Arizona | Homahota Consulting LLC

Mar 11

Making Our Future: TechShop Partners with ASU Formalizing the Maker Movement in Arizona

Have you heard the term “Maker Movement?” According to Techopedia, “The maker movement is a trend in which individuals or groups of individuals create and market products that are recreated and assembled using unused, discarded or broken electronic, plastic, silicon or virtually any raw material and/or product from a computer-related device.” It’s kind of a more formalized name for the folks who have been part of the do-it-yourself or DYI lifestyle or ethic in a mash-up with technology.

Celebrate Indian Market Weekend in Phoenix, Arizona

Out west, where the drought reigns supreme and our days are already in the 80s, it’s Heard Indian Market Weekend. The crown jewel is the Heard Museum Guild Fair and Market, but there are five other great openings orbiting around this event. It’s going to be a busy weekend and guess what, our drought is going to end; we’re supposed to get an inch of rain during market weekend! Please come out and support Native arts despite any inclement weather.

One Chickasaw Citizen’s View on the Passing of the Last Monolingual Speaker of the Chickasaw Language

“…For her, she saw the world from a Chickasaw worldview, without the interference of English at all.”

—Josh Hinson, Director of the Chickasaw Language Revitalization Program

(From the recent NPR article “What Happens When a Language’s Last Monolingual Speaker Dies”)

–She was the last person who knew the world only through Chickasaw.

I am not good at languages. I tried as an undergraduate to learn Spanish. I took an entire year of daily Spanish language classes and worked with a tutor the entire time and I was unable to learn more than a few simple phrases, not even enough to get me by living in the border state of Arizona. What I did learn was that I didn’t even know English grammar well enough to think about another language and its use of grammar.

However, I have to say, I’ve been hit hard by the news of the recent death of Emily Johnson Dickerson, the last monolingual speaker of the Chickasaw language. I did not know her, but she is symbolic and represents the passing of an age. Last year, I spent some time at the Chickasaw Nation and I learned that there were only about 70 some speakers of Chickasaw. At the time this alarmed me. But, late last week we learned that the last person who had only a Chickasaw worldview had died. Well, this –to me—is staggering. According to Chickasaw elder Catherine Wilmond, if we lose our language, the world will end (see her talk about this here).