CELCE Event: "Ethnobiological Calendars as Tools in Indigenous Language Revitalization"

Описание: Talk by Prof David Stringer of Indiana University on 4 November 2025. Hybrid recording.

The transmission of Traditional Ecological Knowledge to new generations of Indigenous youth is a matter of urgency for many communities, especially when it bears on issues of sustenance, medicine, or spiritual relations with other species. While the revitalization of traditional calendars is considered as high priority by ethnobiologists and Indigenous scholars in recent cultural reclamation work (e.g. Balick et al., 2023; Chmura et al., 2022), practical solutions for children in bilingual classrooms have remained elusive. Such efforts are intimately bound up with language reclamation, as biocultural knowledge is linguistically encoded (Harrison, 2023). For example, in the Pacific Northwest, Squamish communities know that the Swainson's thrush, or Xwet (salmonberry bird), heralds the ripening of salmonberries; and in Southern Ethiopia, Mursi people known that when Alpha Centauri, or Sholbi (Acacia star), sets at dusk, and the receding floodwaters are filled Acacia petals, it is time to plant black-eyed peas by the Omo River. Knowledge of calendar species is also encoded in stories, prayers and songs: Wayampi people sing of how the singing of the tarutaru bird and the appearance of the Pleiades constellation guide the planting and harvesting of sweet potatoes. This paper draws on research in lexical semantics (Stringer, 2024), phenology (Turner & Reed, 2022), and critical pedagogy (Rogoff, 2003) to analyze an innovative type of bilingual visual aid, co-developed by Traditional Owners and CSIRO in Australia (reproduced here with permission), and argues that while any individual calendar is regional in scope and respects local knowledge rights, the template itself, with its wheels-within-wheels design, (i) can be adapted to any language in any ecosystem; (ii) allows for education to follow meaningful annual cycles; (iii) can be used as a guide to relate the classroom to outdoor education; and (iv) can be easily adjusted to accommodate ongoing effects of climate change.