A I C L S

History

 

   

   Designed by AICLS’ Leanne Hinton and L. Frank Manriquez with Linda Yamane, the first Breath of Life conference took place in 1996 and has since been held every other year. It is one of two major programs run by the Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival. Breath of life complements the Master-Apprentice Language Learning Program, where tribal people partner with elder native speakers of their heritage language and are trained in how to work together so that the learner can work toward conversational fluency in the language. For languages without speakers, Breath of Life shows that it is still possible to learn ones language through work with the documentation of that language that was done by the elders of long ago through their work with anthropologists, linguists, and missionaries.

 

   Breath of Life takes place every even year at Berkeley. The model of Breath of Life has spread to other places as well. There is now a Breath of Life workshop every other year at the Sam Noble Museum, University of Oklahoma, in Norman, Oklahoma. Every odd year there is also the two week Breath of Life National Archival Institute for Indigenous Languages, held in Washington D.C. (the next one to be held in 2015). There are also other great archives in North America and elsewhere that can be tapped to bring languages back to the people they belong to, through exploration, research and learning.