[Speaking Takelma] Hello.

My name is Elizabeth Bryant.

I am a Cow Creek tribal member.

I'm from Roseburg, Oregon and I am the Takelma language teacher learner.

Takelma is, the language that's spoken by the Cow Creek tribe.

We are reviving the Takelma language because it was our historic ancestral language.

The last known speaker of the language was Frances Johnson.

She lived on the Siletz reservation and she passed away in the 1940s.

That's when we can estimate that the language went to sleep.

To learn the language, we definitely had to, do a lot of work with Edward Sapir's documentation.

Some writings he did about the grammar, and he recorded some vocabulary and some stories.

There's 10, wax cylinder recordings of Francis Johnson speaking.

Using those and working with a linguist, we were able to make a dictionary.

It's you can't really get to a point of fluency with no one else to talk to which is where we're at where we just need to build that base of people who are able to speak so that we can all be considered fluent.

[Teaching Takelma] Their goal is to be conversational speakers.

Another goal is just putting that language in those households and having people also be able to build that language community within their own home.

We sent out our books to every library in Oregon this last summer.

More of that advocacy work about Takelma is huge for us.