What is the name of your organization?
Seneca Nation of Indians
What is the name of your solution?
Document Transliteration
Provide a one-line summary or tagline for your solution.
This solution will transliterate the 4 gospels and the Acts of the Apostles into orthography recognizable by modern-day readers of Seneca.
In what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?
Seneca Nation of Indians' Cattaraugus Territory i Irving, NY.
In what country is your solution team headquartered?
United States
What type of organization is your solution team?
Other, including part of a larger organization (please explain below)
If you selected Other, please explain here.
The Seneca Nation of Indians is a federally recognized Native nation
Film your elevator pitch.
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What specific problem are you solving?
We are working to solve the problem of preserving the Seneca language, which is an endangered language. There are few original speakers of Seneca left; this situation was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which unfortunately took the lives of a number of speakers. The problem is urgent at the Seneca Nation’s two residential territories, the Allegany Territory in Salamanca, NY and the Cattaraugus Territory in Irving, NY. There are language classes for children and adults at both territories. It is a slow process to learn a new language and Seneca, as a polysynthetic language, can pose challenges not encountered when learning many other languages. Therefore, any efforts to grow Seneca linguistic data by training AI models will yield information that can be used to enhance teaching methodologies, thus enabling more Seneca members to achieve fluency in the language of their ancestors.
What is your solution?
Documents translated into Seneca from the 18th and 19th centuries have come to light. Books of the Bible – the four gospels and the Acts of the Apostles – were translated by missionaries who worked among the Seneca people. They were originally meant to serve as devotional materials for Seneca members who had converted to Christianity. Now they have taken on a different purpose: to provide insight into Seneca morphology and syntax from the past and to shed light on how the language has evolved over time.
Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?
The target population are the Seneca people especially those who are interested in learning or advancing their knowledge of Seneca. During the 19th and 20th centuries, members of numerous Native nations throughout the United States were removed from their families and placed in boarding schools, such as the Thomas Indian School at the Seneca Nation’s Cattaraugus Territory, in fulfillment of the U.S. government’s efforts of forced assimilation. Native children were punished for speaking their language or practicing any aspect of their culture. Implicit in these efforts was the idea that the heritage and history of Native peoples was inferior to that of the dominant culture and should be obliterated. Depriving these children of their language was key to this assimilation process. These attempts at cultural genocide have left their mark on generations of Native individuals, including the Seneca. Current advances in technology, including those highlighted in this application, can help to mitigate the effects of this intergenerational trauma. By providing insight into endangered languages such as Seneca pedagogical methodologies can be made more efficient and more productive and can help to increase not only the number of speakers of Seneca, but also the fluency level of speakers.
