By learning how to swim against the current like salmon do, a woman finds her way back to the source of her language and identity. Daniela Boccassini . As our times’ bewildered becoming keeps unfolding, two simple words from a French medieval poem have accompanied me every step of the way: contreval l’iaue. They sank

WORDS Abraham Ofori-Henaku IMAGES Abotchiethephotographer . It’s been quite a long journey growing up in a society that very much holds on to its rich way of life — something that I always took for granted. And now, it’s all coming back to me in regret. Oh! Pardon me! Where are my manners? Hi there! I’m Abraham

Faith Baisden, Thomas Dick, Carolyn Barker, and Kristina Kelman . . For tens of thousands of years, the rich and beautiful sounds of hundreds of different languages washed across Australia. Over all of the continent it is believed there were more than five hundred languages at one time. Around two hundred years ago, a new

This page complements the photo essay “Yamani: Voices of an Ancient Land,” which presents a unique musical project by the same name, developed by six extraordinary Australian Indigenous women. They came together to support the revitalization of Aboriginal languages and the strengthening of Indigenous identity by creating, singing, and recording songs in their six different

WORDS Manju Maharjan and Yuvash Vaidya IMAGES Sheetal Vaidya and Shashank Shrestha We are Newahs, the Indigenous people of the Kathmandu Valley in Nepal. We are worshippers in the Hindu and Buddhist traditions and belong to several different ethnic groups, but historically we all spoke a common language, Nepalbhasa. While the language is prevalent among

WORDS AND IMAGES Severn Cullis-Suzuki The Haida people know the cost of disease. They have lived on Haida Gwaii, an archipelago off the west coast of Canada, for the past 14,000 years. In their recent history, after the first encounter with Europeans in 1774, waves of smallpox, measles, and other contact diseases ravaged the Haida

Maya Daurio, Sienna R. Craig, Daniel Kaufman, Ross Perlin, and Mark Turin Maps have long been used for a variety of purposes, including to characterize land use and land cover patterns or to delineate the extent of territorial jurisdictions such as national or regional borders. In this way, cartography has long been a tool of

WORDS AND MAPS Jordan Engel “More indigenous territory has been claimed by maps than by guns. This assertion has its corollary: more indigenous territory can be defended and reclaimed by maps than by guns.” —Bernard Nietschmann, geographer Throughout time and across cultures, the thing that is often most important to a people is land. While

WORDS Ilarion (Larry) Merculieff and Libby Roderick IMAGES Paul Melovidov and Barbara Lestenkof Contrary to most people in modern societies who see words simply as vehicles for conveying information or expressing thoughts and feelings, people in traditional Indigenous societies view words as entities that carry great power; therefore, they must be chosen and used with

WORDS AND IMAGES K. B. Wilson In his essay “Biocultural Diversity: Reason, Ethics, and Emotion” (this issue of Langscape), David Harmon traces the emergence of the field of biocultural diversity as a call for an engagement with the beautifully rich complexity of life. In my own take on biocultural diversity, I ponder the rise of