Lily Gladstone's Acceptance Speech Shows Why We Need to Save Endangered Languages

In December of 2022, British contemporary artist Es Devlin installed a public sculpture in concert with the Endangered Language Alliance, “Your Voices,” outside of New York’s Lincoln Center. The work responds to anthropologist Wade Davis’s observation: “Every language is an old growth forest of the mind, a watershed of thought, an entire ecosystem ... See more

Many people knew this before, but the last three years have hammered home the fact that we cannot protect things that we don’t empathize with. If we don’t care about the value of other lives, whether human or animal, then we won’t be motivated to protect those lives.

Dr. Stibbe’s book, The Stories We Live By, and free online course are full of real-life examples: of economics textbooks that describe people as “consumers” who are driven by an insatiable need to buy; the government documents that position cows and horses as “units” as though they are as lifeless as a kitchen cupboard; and the United Nations’ Sust

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It kind of romanticizes the Indigenous, and this is why, you know, sometimes I find that in the recent upheavals and desire to center Indigenous realities, there is a romanticization of those Indigenous technologies that kind of instrumentalized them for modern anxieties, like, grabs them by the scruff of their necks and says, “here's climate chang... See more