Tag: Indigenous language

Module#3 Weblog#5 by Dilip Verma

The Native Village web site is professional and well maintained. It is copyrighted by an individual, but  is too good to be run as a hobby. However, no mention is made of how it is maintained financially.

Web site: http://www.nativevillage.org/index.htm

This vibrant site publishes twice a month and is designed for educators and youth. It is not particularly scholarly but is a great example of a functioning format of a Web resource for an Indigenous community.

The first publication is “Native Village Youth and Education News” which is a news magazine of interesting stories on Indigenous topics.

Link to Volume 1: http://www.nativevillage.org/NOV%20News/V1%20November%202009%20headlines.htm

The second publication is “Native Village Opportunities and Websites”, which is divided into two sections:

“Opportunities” lists all the activities (and there are plenty) going on related to Indigenous Knowledge and Community.

Link: http://www.nativevillage.org/Opportunities/10-15-09%20OPPS.htm

“Websites” offers a selection of interesting Websites every fortnight.

Link: http://www.nativevillage.org/Libraries/NativeVillageLibrariesHOME.htm

There is also the “Native American Language Library”, which received recognition by the American Indian Review Magazine as the “Best Language Website on the Internet”. The page offers a lot of good links to websites on Indigenous languages and is a great resource for teachers wanting to bring Indigenous content into the curriculum.

Link: http://www.nativevillage.org/Libraries/Language%20Libraries.htm

Module 2 Weblog Entry#3 by Dilip Verma

The Inupiaq Dictionary Project

Web Site URL: http://wiki.bssd.org/index.php/Category:Inupiaq_dictionary

This is a school based project inspired by Audie Chikoyuk of Marshall, Alaska in the Bering Strait School District that uses Wiki technology to encourage indigenous students to build a language dictionary.

The Wiki contains links to each Inupiaq word entered into the system. Each word has it’s own page with a word, definition, MP3 audio file, image and any other additional relevant information. Since it is a Wiki, anyone can add or make changes to the content, which may or may not be a good thing in the long run. It is a very simple site, and still quite small, but has grown to include a dictionary in Yupik as well. This is an important site as it demonstrates indigenous youth creating and sharing a product that promotes an internal discourse with very little investment. The fact that it is an oral dictionary is important in my quest for digital products that can be used in Mexican Indigenous communities, because these languages often do not have a globally accepted written form. Since Indigenous languages tend to vary from community to community, the Wiki technology gives students from different communities the opportunity to add variations to the same entry, encouraging a peer-peer discourse.

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