A few months ago I was contacted by Ivan Brenes, an English-language instructor at Osaka University, Japan, who told me about a minority culture I’d never heard of: the Ainu. According to the Ainu Museum website, the word “Ainu” means “human.” Ainu culture flourished in the northern islands of Japan, especially Hokkaido, from about 1400-1700. As the […]
Today is International Mother Language Day. Here are photos of Harvard students observing and celebrating the day with copies of our poster, based on my Mother Tongue poster that has been shipped to Bangladesh for display in Chittagong. Photos by Maung Nyeu, our collaborator on the Our Golden Hour education project. Poster design by Alec […]
My apologies if you’ve heard this through another channel, but I wanted to let you know what’s happening with my current Kickstarter campaign. The original goal was for a short, sweet campaign to raise $1,000 so I could do a carving celebrating Mother Tongue Day (February 21st) and send it to Bangladesh, where there are […]
Last month, I drove down to Cambridge to deliver the latest pieces in our work to help indigenous children in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh. My collaborator, Maung Nyeu, displays the carvings I recently completed–the numbers 9 and 10 in Mro, Marma, Chakma and Bangla. These will go on the doors of the Grade […]
Some amazing news. Thanks to the help of Dan Kaufman of the Endangered Language Alliance, I’ve finally managed to contact someone who knows Bamum. Here’s the backstory. I’ve been looking for someone who can read and write Bamum, a script from one of the many districts of Cameroon, ever since I started the Alphabets more […]
September is always the busiest month for the Endangered Alphabets, and this year is no exception: one successful public show has already happened, one opportunity for you to see me and the Alphabets live is coming up, and at the end of the month I’m launching my most ambitious Kickstarter campaign yet, for my most […]
As you may know, some of my Tibetan carvings are based on the calligraphy of Tashi Mannox, and whenever one of them is bought I contribute 20% of the profits to Rokpa International, an NGO that cares for sick, homeless and orphaned children in the Himalayas. Here’s the latest bulletin from Rokpa on the earthquake […]
My amazing students at Champlain College are once more breaking new ground in support of education for indigenous children in Bangladesh. In addition to publishing school materials in the endangered alphabets of Marma, Mro, and Chakma, they are working to compile the first-ever anthology of stories from the Marma people–stories collected by the children themselves […]
As I was saying in Part I of this extremely short series of posts about Our Golden Hour, on Sunday morning I met with Maung Nyeu (the founder of this wonderful non-profit) at Algiers Cafe on Brattle Street in Cambridge. I handed over the materials created by some of my students in the Champlain College […]
Quite quietly, in the upper room of Algiers Cafe on Brattle Street in Cambridge, an extraordinary seasonal gift exchange took place yesterday morning. I was meeting with my friend, colleague, and collaborator Maung Nyeu, founder of the amazing non-profit organization Our Golden Hour, which aims to provide mother-tongue education for indigenous children in the Chittagong […]
