Prefigurative Community Building (Part 30)

Restoring Our Tongues: A Power With Guide to Decolonial Language Revitalization

Languages are not just tools for communication, they’re ecosystems of meaning, containers of memory, and maps of the world. When a language is lost, it’s not only vocabulary that disappears, it’s stories, jokes, kinship, prayer, and the rhythm of community life. Colonialism sought to silence Indigenous and ancestral tongues by severing them from daily use. But communities are reclaiming their words, not as heritage artifacts, but as living, breathing acts of resistance and reconnection.

Language revitalization cannot be commanded from above. It cannot be standardized and scaled like a curriculum. It thrives in collective spaces, through shared breath, care, repetition, and joy. This makes it the perfect site for Power With coordination: the kind of mutual effort that distributes leadership, respects lived experience, and avoids domination.

The guide below walks you through starting a decolonial language revitalization project from the ground up, with tools that help you avoid replicating forms of Power Over, and instead foster collective ownership, dignity, and belonging.

Step-by-Step Guide to Launching a Power With Language Revitalization Project

Step 1: Start with Listening and Relationship

Before launching any project, listen. Sit with elders, heritage speakers, cultural workers, and youth. Ask: What role does this language still play? Where is it spoken, remembered, dreamed of? Begin in the kitchen, not the classroom.

If elders are present, support them in leading. If they’re absent, co-create with peers and texts, but always in a spirit of recovery and humility.

Helpful Resources:

• Decolonizing Language Revitalization by Lindsay Morcom (video)

• First Peoples’ Cultural Council (toolkits, guides)

• Our Mother Tongues (interactive resource)

Step 2: Form a Circle, Not a Hierarchy

Invite a group to gather regularly to learn, practice, and reflect together. Don’t select a “teacher” unless someone wants to share. Instead, treat the group as a language learning circle, everyone brings something, whether pronunciation, knowledge, or patience.

If you're creating signs, translations, or texts, do it together. Use consensus and shared authorship. Value different fluencies.

Helpful Models:

• Language Nests (Te Kōhanga Reo model, NZ)

• Language Reclamation Handbook (Gabriela Pérez Báez, UNM)

Step 3: Create Communal Learning Materials

Instead of waiting for perfect textbooks or apps, start building together: flashcards, signs, dialogue scripts, labels in your homes or schools. Use reclaimed signage in shared spaces as both tool and declaration: This is a living language.

Make materials open-source and remixable. Share them back with other groups.

Helpful Tools:

• Lingua Libre (Wikimedia voice recording tool)

• Dictionary Apps for Language Revitalization (Developed by FirstVoices)

• Indigenous Language Digital Archive (free software)

Step 4: Host Public Celebration Events

Language gains strength in public space. Hold “language open mic nights,” song circles, food gatherings, or signage walks. Showcase the work as a community achievement, not a performance. Invite other generations to witness, contribute, and support.

Helpful Event Inspiration:

• Language Reclamation Songbook Toolkit (Wikitongues)

• Revitalization Through the Arts: Native Youth Language Projects

Step 5: Share Power, Acknowledge Trauma

Many will carry grief, shame, or anxiety about reclaiming their language. Be gentle with yourself and each other. Normalize forgetting and remembering. Create rituals for loss and reawakening.

Never shame someone's pronunciation or grammar. Center encouragement, laughter, and vulnerability.

Helpful Guidance:

• “Language and Spirit” Workbook (NILA)

• Decolonizing Language Work zine (Allied Media Projects)

Step 6: Remain Horizontal, Stay Local, Share Widely

Don’t centralize. Let many groups form their own circles. Instead of scaling up, replicate the model in other neighborhoods, families, or collectives. Offer mutual aid between groups, share materials, co-teach, listen to each other's audio recordings, but don’t impose structure.

Helpful Platforms:

• Wikitongues (global language archive and peer-to-peer learning)

• Native Language Network (grassroots peer support)

Examples of Existing Power With Language Revitalization Projects

1. Idle No More’s Language Camps (Canada)

These grassroots camps connect youth and elders through immersion, story, and ceremony. There's no rigid curriculum, just shared space, cooking, laughing, and living in the language together. Materials are created on-site and shared freely.

https://www.idlenomore.ca/

2. Zapotec Language Collectives (Oaxaca, Mexico)

In the Sierra Juárez and Isthmus regions, community members have formed translation circles, storytelling zines, and local signage projects. Rather than waiting for government curricula, they reclaim words in daily life: street names, songs, and WhatsApp groups.

Watch the short doc: “Nuestro Idioma es Resistencia” (Our Language is Resistance)

Conclusion: Language Revitalization is Collective Return

Revitalizing language is not about saving words from extinction, it’s about saving ourselves from silence. When we speak ancestral or Indigenous languages together, we repair time. We make room for identity to expand, for grief to metabolize, and for belonging to return.

Power With coordination lets language work be gentle, joyful, and relational. It resists the extractive academic impulse and centers community, consent, and creativity. And it proves that no language is dead if there are still people willing to whisper it, sing it, and love it into being again.

Let the words come home. Let them bloom from our mouths like seeds in spring.