Mark Turin, Claire Wheeler and Eleanor Wilkinson

“ Because indigenous peoples do not have monuments or sites of the same sort as those found in cities and archeological complexes, their material cultures, let alone other less “tangible” expressions, were never considered a form of cultural heritage. The acceptance and ratification of the Convention by Ecuador in 2008 represented a dramatic turn in cultural politics, with great influence on the public management of cultures, those of the urban Spanish-speaking population and those of the indigenous peoples all over the country. ”

“ Literacy becomes part of their language only through formal schooling. Too often we forget this truism, perhaps because our visual culture leads us to assume that written signs are the essence of language. However, if literacy seems for us connatural to language, it is not the case for other societies, especially if they have been only lately exposed to written language. If such is the case of Ecuador’s indigenous languages, then any educational model that makes use of them must bring orality to the foreground. ”

“ The instrumentality of intangible cultural heritage has been seriously considered by governmental agencies and is being evaluated by indigenous peoples as a mechanism to enforce their collective rights before the state. This is made possible because intangible cultural heritage is linked to other fields of public policy such as health care and education, and because the concept of cultural heritage includes a network of multifarious expressions and prescribes the understanding of cultures in their own specificities. ”

“ The Amazon lowlands are home to nine of Ecuador’s eleven indigenous languages. The linguistic diversity of the lowlands mirrors the sociocultural and biological diversity characteristic of the country as a whole and of the Amazon basin in particular [2] . There is no agreement on the specific number of speakers of indigenous languages in Ecuador. This is due to the lack of transparent and updated sociolinguistic data. The size of Ecuador’s indigenous population is clearly a political issue both for the government and indigenous peoples. ”

“ Bringing orality to the foreground: new approaches in indigenous education and culture Every human language has its roots in speech, and orality is speech by definition. Literacy is only a byproduct of culture and a medium for representing speech visually for recording and archiving purposes. Children learn languages first by listening while their first output is almost always oral. ”

“ Ethical and legal issues in orality and literacy concerning indigenous peoples The folklorisation of indigenous cultures in Ecuador by governmental and non-governmental agencies has prevented their consideration as objects of legal protection. By considering intangible culture as people’s heritage, the 2003 Convention paves the way for their protection as property with all of the related rights. The fact that intangible cultural heritage often lacks physical support and is mainly collective in nature makes it more sensitive to illegal appropriation by outsiders. ”

“ Documenting linguistic diversity seeks to preserve languages for posterity in a context in which half of today’s 6,500 languages will be extinct in the next hundred years (Crystal 1996; Bradley and Bradley 2002) . The idea of preserving linguistic diversity as an expression of our species is certainly valuable, but it is less so when the great majority of documentation projects are focused on archiving only, i.e. without a view to mobilising outcomes for the survival of languages and cultures. ”

“ Many other important advances in the literacy of indigenous languages took place during the second half of the twentieth century, particularly among the Kichwa-speaking communities. A model of literacy development was designed and self-managed by speech communities. In the early 1940s Dolores Cacuango, a female Kichwa activist, created a network of schools with the support of several urban women and local indigenous leaders; the schools were run by indigenous teachers who used the native language and promoted the indigenous culture and the defense of the ethnic territory. ”

“ If documentation outcomes must serve the social, economic and cultural promotion of indigenous peoples, then indigenous peoples must be the first users of those outcomes. On these grounds, it is essential to discuss with speech communities more practical ways to make outcomes of documentation easily accessible to them. It is useless, for example, to simply return digital copies of audiovisual material to the communities if they do not have electricity or DVD players or personal computers. ”

“ The use of language documentation is clear when viewed from the perspective of linguists and anthropologists or even from that of governmental agencies concerned with positioning the nation-state in the multicultural market. However, when seen through the lens of speakers themselves, the relevance and practicality of language documentation becomes blurred by other more important matters concerning their physical and cultural survival. ”

“ When it comes to this point, however, the State and the indigenous peoples have to come to terms with delicate issues concerning intellectual property rights, the return of outcomes to the communities, the practical accessibility of such outcomes, and the management of audiovisual material. This task is not easy in the absence of a law on intellectual property rights, a code of conduct and a general framework that enables the direct participation of indigenous peoples in decision making about their own heritage. ”

“ Today, cultural and linguistic diversity is as important as biological diversity because it is seen as the outcome of thousands of years of species adaptation. Cultural and linguistic diversity is therefore an asset for societies in the world’s multicultural market and explains why states that previously claimed cultural and linguistic homogeneity now promote cultural and linguistic rights. ”

“ At the moment Kichwa language laboratories have been implemented in all millennium schools located in Kichwa-speaking areas and also in a few Spanish-speaking schools, as Kichwa is a language of intercultural communication and all Ecuadorian citizens ought to know it at least rudimentarily. While several problems have arisen in the experimental stage, which have to do with the insufficient training of teachers in the proper use of high-tech equipment and software, the project is still underway and is expected to extend to other indigenous languages. ”

“ Only this realisation shall lead us to recognise the multifaceted nature of endangered languages and cultures and to make effective contributions to their survival rather than remain silent witnesses of their extinction. ”

“ Given their experimental nature, millennium schools follow a participative educational project that takes into consideration the cultural, social and economic elements of their areas of influence and seek to establish a democratic and equitable culture in economic, social, ethnic and gender terms. In sum, millennium schools make use of an innovative educational model alongside proper facilities, teaching aids, well-trained teachers, and the active participation of parents and community. ”

“ It is certain that obtaining informed consent of the speech community rather than individuals and sharing views of documentation with a larger audience can help to get the meaning through, but still it is not enough. Language detached from culture and culture detached from physical survival lack sense for speakers as human beings. ”

“ Today, an indigenous population of 2,000,000 is a reasonable estimate. Still, caution is needed because ethnic population—i.e. people self-claiming to be indigenous—is not equivalent to speaking population—i.e. people speaking one of the eleven indigenous languages. In such a case, the ratio between both populations depends on the ethnic group. Thus, the Cofán ethnic population is rather close to the population of speakers of A’ingae, the Cofán ethnic language, even if the rate of bilingualism among them is high ”

“ The widespread use of Spanish in urban and rural areas, the labour migration of indigenous people to the cities and the partial success of bilingual education programmes have been determining factors in the decreasing vitality of indigenous languages. ”

“ Together with the safeguarding of previously identified heritage in danger of extinction, one step towards the empowering of communities in the management of their own heritages is to mobilise the outcomes of inventory and documentation for educational purposes and the revitalisation of indigenous cultures. ”

“ Indigenous languages have become visible to the Ecuadorian Spanish-speaking society only in the last few decades thanks to the successful positioning of the indigenous movement since the mid 1980s and the principles of plurinationality and interculturality established by the 2008 Constitution. ”

“ While nobody questions the importance of bilingual education as a mechanism for enforcing interculturality and plurinationality, the effectiveness of its administrative and organisational aspects has been criticised. ”

“ In this respect, the process of identity politics led by indigenous peoples since the 1990s has in turn strengthened the linguistic identity of speech communities. In this context, the recent changes in the spelling system of Kichwa in 2008 have been strongly criticised by many highland communities, with the resulting rejection of teaching aids printed with the new spelling and the migration of school children to Spanish-speaking schools. ”

“ Policy makers, governmental agencies, non-governmental organisations, research institutes and scholars must realise that talk about endangered languages and cultures goes beyond languages and cultures and involves human beings. ”

“ Of course, all these texts were mainly intended for Spanish-speaking students of the language and not for the formal learning of grammar by Kichwa native speakers. These native speakers learnt to read and write in their language only in the last decades of the twentieth century through bilingual education programmes. As for the other indigenous languages, their use in written form is even more recent. ”

“ Also, with a view to producing ready-made alphabets in order to begin with their evangelisation work, SIL missionaries set aside important dialectal differences that later on became a matter of contention among indigenous peoples, particularly once they became politically and culturally empowered in the last decades of the twentieth century (Stoll 2002) . ”