Meet Naomi Biesanz
When National Breath of Life started its apprenticeship program, the Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw Indians language team offered Naomi Biesanz the apprenticeship position on its team.
Naomi, a member of the Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw Indians, descended from the Hanis Coos people, has been involved with the Tribe’s language program for about three years.
She was studying linguistics at Portland State University when she first learned about “endangered” languages. When Naomi looked into her own community’s language use, she was surprised to find it wasn’t actively being used.
“It’s a hard feeling to describe,” Naomi said. “It’s like we don’t have something that we’re supposed to have.”
Naomi explained feeling a sense of loss like a piece of her personal and cultural identity was missing and she wanted to do something about it.
“It’s not like I learned the languages were dormant and suddenly made it my life’s mission to bring them back,” Naomi said. “I didn’t even know we [the Tribe] had a language program at that point, but it was something that was always in the back of my mind.”
After getting her bachelor’s degree from Portland State, Naomi spent time working as an English teacher in South Korea before moving back to the U.S.
After moving back, Naomi found a personal interest in learning her heritage language and stumbled upon the community’s language program while looking for resources.
“Once I felt this drive to learn the language, I started to think about what makes a language living,” Naomi said. “I wanted to make sure I had a community to use this with, so I was really excited to learn about the language program and people involved with it.”
In 2020, Naomi became one of the first members of the Tribe’s language committee and began forming deeper relationships with the Tribal linguists in the community.
This new involvement with the language program gave her a deeper understanding of the work within the Tribe’s language program. Engaging with this work meant a lot to Naomi as she wanted to learn the language and ensure the rest of the community could use it, too.
“There’s a lot of wheels spinning at the same time,” Naomi said. “Being a confederated tribe means the community has multiple distinct languages and we have to find the people and content to teach the community these distinct languages.”
Language revitalization efforts as a confederated tribe are unique from other communities engaged in this work. The language team is researching multiple distinct languages with each language requiring its own classes and teachers for the community.
Naomi hopes that through this apprentice work, she will gain enough confidence in her language use to eventually teach community classes.
“As we start to expand our language program I’d love to get involved with teaching language again,” Naomi said.
As an apprentice, Naomi is able to engage with exciting archival language research every day. Working under community mentors, Naomi mainly transcribes notes and builds up the community’s language database.
The Tribe’s team hopes this work will provide more language content to be used throughout the community and encourage people to engage in language classes and programming.
Keep an eye on future blog posts to learn more about the language teams engaging with National Breath of Life.
Edited: 08/21/24
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