Wednesday, July 18 - Crow RWC Workshop - Day 3

[NOTE: I have internet access only during the workday, and I’m kept quite busy during that time, so it’s rather challenging to find time to post to this blog. That’s why my entries are delayed. My apologies for that, but I’ll do my best to keep you updated.]

We’re doing this workshop at the invitation of The Language Conservancy (TLC), a non-profit organization that helps Native American groups to breathe life back into their language if it appears to be dying out because the children are no longer learning it from their parents. This is the same organization that Anita and I helped last year in New Mexico.

On Wednesday, the TLC director asked me to make the trip to Pryor (an hour in each direction) to help the groups working there to improve their productivity. Originally, it seemed that there was limited interest among the Crow community around Pryor, so there were only two word-collection groups there on Tuesday when we first met in that location. The actual turnout was significantly higher than expected, however, so the TLC director decided to add a third group on Wednesday, when he sent me. Traveling with me were two TLC linguists and Steve Echerd, a colleague who works with SIL’s Americas North branch and who is shadowing me at this workshop in order to be able to facilitate future workshops by himself.

After the morning status report and pep talk, which were my responsibility, I took care of a few administrative details and then spent most of the remainder of the day sitting in as an observer (making an occasional comment) with the group that had gotten off to a weak start the previous day, helping them to understand how best to work with the materials in the time allotted for this workshop. I had been asked by the TLC director to do the record-keeping as well, but that proved to be more than I was able to handle if I was to be the near-constant presence that the word-collection group needed. So I was glad that Steve had come along with me to Pryor, as he was able to monitor the other two groups on an intermittent basis and take care of the record-keeping.

The word collection seemed to progress slowly, with only a few of the 126 folders we hope to get through during the workshop being completed. However, when we tallied up the results in the evening, we discovered that the number of words being collected was more than adequate, bringing our total for the three days to 3,680.