The last Miami language speaker walked on more than a half-century ago. But because of efforts made by Daryl Baldwin, a citizen of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma, and others passionate about reviving what was thought to be an extinct Algonquian language, it is once again being passed down.
Baldwin said he has three grandchildren, who are a part of the first generation that doesn’t know there was a time when the language wasn’t spoken.
“People aren't fluent in it, but they're using the language,” Baldwin said in an interview with KOSU. “And so they're familiar with it, and they know it's there. So we finally got into that threshold where we've come out of the vacuum of emptiness— which is what I was born into— into a period of revitalization. And hopefully there's enough resources that this will continue to carry on.”
Baldwin is the executive director at the Myaami Center at Miami University in Ohio. The center houses the National Breath of Life Archival Institute for Indigenous Languages, which has grown throughout the years, hosting workshops and offering training.
“With four iterations between 2011 and 2017, the National BoL has provided training in archives-based linguistic research to 141 tribal representatives from 65 language communities who are actively working to revitalize their highly endangered or silent languages,” according to the institute’s website.
Thanks to a recent $2.1 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the resources the institute can provide to tribal communities are about to increase.
“We will be working with 20 tribal communities across the United States and also really building up the technological infrastructure in the Myaamia Center so that we can support those communities and also support the ongoing development and maintenance of all of the software,” Baldwin said.
The technology he is referring to is what helped breathe life back into the Miami language.
Baldwin explained that he had archival materials about the Miami Tribe stretching back more than 250 years ago. He was consumed with questions of how to sift through and organize it, leading him to help pilot and develop software that evolved into what the institute uses today — now called ILDA or Indigenous Languages Digital Archive.
Out of the communities who will benefit from the grant, Baldwin did not want to specify the names of the tribes out of respect for their privacy, though he did note a handful are located in Oklahoma. He also addressed the issue of data sovereignty and shared that the Miami Tribe is the copyright holder of the software, and they extended the data protections to tribal communities.
“So in the user license, it specifically says that if Tribe X wants to use ILDA, anything they put in is theirs,” Baldwin said. “We have no control over that, and so we'll house it, we'll store it and we'll continue to update the software and maintain it for them. But anything that's in that basket is theirs. ”
As the Myaamia Center and the National Breath of Life Institute continue to develop, Baldwin has found himself passing the torch to the next generation, hoping to see his community continue to speak the language that went silent for 30 years.
