 Welcome to the QC afternoon of the seminar. It makes me quite pleasure to introduce our partners in crime. Well, I'm not so quite a video. I thought it was an aim pump. You've seen Alko and John Sullivan from the University of Warsaw. You've seen that it's very, very good at getting plants. Would you mention that? Yeah. No, no, no, no. It's golden stuff. I was inspired by John Sullivan. Just something about that. She's had a European Research Council starting run, which is very sought after. And another big project from the Polish government are looking at well-being, historical trauma, and language maintenance revitalisation. And the current one, which we're currently working on, is called Engaged Humanities. It's a community project between ourselves, Warsaw and the University of London, which some of you might have heard us talking about in a couple of months ago. It's a kind of complementary to that talk. And we can talk particularly, though, relating this to the work that you said, which I've been doing previously for the last 10 or more years. They've also revitalised England, and Mexico, but also relating, I think, to your previous European Research Council project. Yes, exactly. Thank you. So the framework for this talk, where the specific focus will be, especially in the end, toward the most recent experience, the most recent experience of the field school, the collaborative field school of the project Engaged Humanities, which is carried out with SOS, with Julian, with Peter, and with our Liden partners. And some people here participated in this event. Ebony, Albert, Joanna, me and John. So we hope this also can be some kind of exchange for some kind of discussion that we can have about this recent experience. But I would like to start with the framework for this talk. As it actually, the activities I would like to reflect on developed within several major team projects, starting with Endangered Languages, Comprehensive Models for Recent Revitalisation, which was funded by the Polish Ministry of Science, and it dealt with the Nahuat language, the Wemiseries language, and the Lemko language in Poland. And then this huge project that Julia mentioned, a starting ground of the ERC, European American Contact, which actually ended this November, the last November, but it has provided us with major funding and also opportunities to develop spaces for working with native speakers of Nahuat as research partners. And then the current project, Engaged Humanities in Europe, Capacity Building for Participate Research in Linguistic Cultural Heritage, this is the joint project with SAAS. And the new project, we just started in December, Language is a Cure, Linguistic Vitality as a Tool for Psychological Well-being, Health and Economic Sustainability, a Cure funded, it's with European funding, but the agency which is an intermediary in funding is a Foundation for Polish Science within a team program, and this is the project carried out with social psychologists and also psychiatrists. And the institutional base is the Faculty of Artists Liberalities University of Warsaw, where we recently created an international centre, also with the participation of SAAS, called Centre for Research and Practice in Cultural Continuity. And Idies, and John was going to tell you about Idies because this is the institution he created. Okay. El Instituto de docencia e investigación etnológica de Zacatecas, sorry, is a non-profit corporation in Mexico that we created in 2002. I had been working with Classical Now-What, I was in Zacatecas writing my dissertation on a topic related to Classical Now-What and I had never, I had not learned Modern Now-What and I found there were native speakers at the university, so I had been learning Modern Now-What with them. And so I would be learning Modern Now-What and then working with them in Spanish on translating documents that their ancestors had written in their own language. And I was then working for the university in Zacatecas and I was slowly realizing that one of the purposes of Mexican education, not just Mexican education, but probably a lot of education, is ethno-site. So I was sitting here working with native speakers of Now-What in Spanish on documents that their ancestors had written in their language and I thought it was like you're getting a slap in the face. You can't do this anymore. Every moment you continue working with them in Spanish you're contributing to erasing their language and culture. So from that moment we began working monolingually. EDS became a monolingual space, a safe monolingual space for native speaking college students to continue practicing their language and their culture, working in teaching, research and vitalization activities. And there are a number of principles that have structured our work but I will talk about those a little bit later. I just want to say something new in the development of EDS which is for me very important. EDS was my brainchild. So there's always the risk of me dominating this program not being a native speaker which is kind of strange. But the way things have happened it has not developed that way. The native speakers through our teaching in different countries have always participated independently in research projects with western researchers all around the world. They began their own research projects. They have worked with researchers that have gotten grants in different countries. And the most recent thing that is happening is that I will be stepping down as director of EDS and the entire directive administrative structure of EDS will be Indigenous people this year. So the principles of our approach is that we work with community members and Indigenous students in a collaborative way and they are protagonists in research and other activities. And also something that's very important is that we have become aware of this internal colonialism in research which is so... My training is in ethno-history and I worked first on pre-Columbian Mexican and colonial period and this is the area which really needs decolonizing not only in terms of research but also as far as scholars' minds are concerned and this is one of the things I've been reflecting on over the last several years as an ethno-history and I know how working with modern people and collaborating with them on promoting and reinforcing the use of native languages of Nahuatl can also be useful for the work of ethno-historians because for the Indigenous people PAS is part of the present. And I will talk about this later but it's also about how we make connections in the academy with whom we work, how we work, who become our partners, what are the principles. There's a lot of internal colonialism here. So this is the area we would like to focus on today. This is a map which illustrates the development basically the spread of Nahuatl, the areas where Nahuatl was spoken across the centuries. So this big yellow area is the maximum extension of the language as the first language in the communities but also as lingua franca in the beginning of the 16th century and also in the moment of the first decades of colonization. And the orange are supposedly Nahuatl-speaking populations communities of course in areas which were highly multilingual around 1521. And then current Nahuatl populations which are these red spots these are like isolated islands of speakers and in most of these places especially urbanized ones the transmission has been broken over the last several decades. And a very brief overview of the history of Nahuatl so I'd like to just comment on several major, major steps of development. Nahuatl was probably one of the languages spoken in the empire of Tertua Khan in the first half of the first millennium AD and then it was used in the Toltec state and as the language of Aztec, Altepet or ethnic states between 13th and 16th century and specifically as the language of the Aztec empire language of administration also in dealing with external provinces and it was used as lingua franca in commercial and political networks and this role continued after the conquest because especially Spanish friars but also administrators decided to rely on Nahuatl in their practical dealings with a very multi-ethnic environment of Mesoamerica and a series of legal orders reinforced along the 16th century this role of Nahuatl especially the famous order by the king Philip II in 1570 which announced Nahuatl to be the universal language of all the Indians promoting Nahuatl as the second language of the empire in the area of New Spain and all the Christianization and nocturnal materials and a lot of works and also the legal spaces were open for Nahuatl and Nahuatl was used by indigenous people and also by other ethnic groups as an intermediary between native languages other native languages and Spanish and this policy changed the policy of the crown changed in the end of the second half of the 18th century with the order which actually prohibited royal order that prohibited in 1770 the usage of Nahuatl and promoting Spanish language education explicitly announcing the need of making local languages extinct it was not really fulfilled it was not implemented the Spanish empire disorganized let's say at this point was very weak but this policy was further continued with the Mexican independence as part of the modernization of the nation indigenous groups had no real place in the modern Mexican state the category of India having special privileges a South category with all its legal privileges and rights to communal and corporate organization and land was abolished so indigenous people were practically left entirely undefended in the modern in the first century of the Mexican state which was followed by the policy which kind of was oscillating between assimilation and annihilation of indigenous groups and the policy of hispanization and the bilingual education which finally followed in the second half of the 20th century was actually the way of very quick transitioning of native populations towards Spanish and at that time we cannot talk about any form of stable bilingualism or multilingualism this was if there was a bilingualism indigenous communities was a very short time bilingualism which was a way of transitioning toward the dominant language and this in many ways this policy continues today despite many existence of many institutions which were created like inali in order to support indigenous languages we would like to turn to the implementation of what we've been doing so as it started with Idis and John will comment on this Idis started to create monolingual spaces for research, teaching, learning and discussion in Nawad then our second step when we started to work together was to support Nawad literacy and we started to organize capacity building and empowerment oriented activities we started having this support within several grants we started to carry out field work but not we but we encouraged indigenous students to carry out field work on their own and we carried this field work together with them or they did it on their own they analyzed the results and they used these results for their own master thesis and their own research and this in the end has led to creating spaces for developing indigenous methodology and collaborative research and John will talk about this and what we've seen in this work is that we shouldn't rely only on indigenous intellectuals which is like the most obvious choice when you start to work and you want to get people into research and to work with native scholars but in our activities we've noticed that there are people who are really interested in getting involved in the long term are there community members who already started to carry out activities in support of their languages started teaching but they are missing resources many of them are illiterate in now because they didn't receive any they hadn't received any formal education in writing their language so becoming aware of it has been very important and in our approach which is oriented toward boosting self-esteem empowerment and capacity building for native speakers not just intellectuals but also other community members to take some initiative John I just got to say something real quick what does it mean to be an indigenous intellectual? the great majority of people that are indigenous intellectuals in Latin America are indigenous people they speak their indigenous language but they're intellectuals because they've been trained in Spanish in the university they've gone up the system they become hispanicized all of their writing all of their research is done in Spanish to a Spanish audience Spanish speaking audience so what does indigenous intellectual mean what does that really mean? if you don't have reading materials okay and you don't in Latin American indigenous languages there's a dearth a heavy heavy dearth if you don't have reference materials a monolingual dictionary a monolingual grammar a monolingual encyclopedia these are things we take for granted if you don't have those and they don't exist in America okay how can you set up an educational system or educational activities so that native speakers can do intellectual work from within their own language and culture so the total monolingual series that we've created through the University of Warsaw it's not in Latin America University of Warsaw, nobody can believe this we are the only people publishing in what is going to be hopefully a massive way monolingual materials written by native speakers across space and time so we're going to start back in the 16th century we already have yes okay with alphabetic text written in Nahuatl by native speakers and publish that corpus all the way up till today not by steps but you know, all of them and an important part of this is orthographic standardization it's a big political mess okay there's never going to be consensus for an orthographic system in Nahuatl in many indigenous languages in Latin America because every linguist promotes his or her system every government agency promotes their system and everybody fights with each other it's a bunch of egos so what we've decided to do is take what for us is the most logical spelling system which is based not on sound because I mean, think about it if you wake up with a stomach ache there's a good chance that you're going to pronounce something differently from when you don't have a stomach ache and you're going to spell that word differently if you're trying to represent sounds so what we try and do is represent morphemes okay, that is the element that crosses all variants in space and time in Nahuatl and relying on the colonial tradition of writing which is rejected based on ideological argument that it's a colonial heritage but it's rejected by people who actually don't study this tradition which was the tradition of writing not of Spaniards but of indigenous people who used orthographic writing in the colonial period as their own tools to defend themselves to continue their culture to win in courts over Spaniards to preserve their tradition but also we don't want to impose this but we never impose anything and for example in the field school there were students from actually great initiative first intercultural university that has classes in Nahuatl we collaborate with the founders of this program and they use different orthography this is not a problem for us and the field forms the metadata forms into variants so if someone wanted to fill them in the standardized let's say modernized calligraphy or the orthography they use in this university they could choose and there was absolutely no problem with that no fights over it and we insist on not fighting because fighting over anything is division we want people to get together it is in no one's best interest except maybe the governments for native speakers to be divided people should be able to come together without barriers and talk about common problems to share ideas for solutions and even for people who use normally use different orthography if they want to experiment we encourage them to experiment to see how this would be if they would like to write something do an experiment in this orthography and if they like it or if they see an advantage opening spaces for discussion this is an experiment right and these all of these works are available the PDF forms are available for free if any of you want access to the PDFs you can contact us immediately they are on our website okay they're on the website the books are distributed free in indigenous communities they're also becoming available slowly on amazon.com for non-native speakers but they're being used in a number of different situations they're being used in the communities but also which is a pleasant surprise they're doing group readings and discussions which is very nice and the authors and the members of EDS are actually doing this job they're going to the communities all on their own initiative yeah reading with children promoting working together organizing workshops with the use of these publications so we just facilitate the the fact that these books are available and they're being constantly published several new positions per year but then the native speakers have to use them and they've started to do that and we've found that now that researchers all around the world are starting to use our publications in their research and also they're being used as teaching materials in classes for for non-native speakers before we finish this I have to say that there's only been one monolingual dictionary two monolingual dictionaries of an American indigenous language ever written ever in history the first one was written maybe 15 years ago in Guatemala it's in a warehouse not being circulated number two is our dictionary it's called 12,000 entries monolingual contextual entries with references to colonial dictionaries and also Ioanna who is present here is the author of two pictorial dictionaries she developed with native speakers from Wasteca and from La Scala collaboratively and she illustrated these dictionaries and they are circulating they are actually in the second picture the children here sorry for moving so much the children are actually holding this picture in Wasteca and two further projects that we're working on starting to work on right now we're doing a monolingual grammar of modern Wasteca and Nahuatl which is going to be a long term project big adventure and also I don't know if any of you have heard of the Florentine Codex first encyclopedia in America probably published in America European style encyclopedia but resulted to be more like a mixture of European style encyclopedia with knowledge structured along traditional discourses by native speakers who actually wrote it because Saagun was only the editor of this and it's all in Nahuatl 12 books in Nahuatl 16th century and we're going to redo this in modern Nahuatl using all of the variants of Nahuatl people can contribute to entries on specific topics in their own variant and it will all be published online so the main problem the basic problem we've encountered is actually the literacy in Nahuatl is very limited because Nahuatl is making children even if they are fluent speakers and the transmission is still in place like these children from Soya Tla in Puebla in the municipality of Tepelkuma they start their kinder with Spanish and Thai and Spanish and continue with Spanish through their whole life so they don't develop any school experience or more complex let's say cognitive experience outside their house and their experience with their families and the community at school related to their language and they say they cannot read and write in Nahuatl and when they come to the events and they started in Cholula in 2014 they say I can speak their language I cannot write it I want to read and they help me with that so it's like the basic thing of teaching people how to read and write their language and obviously they can learn it in a week or two weeks as with the school group which we included in one of our winter schools in Cholula from Soya Tla they participate in the classes in reading colonial documents and modern Nahuatl class and they learned to write the standardized orthography which is easy for them because it's based on Spanish orthography and this is the orthography they knew from school and in the end we organized within the Inter-Dialecto-Mating Encounter that John will talk about literary competition for them so this children this teenager wrote poems and stories in Nahuatl and they variant and then they were read aloud by speakers from different regions gathered there and they voted for the winners in the literary competition it was a very special experience and then we in posterior events people who came to participate said look I want to teach my language in the community nobody's teaching but I don't know how to read and write this is what I need to learn as soon as possible so we realized this is something and we're doing this also as part of our other activities and a special series of activities are connected to reading historical texts in Nahuatl written by the ancestors of the modern Nahuatl people in Nahuatl from 16th through 19th centuries and we've organized series of workshops but the rule was that we don't use Spanish in these workshops everything is done in modern Nahuatl why? why do we insist on that? because this is one of the major obstacles also psychological obstacles for the native people you cannot use Nahuatl outside household because it's not proper it's nobody would understand you this is like entirely out of place imagine having meeting of teachers of Nahuatl everything is done in Spanish and also we just believe that people cannot communicate across variants this John is going to talk about it so we started this workshops using modern variants of the language and reading colonial documents and discussing them and translating them in modern Nahuatl and for me it's as an ethno-historian it has been particularly emotional because it's reconnecting with the past this part of the heritage is not present at schools in Mexico indigenous children and also mestizo children they don't read Nahuatl documents that their ancestors wrote they don't know about many forms of agency and resilience across the colonial period colonial period is like dark ages it's something that you don't talk about you don't learn about very much so there's no connection between the cultures of the past the Aztecs, the Mayas and the people today the impoverished version of what it used to be and this is actually part of the Mexican ideology from the 19th century so great civilization, yes but today's indigenous people they have to be modernized and their languages are no longer reflection of this great languages of the past that we use the classical languages that used to be that were used before the Spaniards arrived so by reading these documents these people actually realize they can understand them how difficult is there are some hurdles we have to struggle over certain for example syntactic expressions and some changes in the vocabulary but they find they can find out quickly they understand that and some loan words which are not now stigmatized there are these arguments of pure languages corrupt it's not pure anymore they see these loan words were already in the language in the 16th century okay so there are several important messages for them and also they can see different forms of agency and then they can reflect upon these forms of agency and think how this can inspire their attitude today so these were the lessons from these meetings and I would like to quote a testimony recorded after one of the the first workshop actually by Jorge Hernandez from San Miguel de Nango this is this Jorge who organized last year organized part of our field school in his community he started revitalization activities in his community being a very successful young engineer in Mexico City he doesn't need his language he can speak English but he decided that he needs to do something for his community and for his language and if he evolves he's thinking evolved over the years but started with a simple workshop this is what he said but when we began to listen to the speech of our other brothers people who come from many places not just from here but from Mexico City they come from Baracruzo, Ahacatlashcala then we understand each other we began to understand each other and we began to examine the documents so this bewilderment this astonishment we can understand each other we can work together across variants and I think judging by his case because he became an activist and he wants to continue this has been like a source of inspiration and also this is important to to work out ways or approaches toward what can be called participatory or already has been called by some historians participatory historical culture something which is relevant for the present but to make it relevant for the present it's very important to include people who are descendants of the people who wrote the document and see how this past can become part of their presence in the present time what we can learn from them in understanding this past and on different levels even on the linguistic level there are forms which appear in the documents which can be connected to some forms of the spoken language today which otherwise would not be understandable for example a common common greeting Piali in modern Wastekanawat that comes from Madios Mitzmo Piali made a Guardiu keep you which became abbreviated so they discovered these connections and it's a really beautiful experience to see how they get reconnected to the past which is so important for indigenous identity I'll show just a short fragment of this how it looks like and people from all ages participating in that this is the presentation by the participants of their books all in now also this is this is also what we've been doing with this publication so this is one of the gatherings we filmed in one of the houses in San Francisco and the author Refugio Navanava and our collaborator from Tlaxcala was reading his books to the native speakers and they got involved in the discussion they started to read these books on their own make jokes about it and it was really interesting because this kind of literary plurality is very important storytelling but not in connection to publish, to written, to printed printed works in the language first I think we need, well, okay I want to talk about indigenous methodology and people are starting to write about that now but I think we need to ask ourselves a question first why is indigenous methodology, research methodology important why is revitalization of language and culture important linguistic and cultural plurality important well, for me it's pretty it's pretty obvious you know, as human beings we have a lot of problems a lot of shared problems all over the globe and if you want to solve a problem, you don't take 100 clones of the same brain of the same education, of the same language and set them to work on that problem you want 100 different languages 100 different perspectives 100 different sets of cognitive and effective tools that are offered by uniquely by different languages and cultures working simultaneously on those problems and looking for ways to enrich our lives collectively so it's not just for the good of the community, it's for the good of all all humanity okay I a couple of things came together and had us start reflecting specifically on methodology research methodology, first we published the dictionary, after it was a 15 year project and then two of my students finished their master's degree with theses written in now what okay and and then I've read a little bit of what's been published on indigenous methodology and I haven't liked it, why? because it's basically three topics when you when you read about indigenous methodology number one people theorize about indigenous methodology people talk a lot about politics and they criticize western methodology so it's like dancing around the subject they're not actually doing the research or exploring ways to actually do research on specific projects from an indigenous perspective, from within an indigenous language and it occurred to me, well gee, that's what we've been doing at Ithias for the last 20 years so it's probably time to start thinking about it, think about what we've done so a couple of things jump out you know, we work monolingually and that's really important and I just said a specific language and culture gives you a specific set of tools to work upon reality to perceive reality, to transform reality that's good for everyone and a lot of people throw a criticism at us and say well you're a purist, you only want to work monolingually no, that's not the case we want our students to be able to work with many languages obviously we have these kids coming from these villages where they were raised monolingually and now what and then they go to school and a lot of them I would just have to say we're tortured some with physical punishment, fines psychological everything you can imagine and then you go out in the culture and you, I mean out in the society in the mestizo society you go outside of their village and there's all this, you know, racism discrimination so when they get to Edias as college students they pretty much decided that they're never going to speak their language or practice their culture again except when they go home to visit and then they run into us and it's like we have to jump start then you know like you jump start a battery that's dead we have to jump start them back into using their language think critically and creatively and the dictionary has been a really good tool for that we didn't intend it to be, but it is think about it, constructing a definition for a word and not a calc not using the structure of an English or a Spanish definition of a word but thinking how you from within your language and your culture how do you define a word okay and creating example sentences for every definition for example, this has allowed the native speakers at Edias to get back into using their language well they've never used their language academically, but getting into using their language academically epistemology that's a big word you take classes on it well, I mean you know the kids at Edias they've gone through, they're now us they've been raised in within their culture in their language and then it starts to mix with Spanish and so they don't know what's what you know and if you're going to really work within your language you have to start exploring how your language structures your perception of reality and how you work with reality okay, and you have to be able to divide at least for the moment what's yours and what's the outside okay, so there's just some really quick examples super quick examples a conference we went to where we had some native speakers of I think it was Radica talking about colors they were talking about colors in their language and I raised my hand after their talk and I said well you know you don't really have the concept of colors okay the concept is the surface appearance of something so within this big box of surface appearance you have what some people call colors but you have for example fuzziness bumpiness if you can see it softness it's surface appearance and they said oh my god you're right, we do that too so if you don't go down the level of basic perception and the basic construction of the language, how the language is put together you can't start to rediscover how you work at the most basic academic level okay, and that's what we're trying to do at Edias another thing which is really important is this idea of and you guys probably debate this all the time this idea of how we look at reality in western society well we compartmentalize everything we cut up everything into these little compartments that are self self-contained and so you can study religion without having to study economy or the relations between religion and economy or vice versa you know what I'm talking about right all of our universities and schools are divided up into disciplines okay and we take it for granted no indigenous person on earth unless it's been beaten into their head through their education they would never accept that this is even possible everything for indigenous people is interconnected and there's nothing you can talk about without including deities natural deities for example okay and another real quick anecdote that would describe this is one of our students Edouardo who just got his master's degree and wrote his thesis he was writing on corn so me the advisor the gringo says okay so what are we going to do we're going to have a chapter talking about deities chapter talking about land a chapter talking about maybe tools chapter talking about agricultural cycles and he just says this doesn't make sense to me it doesn't work for me so what he came up with is talking about the agricultural cycles but as ceremonies during the year and then within each ceremony are articulated deities, tools land techniques yeah okay so these are the okay and that I will be real quick the mess consult school system does not promote independent thinking so another thing that's really important is giving the kids permission to think for themselves and giving them activities where they're forced to think for themselves with their buddies okay and when they do this then all of these beautiful things start coming out okay because they have permission to do it they realize they can do it and now they're starting to access all of this richness which comes from within their own language and culture good and I would like to add that we have so far two masters as defenses entirely in Nawa with comedies not only by native speakers but also foreigners speaking the language including Professor Flores Farfan and Adam Kuhn who also was in Tlaxcala with us and me online everything was done in Nawa all the whole defense and the community members participated the families which came for the event and they were in the university space and the tesis were published in Nawa and so summing up this part what can empowerment need to so we hope that these joint activities carried out in the native language can encourage developing agency and fostering new social linguistic environments committed specific for language revival and use and the students that it has already started doing this work for their communities in the Wasteca they took initiative in their own hands and this is like a separate topic that they started to do in the communities but what's also important from our perspective is that new networks appear between native speakers, new speakers of the language and external speakers so people like me, like other students and researchers all over the world who learn to speak the language and work in the language with them and I think this is also very positive in boosting self-esteem and different initiatives of native speakers but then there is this very difficult step of taking the risk to go against a question existing ideologies and attitudes and power relationships in the community and those of us who went to the field school in Shaltipan could see how it is and I will come back to this issue it's not very easy to become a revitalizer of the language when language property language ownership is so important although it's not explicitly pronounced in the community when people do not want to risk they reestablish positions as a professor, teacher or specialist with being accused of using the language for his personal advancement or his personal career or his personal gain this is very, very complicated and only few people can do it and we becoming aware of this how actually difficult is to do to start something in the communities not just between the communities and in the events or promoting the now language in the local networks this is one thing but really doing something in the community and going against dominant ideologies is a very huge challenge and this is the last event the last part of the talk on which we would like to comment briefly is this this field school in San Miguel Shaltipan another community in La Scala which was organized as part of our capacity building activities I have to tell you in the beginning that the program officially is for people from our university to undergo capacity building and learn from from our partners but we have negotiated with the European Commission to be able to fund the participation of ethnic minorities and without the definition that they don't have to have a legal status of the minority everybody whom we consider to be a minority is participating is being funded so the idea of this field school was not to carry out training for western students because we have plenty of opportunities for this kind of training in Europe this was something we wanted to organize for native participants and students as much as possible in all language so that you can see that we don't have to use dominant languages to carry out these activities but also to show western students how this kind of field work carried out entirely in the native languages without using the dominant language by external students who learned the language so this was something we wanted to share and we were really lucky because there were many students also former students of John or indigenous researchers from US for example but also from Europe who could speak modern Nauat and they even presented research papers conference papers in Nauat to the native audience about their research they did it in the modern language so I think the impact of this for native speakers who gathered from all over the Mexico different regions this was the impact we wanted to have to make them feel more confident that they can use their language in public spaces in education they can deliver papers about their research they can talk about their problems and their activities they can plan together and they communicate and people who would never admit they are speakers of the language from the community which sort of banned the use of the language they would make, they would reveal themselves they are perfect speakers of the language nobody suspected like the waiter who was serving food he got so encouraged nobody knew he spoke the language including Beatriz and Refugio they didn't know he spoke the language and it turned out he speaks the language and he was very happy to communicate so this was something we were looking for so these are the participants from all over the world from our three inverses in Europe but also from ethnic minorities in Europe and from people from the United States and we wanted to bring indigenous researchers, activists and artists speaking Nahuatl and other indigenous languages so we have speakers of Ayuk speakers of Mischtek here and speakers of Nahuatl together and my other speakers from Europe and Mexico who were sharing their experience like Yustena Mayerska sitting there and then Temata Ushkuru Revatalizers of the Vimisieres language we were talking about Vimisieres in Nahuatl I was translating from Polish to Nahuatl and we had several working groups focusing on documentation of the linguistic culture heritage of different places different committees participating there was a group working on language attitudes on language planning a group working on preparation of teaching materials a group on artistic activities and a group which work on local concepts of well-being and development based in the heritage and we carried out different activities and also field work we will see some of it in the movie the composition of the groups was planned so that there would be at least one or two native speakers or speakers of Nahuatl in each group which could help with translation and also carrying out documentation and interviews with native speakers in Nahuatl there was this cultural event in San Miguel Tenango which is a kind of peripheral community in the mountains speaking the language and it was entirely organized by our former by Jorge Hernandez Marquez who started who actually found us in Mexico City when we were organizing the workshop in the archive and then got interested into promoting his language and also we worked with different organizations in San Francisco and this is the community where maybe one-third of the population migrated to the United States and we had performances by indigenous participants and we tried also to promote reading and the publications in Nahuatl and the last thing we would like to comment about before finishing is our interdactical encounters because this was also the two days of our field school were devoted to interdactical encounter in Nahuatl one of the tools for dividing indigenous people in Mexico is this argument that you have a lot of different variants of these different languages and the variants are mutually unintelligible and this is even supported by a lot of scholars so in 2011 Stephanie Wood from the University of Oregon got a grant from the National Down for the Humanities and we had ideas for working with her and we decided to do this interdialectical encounter we invited speakers of representing approximately 10 different variants of Nahuatl about 20 people and we met for five days and there were only two rules you have to speak in Nahuatl no fighting even if we're talking about orthography so we did and nobody knew what would happen and we were pleasantly surprised to find that everybody understood each other obviously people would hear something and they'd laugh we don't say that, what does this mean I say it like this but everybody understood each other so we had five days of talks on every different topic you can imagine and this is really important too whenever native speakers get together in Mexico normally it's at the behest of an institution a Mexican institution and the topics are in Spanish and the topics are organized previous to the conference so we always organize our topics at the conference when it begins so everybody can talk about what they want to talk about and that's what we did we also had found out earlier that surprise surprise when we have mixed groups of men and women a lot of times the women will defer to the men so we always in our interdialectical encounters we have at least one session where women have their own space to talk and the men are in a different space so anyway we have progressed slowly from completely open topics along the course of these interdialectical encounters that we've had to focusing on specific things you spoke about the activity we had at the Archivo General de la Nación first time indigenous scholars or even indigenous people entered the National Archives in Mexico and the first time they ever actually looked at the documents that were written by their ancestors and analyzed them in their own language and then finally the last room we had at San Miguel Chatipa but no the last yeah at San Miguel Chatipa where it was an academic conference it was a conference and you have these kids when I say kids I'm talking about as young as student teachers who are going to become bilingual educators in Mexico of indigenous languages up through Natalia, how old? 60 something we always have a big spread everybody talking about what they're doing, what are the curriculum development projects for their school book projects they're working on multimedia presentation dictionaries, book presentations everything you can imagine everybody speaking in Nahuatl and they're so happy to be doing this and not only that but to get feedback from their peers and the last step or the next step which we still haven't gotten off the ground is to conduct these virtually so that we don't have to wait a year between each other dialectical encounter okay summing up and we are done yes yes so we have some other thoughts and this field school actually was very intense and I have the feeling that we've been able to get our understanding much deeper of language ideologies, attitudes and local politics in the community especially in San Miguel it's a bit overwhelming and not in the sense of issues that we have not been aware before, language ownership what are local ideas of revitalization actually sometimes to use to post vernacular use of the language and also what we found out which is a challenge for future work is the denial of shift and language death as well as of its reasons but also weakening still present but weakening of attitudes linked to language purism so people who speak or semi speakers are seen as the hope of the future of Nahuatl and the language is safe because we have these people so there's no concern also local competition between communities and internal races and we have a very very very difficult episode of internal races between the communities was very very difficult thing during the field school which also was a huge lesson for all of us and for our sensibility and awareness so the huge challenge that we see for us and other people is creating new role models in the communities where there is no revitalization maintenance and kind of challenging existing ideologies and trends and politics in the communities and one of the ways we can help with this is connecting activists from the Nahuatl world and beyond and creating this community of practice which is actually outside a specific community and what will they will do with that in the communities is kind of beyond us but by creating this community of practice is this kind of support we can provide as external people, as scholars, as academics as activists and this is something that's actually is already happening thank you for your attention and before questions we'll show you a short documentary about the field school and we'll be watching about 40 years ago it was at that time that today people got to know about the program in the U.S. and not only did they talk about it a little bit about the activities and how people have a very important role and they would like us to serve I was a little bit scared, but I was very happy. I was very happy. I was very happy. I have nothing to say, and I am very happy. I was very happy. I was very happy. I was very happy. I was very happy. I met you, and I received this Srila, with a smile... Yes! Driving a bit into the road... how do you work with a chain? How much work do you do? How do you work with a chain? Oh, very good! I will tell you about his technique, I'm a deserter. I'm a deserter. I'm a deserter. I'm a glieler. I'm a deserter. I thought that I thought that the language I'm talking about is known to be the first. But when I went to school I remembered that the teachers could tell me what it is about the future. Education materials. But I'm curious how you are dealing with the issues of tourism or the influence of bilingual language use in these materials. As you said, that you would have the answer to the media Do you have some sort of gatekeeper for that, or how are you trying to keep puristing the notions out of this, or would you complete it out of that? I can talk about purist, but you can talk about motivational materials. I mean, we had to, just a specific example. In our monolingual dictionary of Nawa, a lot of the words are Spanish origin, and we had to decide which ones to include it and which ones to not include. And so it's really, it's not really that difficult, because we apply a series of criteria. For example, are the words that are incorporated, and they're usually all nouns, okay? Can they be compounded or incorporated onto Nawa, you know, verbs and nouns? Can they be inflected? Are they substituted, borrowings? Also. Yes. Yes. And so that's one of the things we do, but basically when we, how can I say this, in the publications that we've done so far, okay, you don't have, we haven't seen a massive amount of substitutive borrowing, like you say. But we have it in our field materials, of course. Yeah, of course. And the idea is that in the case of Nawa, Purins is obviously counterproductive. It actually stops speakers who are stigmatized for their long hours, including older speakers in the community. And we've worked with communities like, for example, Tlacotenko in Estarote, Mexico. It's counterproductive. It's actually hinders from using their language. And we've got into discussions with them, because they came to A.G.N. to the workshop and said, look, you're reading this polluted document. There are plenty of loanwords we speak better now at than these people in the 16th century. But then we visited the community. We had this discussion in Nawa about that. We continued talking to them about that. The idea is that what we want to show, and also as a result, one of the results of the ERC project on language change, five centuries of language change, is that loanwords have been, some loanwords have been in the language right from the first decades of the contact. And they got assimilated and so on. So we don't really, when we publish, we don't make the native speakers get rid of these loanwords. Okay? But also we want to make them aware of the fact that some loanwords are now in the modern state of the language change are substitutive and lead to this extreme code mixing. So when we work with them, and for example, using older texts or some leader texts, they can actually get into touch with this vocabulary, which is vanishing. This lexical resources, which can be reintroduced into the language. John has experimented a lot on creating neologisms for academic purposes, creating from within the language, not Cox from Spanish. So I would say it's complex. So we don't kind of create negative comments for using Spanish loanwords, but we also encourage native speakers to experiment with the new words or getting to all the resources, how they can be, how they can be explored and used in modern variants of the language. So there's no easy solution in one recipe here, right? I'd like to say one more thing. Since we do work simultaneously with older and modern now, it has been very easy to see. And again, this is really important for linguistics. Because if you only focus on one variant in time, there's a lot of things you're not going to be able to understand because you don't know where they came from. And vice versa, if you're looking at the past, you may not understand how something works unless you've seen how it develops, even internally in the language over time. But for example, there are a lot of structural changes that have been going on and now over the last 450 years, OK? The majority of them today are still at a point of transition, OK? So you can work with native speakers and you can say, OK, you guys are doing this. But how would your grandparents have said it? Oh, they say this, OK. So that's how it was originally. This is how it's been transformed because of the contact with Spanish. And we want people to understand how their language works and how it's developed. We don't want to tell them what to do. And also, people who are engaged in field work, for example, who are semi-speakers, who are passive speakers. We have some collaborators who are passive speakers, understand perfectly different variants, but we're not able to speak, started to speak. And when they were sharing this experience with us, OK? So we translated, transcribed and translated this and this and that from different regions. Oh, we learn so much in terms of vocabulary, in terms. It's so useful. And so there are different, different, different ways. But one of the things we wanted students to make aware, students of Indigenous students, that there are certain borrowings which are substitutive borrowings, actually. And there are lexical resources they can resort to. And dictionary is very helpful in this respect, actually, to avoid too much substitutive borrowing in the language. But no policy, like extract policy and electric. I want to say one more thing real quickly about the importance. Real quickly is the word. Go ahead, Pio. Go ahead. Can I ask you a nasty question? Of course. If you have to. What you shared with us is wonderful. And the result of 20 years of commitment. My case is not 20 years, but thank you. In John's case, whatever it is, 10 to 20 years of engagement and involvement. And with very interesting and very powerful results. In the modern university situation, for the students who are here, you can't get funding for projects that go for 20 years. You can get short-term money. You work a project for two, three, four years, and then you're supposed to move on, do something else, do another project, do whatever. How can you sustain this kind of activity in that sort of environment? This is what we've been struggling with. So our activities are not shaped by the framework of funding. But we shape the framework of funding. We negotiate the framework of funding so that we can. So imagine having Enqum, which is for capacity building of us in Warsaw. But we've been using this also for our learning from the minorities and experience of different activists and communities, but also getting the opportunity of the communities to learn something. So I think it's having this flexible and open mind, a flexible attitude toward negotiating the conditions of your work, I think, and funding. And then it turns out it is flexible. If you start to negotiate it, you can use the resources you have to do what you want, after all. So this has been my idea behind it. And there were so many different projects. But in each of the projects, even project for the development of the National Heritage in Poland, I've been able to include now. OK. And this was the first project focusing on revitalization. And we included VimySeries. This is how I got into touch with VimySeries and Wemko. But you know, why I did it was kind of opportunistic in a way, because I wanted to find money for now. So I started to look for, I wasn't interested really in Polish minorities. I got interested after that. But I needed some Polish groups to step in in order so that I could get funding for now. Because there was funding available. And maybe it was not very noble approach. But in the end, I gained a lot because I really got involved into Polish reality. And I realized that there is so much to be done. And it's not so much different from what's going on in Mexico. So we are all learning all the time. Why do you think we founded Edius in the first place? How do you get around funding restrictions that are also tied to political commitments as a part of the system? And how do you get around the structure of academia, which a lot of times you don't really have academic freedom? That's why we founded Edius in the first place. The idea was to have a nonprofit very close to the university, which would allow us a space where we could decide what we want to do, how we consider it to be done correctly, and generate independent funding. And that's what we've been doing. I understand exactly what you're saying. And it's really difficult. It's really difficult. But I mean, in the last instance, what do you got to do? You've got to take up your hammer, and you've got to start whacking away at the wall. You'll get someplace, and it's going to be hard. And most people are not going to want to do it, because it's too difficult. And the practical solution that actually I don't implement it, because you have students who have to write their PhD dissertation. They give three, four, maximum five years. Two and a half years in Mexico. Yeah. But, for example, in the United States. And so the expectation is they should learn the language, learn in the language with the communities. How can they do it? In the case of Nawa, thanks to the program that was organized by EDS, this intensive summer course, they actually can start communicating after the first course. And they continue with classes online. So basically, students in the United States, and everybody who wants to take the course in one year, can speak Nawa, and can go to the community and do fieldwork, and can collaborate with native speakers. So EDS has created this infrastructure, academic infrastructure. If someone really wants to do the fieldwork, wants to work in the language, in one year, he can speak the language. So this can also be done with other languages, not just for Nawa. Can I give one example real quick? Do we have any time at all? No. Yes, we do. It's 1655. OK, OK, all right. Whatever you need to show, you show it in the pub. In the pub, yeah, OK, good. Thank you very much, everyone.