Indigenous Peoples the world over are seeking to hold on or reconnect to their oral traditions, in order to maintain or rebuild their identities, their sense of place, and their ability to forge their own destiny and “walk to the future in the footprints of their ancestors”. There is a lot everyone can learn, or re-learn, from the wisdom of indigenous oral traditions. That is why Terralingua is at work to ensure that these traditions are not further depleted and that the living chorus of Voices of the Earth can still be heard loud and clear. In the initial stages of the Voices of the Earth project, we are partnering with two Canadian First Nations, the Saanich (W̱SÁNEĆ) People of Coastal British Columbia (BC) and the Chilcotin (Tsilhqot’in) People of the BC Interior. We are providing small start-up grants to enable them to develop their own oral literature documentation projects. The resulting materials will contribute to their language and culture revitalization programs, educational curriculum, reconnection to the land and ancestral ways of life, and affirmation of their identity and rights.
Article: Policy Matters, Issue 17. Policy for Biocultural Diversity: Where are we now? by Luisa Maffi. A brief history of the work that has been done to implement BCD into policy over the past 15 years. “It is arguably critical for advocates of biocultural diversity to continue to rise to the challenge and strive for concrete steps forward at the international and national levels that can, in turn, support and be influenced by local initiatives for biocultural diversity conservation.”
Language Diversity Index Tracks Global Loss of Mother Tongues. David Braun of National Geographic News Watch interviewed Maffi, David Harmon, and Jonathan Loh about the Index of Linguistic Diversity. “For the past several years, we had been hearing anecdotal reports about endangered languages–how we’re losing languages by the day, how we may lose 50-90 percent of languages before the end of the century. But nobody had any reliable quantitative data to corroborate these claims,” says Luisa Maffi, co-founder and director of Terralingua. “But now a new Index of Linguistic Diversity (ILD), the first of its kind, shows quantitatively, for the first time, what’s really happening with the world’s languages.”
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