This is the second update about our project, a beneficiary of the micro-grants for indigenous language digital activism [1]. The grantees who are part of this initiative will write articles highlighting their progress.
CACAOPERA – Representatives of the Kakawira Indigenous People in El Salvador successfully completed the audio recording sessions for the creation of a digital “booklet” in the Pisbi language as part of the project to revitalize their language.
The project, which is funded by the Rising Voices organization, involved members of all ages from the Winaka organization, who seek to strengthen their identity and ancestral heritage through their language, and who participated in training workshops on principles of communication, basic exercises of vocalization and management of digital tools, using materials donated by Rising Voices for the development of the project.
During the audio recording sessions, the indigenous Kakawira participants prepared scripted dialogues in Pisbi with translation in Spanish. The lessons include basic greetings, words related to worldview, numbers and colors, among others.
The digital booklets were prepared based on the Pistaka Kirika Guina [2] collection made by the Cacaopera Community and coordinated by Tata Miguel Amaya and by researchers Consuelo Roque and Antonio Echeverria at the University of El Salvador [3].
The Salvadoran National Coordinating Indigenous Council [4] (CCNIS), which develops the project, considers that with the disappearance of unwritten and undocumented languages, humanity would not only lose a great cultural richness, but also ancestral knowledge contained, in particular, in the indigenous languages.