About the Film
From the scribe.org website: Heenetiineyoo3eihiiho’ (Language Healers) (2014, 40 min) tells the story of Native Peoples fighting to revitalize their languages.
From Alaska to Oklahoma and Wisconsin to Montana, we witness stories about the importance of saving Native languages and meet some of the people who are working hard to heal these national treasures. We learn about the importance of Native languages and cultures in Alaska from a Yup’ik dog musher and then from a Tlingit carver of wood and metal. The film then takes us to a school in Wisconsin where we hear the story of a seventh grade girl who was recently punished for speaking a few words of the Menominee language. We learn more about the fight against language loss through visiting a Euchee (Yuchi) immersion school in Oklahoma where only four fluent elder speakers remain. Finally, we travel to Montana where an inventive professor has been perfecting a method to quickly save these disappearing national treasures.
View the Trailer
Visit the film’s page on Facebook
A segment with David Harrison from the Living Tongues Institute
Linguist, Author, and National Geographic Fellow Dr. K. David Harrison surveys some of the ways technology is being used to maintain Native languages. Learn more about Dr. Harrison’s organization, The Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages.
Upcoming Screening
If you happen to live near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, you can catch a screening of the film at the Scribe Video Center on March 21, 2014. The film’s director, Brian McDermott, will be there in person.