute is a partner, has received support through a $311,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The grant was awarded to Daryl Baldwin, director of the Myaamia Center at Miami University, and Pérez Báez.

Since 2011, the National Breath of Life has provided training on the use of archival documentation for the revitalization of highly endangered and dormant languages to 117 community researchers from 55 language communities. With this growth comes the need for software to support the advancement of the research.

In response, the upcoming NEH-funded National Breath of Life 2.0 workshops are designed to provide participants with training in the use of the new indigenous languages digital archive. The archival system is the only available software that allows for the organization, storage and retrieval of digital copies of linguistic archival materials.

It directly links independent data derived from linguistic analysis to original manuscript pages. Pérez Báez said its powerful search function allows for the in-depth linguistic analysis required for the reconstruction of highly endangered or dormant languages.

The indigenous languages digital archive is modeled after the Miami-Illinois digital archive, also funded by a prior NEH grant and designed by the Myaamia Center to advance research for the revitalization of the heritage language of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma.

Pérez Báez said the grant will support the refinement of indigenous languages digital archive. It will also provide funding to hold two training workshops for community researchers engaged in language revitalization to learn how to use the archival system. The community researchers will then have access to the software free of charge.

The grant “has had significant positive impact on our ability to utilize archival materials for our revitalization effort,” Baldwin said. “It is an important step in the development of National Breath of Life to be able to share this technology with other tribal communities.”

A National Breath of Life 2.0 workshop will be held at Miami University in July 2019. Applications to the 2019 workshop are being accepted at www.nationalbreathoflife.org. The deadline is Saturday, Dec. 15.

The UO institute will hold a second workshop in Eugene in 2020.

“NILI is excited to be partnering with the National Breath of Life in this important national workshop, and we look forward to hosting community language leaders from across the nation,” said Janne Underriner, director of the institute.

—By David Austin, University Communications

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Scholar Stephanie Wood soon to launch glyph translation tool: “Visual Lexicon of Aztec Hieroglyphs”

A glyph translation tool: The Visual Lexicon of Aztec Hieroglyphs

Stephanie Wood, an ethnohistorian and specialist in Mesoamerican culture who is affiliated with the UO College of Education, will soon be launching the creation of a glyph translation tool, the “Visual Lexicon of Aztec Hieroglyphs,” which unites the work of scholars in Mexico, the U.S., Germany, and the Netherlands.  

The tool will be created with the participation of a Latinx student team at the UO. The result will be a free, online, searchable database of the atomic parts of compound glyphs, all named, annotated, and with attestations of the ways that they appear in compound glyphs in known 16th-century codices, such as the Codex Mendoza, the Codex Xolotl, and others.  The resulting site will be at least trilingual, using Nahuatl, Spanish and English.

The goals of the Visual Lexicon are manifold: 1) to provide a tool for scholars deciphering glyphs in under-studied or newly discovered codices; 2) to help with the teaching and self-study of glyph decipherment; 3) to deepen our understanding of the Aztec writing system (reading order, phoneticism, regional styles, etc.); 4) to prepare pedagogical pathways that highlight Aztec cultural hallmarks; and, 5) to be merged with the online Nahuatl dictionary Wood serves from Oregon, besides standing alone .

This project is a collaboration with professor and principal investigator Benjamin D. Johnson at the University of Massachusetts, and it is funded out of his three-year grant from National Endowment for the Humanities.

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Stephanie Wood will lead educators along the Lewis & Clark Trail

Editor’s Note: CLLAS affiliated faculty member Stephanie Wood will lead schoolteachers along the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail.

Prof hits the trail to get another view of Native American history / from Around the O

October 30, 2018—Next summer, 25 schoolteachers will embark on a 550-mile expedition along the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail to uncover new knowledge: how to better integrate Native American histories into their curriculum.

The trip is part of an initiative led by the UO’s Stephanie Wood to help educators create a more balanced and judicious approach to the nation’s history by weaving the experiences of indigenous peoples into their teaching. Wood, a research associate in the College of Education, was awarded $179,247 from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support the Discovering Native Histories Along the Lewis and Clark Trail summer institute.

The institute will draw from seminars, an immersive trip along the historic trail and meetings with tribes to help participants deepen and reframe the Lewis and Clark story.  › Continue reading

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Indigenous Rights and Environmental Justice: Info Session

November 16, 2018
12:00 pmto1:00 pm

Straub Hall, 245
1451 Onyx Street, Eugene, OR 97403

Come talk with UO professor Derrick Hindrey about indigenous communities in Bolivia!

This program will focus on concrete contemporary topics, including indigenous peoples and climate justice; hydrocarbons development and conflicts on indigenous lands; legal developments and challenges; natural resource management in indigenous territories (e.g. community-forestry); development encroachment; transnational indigenous environmental movements; conservation of biodiversity related to indigenous peoples’ intellectual property rights; mining and dams; and finally indigenous agroecology.

Program Dates:

June 22 – July 13, 2019

Application Deadlines:

Priority – February 15 ($100 off your program)

Final – Marh 15

Find out more information and APPLY TODAY:

https://geo.uoregon.edu/programs/bolivia/indigenous-rights-and-environmental-justice-in-bolivia

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Upcoming Events

5/3, 330-430pm, JFI Fellows Talk: Quechua women’s home gardens and climate change adaptation labor Peruvian Cordillera Blanca, Location TBD

5/11, 2-3pm, Graduate Student Research Presentation: Body Mapping: A decolonial method towards intergenerational healing, Location on Zoom

6/1: Undergraduate Awards Ceremony, 4pm, location: TBD

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