dumbfoundry

A New Mexico anthropologist is drumming up support for a festival that highlights authors who write in their Native language.

Gordon Bronitsky says he got the idea from working with Navajo writer Rex Jim. Bronitsky runs the New Mexico-based Bronitsky and Associates, a firm that specializes in assisting American Indians conduct business overseas. He once helped Jim, a poet, host a reading in Ireland.

“ He opened my eyes to the fact that Native writers have something to say,” Bronitsky said.

According to the Summer Institute of Linguistics, there are 6800 languages and hundreds of them are considered “endangered,” meaning that parents are no longer teaching the language to their children and are not using it actively in everyday matters.

Bronitsky is organizing a festival, slated to take place in July of 2005, bringing together Native writers from all over the world. Writers who have signed up include speakers of Lakota, Chippewa/Ojibwe Choctaw, Navajo and Laguna Pueblo, in addition to a host of authors from Canada and as far away as Peru, Brazil and Greenland.

The idea is to give the writers a showcase, and help them earn a living in the process.

This entry was posted by eeksypeeksy on Thursday, March 18, 2004 at 8:57 AM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.