On the Impact of the National Breath of Life Archival Institute for Indigenous Languages: Developing an Assessment Model for Archive-Based Revitalization

The National Breath of Life Archival Institute for Indigenous Languages has provided training in archive-based linguistic research for revitalization since 2011 (Baldwin et al. 2018). Four two-week workshops held biennially through 2017 provided training in phonetics, phonology, morphology, and syntax; on accessing archival documentation; and on applied uses of archive-based research for language revitalization. These workshops served 117 Community Researchers from fifty-five Native North American communities. Overtime, it became important to determine the impact of the workshops on community efforts. Thus, a third-party program assessment and evaluation was carried out, supported by the National Science Foundation Documenting Endangered Languages program (NSF-DEL BCS #1561167, PI D. Baldwin). In this paper, we outline the principles upon which the assessment and evaluation were designed, delve into the quantitative and qualitative methods implemented, and provide ample discussion of the assessment findings. We engage in a discussion on the importance and value of assessment and evaluation to any program akin to National Breath of Life. We close by showing how the assessment and evaluation have given validity to the development of new tools and workshops that address the needs of advanced phases of archive-based research for revitalization, and have also provided a foundation for the design of a Native American philology model. This was especially important considering that the workshops had remained mostly unchanged since they were first developed in the mid-1990s.