ASU partners in Mojave Language Recovery Program

An NSF-funded collaboration between Arizona State University's Center for Indian Education and the Fort Mojave Tribe – to document, transcribe and archive Mojave bird songs – is featured in International Innovation: https://asunews.asu.edu/files/p79-81_teresa_mccarty.pdf.

The impetus for the project was capturing the knowledge of Hubert McCord, who is advancing in age and the only fluent Mojave bird song singer. But the project has inolved a core group of elders, and Mojave youth are becoming increasingly involved as well in the documenting, transcribing, and archiving of the morning bird song cycle. Project leaders are Natalie Diaz, director of the Fort Mojave Language Recovery Program; and  ASU School of Social Transformation professors Teresa McCarty, principal investigator and Alice Wiley Snell Professor Emerita of Education Policy Studies, and co-director of the Center for Indian Education, and Eunice Romero-Little, associate professor of Indigenous language education and applied linguistics; and graduate research assistant Jeston Morris.

"ASU's Center for Indian Education has long been recognised as a leader in Native American research, teaching and outreach," the article notes. "Increasingly this work has focused on the sustainability of Indigenous languages and knowledge systems, as Indigenous communities throughout the Americas face growing language endangerment. According to McCarty the Mojave project also seems to be capturing the public imagination: 'It is something different and fresh, and it is a new way of conducting language teaching alongside documentary linguistics,' she explains. 'I also see this work as part of a larger global movement to reclaim Indigenous languages.'"

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