Breath of Life 2.0

NILI-Myaamia Center Partnership
Brings BoL 2.0 to the University of Oregon

The Northwest Indian Language Institute (NILI) at the University of Oregon (UO) has partnered with the Myaamia Center at Miami University of Ohio in hosting the National Breath of Life (BoL) 2.0 workshops. The next National BoL 2.0 workshop will be hosted on the UO campus in Eugene, July 13-17, 2020.  

BoL supports Native American communities working to revitalize their languages. While BoL 1.0 helped communities gain access to archival materials, BoL 2.0 focuses on the management of digital language archives using the Indigenous Languages Digital Archive (ILDA) computer platform. ILDA was developed by the Myaamia Center, and is being shared with Native communities through the BoL 2.0 workshops.

 

The partnership between NILI and the Myaamia Center strives to take full advantage of the strengths of each institute. NILI has a long 20 plus year history of helping develop Native language teachers, both at the annual Summer Institute and in tribal partnership projects. The Myaamia Center originally built the ILDA software for use with the Miami-Illinois language revitalization program, but has now adapted it to fit the needs of multiple languages.

In 2020, NILI hopes to build on the success of the first BoL 2.0 workshop which took place July 2019 in Ohio, by continuing to train Native communities in how to use the software to aid in accomplishing their language revitalization goals. We expect five teams of different Tribal communities to attend. NILI hopes that this partnership will strengthen the important connections that the University of Oregon maintains with the Indigenous groups in and around the Pacific Northwest.

 

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