Taking to the Airwaves A key takeaway of the conference was that
‘getting young people involved in learning language and getting them involved in radio go together.’
to people in other communities facing the same challenge that they faced 40 years ago,” Camp said. Mason added: “That takeaway was enormous for us, and for the participants — getting young people involved in learning language and getting them involved in radio go together.” On the opposite end of the spectrum
are countries like Guatemala, where native groups face many obstacles to making their voices heard. “There is active government intervention with native people using radio to share lan- guage and culture,” Mason said. “There are raids, and people get detained.” Juxtapositioning the experiences
of different communities around the world helped emphasize how a well- funded revitalization effort — often supported in some way by the govern- ment — is vital to preserving a language. “That insight,” Mason said, “was fresh for everybody.”
FUTURE VOICES Neither Camp nor Mason can say for certain if there will be another event like Our Voices on the Air next year. Among other things, they’re debating whether to combine forces with larger, more international indigenous-radio conferences. “It might be every year,” Camp said. “It might even be more often in a regional setting and then
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every other year in a larger and interna- tional setting.” While this year’s meeting worked to
bridge language gaps globally, organiz- ers had to overcome some communica- tion barriers of their own. “The people there spoke 30 different languages, but the working languages for the conference were English and Spanish,” Camp said, “so we recruited a bunch of bilingual English/Spanish-speaking volunteers to act as interpreters.” The conference allowed its radio-
professional attendees to do what they do best: collect and distribute information. “The producers took a lot of interviews with each other,” Camp said, “and then turned them into radio programs broadcast at their stations back home.” That helped expand the reach to corners of the world that otherwise might be unreachable due to linguistic barriers. “There were people from all over —
New Zealand, Hawaii, Oklahoma, Peru, Ontario — who were all independently saying, ‘We’ve got to keep in touch and build a network,’” Camp said. “‘We’ve got so much to learn from each other that this conference just can’t be a standalone event.’”
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Sarah Beauchamp is an assistant editor of Convene.
Our Voices on the Air: Reaching New Audiences Through Indigenous Radio itself might be the beginning of a recurring radio program. “We had a goal of scouting stories for a radio program that we want to make to teach the public about language endangerment and what is lost when a language goes silent,” said the Smithsonian Institution’s Michael Mason. “The conference was a great way to get to know a bunch of communities and people who could be major voices in the stories that we want to tell to the broader American public.”
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ON THE WEB To learn more about Our Voices on the Air, visit culturalsurvival .org/our-voices-on-the-air.
ILLUSTRATION BY BECI ORPIN / THE JACKY WINTER GROUP