Breathing new life into language.

I came to this as a student at Miami University, through the Myaamia Heritage Award Program for citizens of the Miami Tribe. I fell in love with an idea that has shaped everything since: that nothing ever really dies, and that through conscious action, holistic reflection, and community-based inclusion, real change isn't just aspired to, it's achieved, on a global scale.

Soon after, I interned with the Miami Tribe, working through archival manuscripts and building the first storymaps of culturally and historically significant sites. That data fed GIS mapping for the community, and the beginnings of an interactive education site where members could learn their own history through both a storytelling frame and a historical record.

I didn't know it yet, but turning archives into something people could navigate and understand was the groundwork for my UX career.

The comparative method that rebuilt myaamiaataweenki is the same one I used in my own Myaamia and Ojibwe allophone study, listening across related languages to reconstruct the sounds, and the systems beneath them, from fragments.

During my NSF research fellowship in Oregon, I became a seasoned user of the Indigenous Languages Digital Archive (ILDA) and the online dictionary it powers, the same kind of system at the heart of myaamiaataweenki's revitalization. The software was being extended and redesigned for the communities I worked with, and the stakeholders cared deeply about one question: how could the technology itself protect the knowledge and the security of their community? Every piece of work I did was treated as something to be safeguarded.

It was the first time I encountered community-based data protection and technology security through the lens of preservation and survivance. It is, directly, why I think about data the way I do now, working in AI.

This isn't abstract heritage for me. It's a living practice of recovering meaning from incomplete records, which, it turns out, is most of what research actually is.

I have tried my hand at this directly. The documentary I worked on, Seven Generations Forward, uses myaamiaataweenki in every facet, its music, its descriptions, its interviews, even its credits, where the trees and plants are named too.

More than that, it carries an Indigenous perspective that language is not neutral. It is a living thing that reflects the lives of the people who use it, the things it names, and the way the world is perceived through a cultural lens.

The documentary was about climate change. But it was really an experiment in how to convey that perspective to a Western audience, a concept I am still trying to communicate today.

This is the story I carried with me across Ireland. During field studies and surveys, many of the people I met told me Gaelic was dying, too few speakers, too little motivation to preserve it.

But when I sat with the language institutes, there was still a blazing flame being kept alive. I can't tell you whether my story produced quantifiable results, whether it deepened anyone's resolve to preserve their own language. But it felt significant, especially now, in an era when the meaning of data itself is being debated in the AI world.