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Daryl Baldwin is a citizen of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma and currently serves as the Executive Director of the Myaamia Center at ºÚÁÏÉçÇø in Oxford, Ohio. He has worked with the Myaamia people developing language and cultural materials since 1995. Learn more about Daryl.

Dr. Gabriela Pérez Báez is an Assistant Professor in the Linguistics Department at the University of Oregon. She is the Director of the Language Revitalization Lab and works closely with the Northwest Indian Language Institute. Gabriela is Co-Director of the National Breath of Life Archival Institute for Indigenous Languages alongside Daryl Baldwin. Gabriela served as Curator of Linguistics at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, and in its Recovering Voices initiative. Her research centers on revitalization practices around the world. In her native Mexico, Gabriela works with Zapotec communities and has published on migration and language vitality, verbal inflection and derivation, semantic typology, and language and cognition. Gabriela is the compiler of two dictionaries of Isthmus Zapotec within a participatory and interdisciplinary model. She holds a doctorate in linguistics from the University at Buffalo.

Jerome Viles (Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians, Chee-me’, Lower Chinook) is the National Breath of Life Workshop Coordinator. He was born and raised in Eugene, Oregon where he lives with his partner and child. Jerome has been engaged in language revitalization efforts for his ancestral languages of Nuu-wee-ya’ (Oregon Dene) and Chinuk Wawa for nearly a decade. He received a B.A. in Linguistics and a M.A. in Nonprofit Management, both from the University of Oregon to aid in his language revitalization work.

Jerome specializes in archival language research and works with members of his family and community to bring language from archives back into daily use. Since 2016, he has worked as part of a team at the Northwest Indian Language Institute (NILI) to build a digital archive of Nuu-wee-ya’ archival language materials. These efforts have been supported through partnership with the Myaamia Center. This partnership resulted in his team’s creation of the Nuu-da’ Mv-ne’ Digital Archive hosted on the Myaamia Center’s Indigenous Languages Digital Archive (ILDA) platform. Jerome is currently with the Myaamia Center as the Breath of Life Workshop Coordinator working to provide ILDA to other Native American communities engaged in archives-based language revitalization.

Since 2011, the National Breath of Life Archival Institute for Indigenous Languages (NBoL) has provided training to tribal communities engaged in archive-based language revitalization. Through a series of workshops, participants learn how to navigate archives in the D.C. area to locate and acquire digital copies of important language materials they may use for their community directed revitalization efforts. In 2015, 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 housed in the Myaamia Center to advance the work of archive-based revitalization.

A major development of this program is the recent launch of the Indigenous Languages Digital Archive (ILDA) software developed through the Myaamia Center. With support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, ILDA was piloted in summer of 2019 here on ºÚÁÏÉçÇø’s campus. Five tribal research teams acquired copies of ILDA along with training to begin setting up their community language archives. Community Research teams are now able to house their once dispersed and inaccessible archival materials to build new digital language archives to support their revitalization efforts.

To date, NBoL has trained 124 community researchers from 55 language communities. The vision for NBoL is to continue ongoing development that supports the indigenous language revitalization movement by providing communities with techniques, tools, and expertise to support their work. In pursuit of this vision, the Myaamia Center welcomed Jerome Viles (Siletz) as the new National Breath of Life Workshop Coordinator in January 2020. Jerome is a member of the first team to pilot ILDA by building the Nuu-da' Mv-ne' Digital Archive for his ancestral language, Nuu-wee-ya' (Oregon Dene). Through his position, he will share his knowledge of ILDA and experience in digital language archive building with NBoL Community Research teams . Future plans for NBoL include broad dissemination of ILDA, continued support for ILDA users, and advanced training in archival-based language revitalization. 

National Breath of Life workshops have been significantly supported by the National Science Foundation’s Documenting Endangered Languages Program (2011, 2013, 2015, 2017) and the National Endowment for the Humanities: Digital Humanities Advancement Grant Level III (2019, 2020).

The Myaamia Ethnobotanical Database is a collection of plant references derived from over a decade of research and interviews regarding the historical and contemporary use of plants by the Myaamia People. The database organizes cultural information related to plants, and also contains other botanical information, scientific names, distribution, and related ecological data. Additional to its research and archival value, the database is designed to eventually support the needs of ecologist and tribal environmental educators who are interested in identifying and maintaining plant knowledge on tribal properties in Oklahoma and other locations. This talk will cover the basic and current features of this new software and share ideas for future modifications.

Cameron Shriver, Ph.D., is a Research Associate at the Myaamia Center and Visiting Assistant Professor in the History Department at Miami. He researches Myaamia reserves and land transactions in nineteenth-century Indiana and Ohio, and periodically writes on the Myaamia Community Blog, ‘.’ His research has been supported by the American Philosophical Society and National Endowment for the Humanities, and he has held fellowships at the John Carter Brown Library, the Newberry Library, and the Huntington Library. In addition to his work on Myaamia real estate, his current book project analyzes intelligence-gathering practices among Miami-Illinois and imperial communities—French, British, and American—in the eighteenth century. Dr. Shriver completed his PhD in history at Ohio State University in 2016. He teaches Native American History and “Introduction to the Miami Tribe” at ºÚÁÏÉçÇø.

Kara Strass is the Director of Miami Tribe relations at the Myaamia Center. a citizen of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma, is originally from Huntington, Indiana. It was there, within the traditional homelands of the Myaamia people, that her Myaamia identity was fostered by her family, especially her grandmother. Today, she resides in both Oxford, Ohio, and Bloomington, Indiana with her husband Kristoph.

Kara received an M.S. in Student Affairs in Higher Education from ºÚÁÏÉçÇø in 2016. Kara’s graduate studies focused on Student Development Theory, and specifically how these theories can be applied to make Myaamia ºÚÁÏÉçÇøs successful in their college endeavors.

Kara joined the Myaamia Center in 2016 and became the Director of Miami Tribe Relations in 2020. As the liaison between the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma and ºÚÁÏÉçÇø, Kara strives to strengthen this relationship, which is now 50-years old. Additionally, Kara serves as an advisor and mentor to the Myaamia ºÚÁÏÉçÇøs who attend ºÚÁÏÉçÇø as part of the Myaamia Heritage Program.

2022 is the 50th anniversary of the relationship between the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma and ºÚÁÏÉçÇø.  This unique partnership is expressed through a shared commitment to neepwaantiinki, ‘learning from each other,’ which has played a key role in the Miami Tribe’s language revitalization efforts and has led to the first generation in nearly 100 years learning to speak the Myaamia language. 

Although this relationship is 50 years old, the connections between Myaamia history and ºÚÁÏÉçÇø history are much deeper.  Cam will discuss the founding of ºÚÁÏÉçÇø in Myaamia homelands, the continued connections over time, and how an unlikely relationship between a sovereign Tribal Nation and public educational institution was formed.  This history, he hopes, will be more fully developed in a book to be released in 2023.

Building off of the history of the relationship, Kara will speak to the outcomes of the relationship for both the Miami Tribe and ºÚÁÏÉçÇø, including the evolution of the Myaamia Heritage Program and the development of the Myaamia Center.  She will discuss how this relationship served to strengthen the revitalization work of the Miami Tribe, how we are celebrating our accomplishments, and where it is headed in the future.

David Costa, Ph.D., is the Program Director for the Language Research Office at the Myaamia Center.  He completed his Ph.D. in linguistics at U.C. Berkeley in 1994, with his dissertation on the Miami-Illinois Language. Costa is involved in a long-term project to analyze and annotate the data from the language manuscripts that have been uploaded into the Indigenous Languages Digital Archive (ILDA), in addition to helping with the design of Myaamia language curricula, answering language inquiries from members of the Miami Tribe, and ongoing research on the Miami-Illinois language. He has worked with the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma on language revitalization since 1995.

Hunter Thompson Lockwood, Ph.D. (U. Wisconsin-Madison, 2017), is a project coordinator in the Language Research Office under Dr. David Costa. He has worked for the Myaamia Center since 2019, assisting Dr. Costa in analyzing and annotating historical attestations of the Miami-Illinois language on the ILDA platform as part of the ongoing language revitalization work at the Center. He also works with Dr. Douglas Troy and Jerome Viles to design and test upcoming iterations of the ILDA software. His research covers a diverse array of topics, including the grammar of questions and the meaningful pieces that make up Miami-Illinois words. Additionally, he has worked with speakers of Ojibwe and Potawatomi since 2008.

The Indigenous Languages Digital Archive (ILDA) is a program first developed by the Myaamia Center 2012. It was developed to fill the need for a database to organize the huge amount of archival information on the Miami-Illinois language, made necessary by the fact that there were no programs on the market at that time designed for such a purpose. Since the initial rollout of ILDA, the program has been continuously updated and over 78,000 entries have currently been uploaded. Perhaps the greatest value of this program is that it has rendered the most inaccessible data sources on the Miami-Illinois language far easier to use, allowing them to now realize their full potential. The process of keying in, translating, uploading and analyzing new data is still ongoing and will probably continue for decades to come. In this talk Dr. Costa will demonstrate where ILDA is now, detailing the multi-stage process necessary to get ready-to-use data into the program. I will also show how incredibly useful ILDA has become; not only has it assumed tremendous importance for Myaamia language education, but it also has become an invaluable tool for academic research, both historical and linguistic. Time permitting, he will also discuss the connection between ILDA and another program recently created to help with language research, the On-Line Myaamia Dictionary. 

Dr. Lockwood will show how the ILDA platform, by assembling a deep timeline of sources all together in one place, enables and empowers his current research on word formation and lexical expansion processes in Miami-Illinois. Language users of all sorts naturally expand their vocabularies as time and technology march onward, but the creation of new words is especially relevant to communities working toward language reclamation and revitalization, where new or standardized words are sometimes needed for educational, technological, medical, and legal purposes. This talk will tie the historical strategies for new word creation that speakers used throughout the period when Miami-Illinois varieties were spoken more broadly together with the ongoing work of the Myaamia Center to produce useful resources for the broader myaamia community.

The Indigenous Languages Digital Archive has been made possible in part by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the Human Endeavor.

Haley Shea, Ph.D., (Miami Tribe of Oklahoma) is a Research Associate at the Myaamia Center and Visiting Assistant Professor in the Educational Psychology Department at Miami. As myaamia tribal member, is originally from Huntington, Indiana. Haley grew up participating and engaging in tribal programming, beginning as an Eewansaapita summer camp participant and eventually moving on to the role of counselor and later researcher. Haley then attended ºÚÁÏÉçÇø for her undergraduate career, studying Psychology and Spanish (class of 2013) as well as participating in the Myaamia Heritage Awards Program. After graduating, she earned a Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology from Iowa State University and completed her doctoral internship at ºÚÁÏÉçÇø’s Student Counseling Service. 

Currently, she has a joint appointment as a Research Associate at the Myaamia Center and a Visiting Assistant Professor in Educational Psychology at ºÚÁÏÉçÇø. She is currently the co-chair of the Nipwaayoni Acquisition and Assessment Team (NAAT) and engages in research on how language and cultural revitalization within the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma impacts the tribal community on four primary factors: academic attainment, health/wellness, community engagement, and national growth and continuance.

Myaamia ºÚÁÏÉçÇøs who attend ºÚÁÏÉçÇø as part of the Myaamia Heritage Award Program have a common experience that unites them as a community. The primary goal of the Heritage course is to teach them about Myaamia history, language, and culture. However, in addition to the educational component, there is an abundance of additional benefits that these ºÚÁÏÉçÇøs gain as a result of their experience at ºÚÁÏÉçÇø.

One aim of the Nipwaayoni Acquisition and Assessment Team (NAAT) is to understand the impact(s) that language and cultural revitalization has had on these myaamia ºÚÁÏÉçÇøs who have the unique opportunity to have significant exposure to myaamia cultural education. To date, our research has revealed that ºÚÁÏÉçÇøs grow in their understanding of their myaamia identity, connection to the tribal community, academic attainment, and general pride in their myaamia heritage. 

In this presentation, Haley will share some of her experiences as a Myaamia ºÚÁÏÉçÇø at ºÚÁÏÉçÇø and how her own experience has shifted now that she has found her way back to Miami as an employee of the Myaamia Center. Then, as a primary focus of the presentation, she will moderate a panel of current Myaamia ºÚÁÏÉçÇøs who are attending ºÚÁÏÉçÇø. In this panel, these ºÚÁÏÉçÇøs bring life to the aforementioned impact that the Heritage Program has had in their own lives.