Digital Archive of the Indigenous Languages of the Amazon / Archivo Digital de las Lenguas Indígenas de la Amazonia (ARDILIA)

Amazonian peoples have rich oral traditions. This project focuses on collections of verbal art (chants, narratives, ceremonial discourses) from three peoples of the Colombian Amazon. They contain a rich lore recorded from 1975 to 2006 mostly by Indigenous peoples themselves, and many from deceased elders. These recordings are vital for younger generations interested in linguistic and cultural revitalization. The material (cassettes) are stored in precarious conditions, subject to deterioration and loss. The three languages are endangered, and this knowledge is rapidly disappearing as these peoples have been affected and displaced from their territories by the armed internal conflict in Colombia. We aim to digitize and document two collections of cassette recordings of the Magütá (Tikuna) (130 cassettes) and Miraña (42 cassettes) peoples, and redigitize and document 83 narratives of the Murui people. The work will be carried out by a team composed by a Magütá teacher and leader (first PhD of the Amazonia Campus of Universidad Nacional de Colombia), a Miraña activist and researcher (both directly involved in the collections of the two peoples), an anthropologist, with experience in language documentation and collector of the Murui collection, and a PhD student with previous experience in digitizing and archiving language and culture materials. This project is a first step in a larger objective of establishing a Digital Archive of Amazonian languages, which aims to make available to researchers and younger Indigenous generations a well-documented and publicly accessible repository of language materials to empower ongoing processes of cultural and linguistic revitalization.