Conference: North American Indian Sign Language Conference

While a revival of spoken Indigenous languages is underway, this revival is incomplete without parallel investment in North American Indian Sign Language (NAISL). NAISL, also known as Indian Sign Language or Hand Talk, comprises interrelated varieties of sign language spoken by Deaf and hearing Indigenous Peoples of North America. This award supports a community-led conference on NAISL that serves as a venue for presentations, dialogues, practical workshops, and NAISL documentation.

This structure enhances the value of the conference in that it disseminates existing research, resources, and methodologies while also collecting valuable new NAISL data that are at risk of being lost.

Hosting a conference on NAISL helps to focus attention on its importance and fosters a community of support, working relationships, and increased investments of time and effort in the documentation, preservation, and study of NAISL. This helps to stimulate new projects and research as well as efforts to revitalize NAISL in communities. Signers in attendance are invited to contribute signs to an ongoing NAISL video dictionary project directed by the conference organizers.

This takes place in the context of practical workshops where signers are recorded by the dictionary project leaders, providing attendees with training on how to conduct sign language documentation in their own communities. This award is made as part of a funding partnership between the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities for the NSF Dynamic Language Infrastructure – NEH Documenting Endangered Languages Program.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.