Nuxawis: 'Unwilling to Give Up' (Redefining Our Record: Chumash Inquiry in Smithsonian Archives)

Indigenous people of the world fight to maintain our lifeways, culture, and more specifically our languages. Speakers have endured waves of violence and persecution and in the face of that still fought to preserve and bring back languages. Language loss has been observed by communities and linguists and each figures out ways to document and promote language use. This dissertation examines the process of creating community materials for language revitalization from archival written documents. It relies on existing methods from multiple disciplines to inform the creation of materials that suit the interests of people trying to learn a heritage language, in this case, Chumash, the heritage language of the author of this study. Relying on Chumash cultural traditions and blending them with feminist and anarchist practices, the process of accessing materials, analyzing them, storing them, and sharing them out into the speech community is looked at for one sample size of Chumash narrative texts. From there, the ethnographic collection was also accessed and documented for the craft community, to blend language and cultural materials to create an exciting and attractive curriculum but also to share the knowledge both in the stories and the creative cultural arts, in this case mostly baskets, beads, and digging sticks. All of this was done within a revitalization context, with no institutional support from public schools, or tribal schools to address the loss of Chumash language. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]