page_title: Mojave language
section_title: Revitalization
hierarchical_section_title: Mojave language / Revitalization
caption_attribution_description: Natalie Diaz reading from her poetry. The ASU Department of English celebrated our 2017-2018 graduates and award-winners! Our featured speaker was assistant professor Natalie Diaz, who performed a reading from her poetry. Diaz was born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California, on the banks of the Colorado River. She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe. Her first poetry collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec, was published by Copper Canyon Press. She is a Lannan Literary Fellow and a Native Arts Council Foundation Artist Fellow. She was awarded a Bread Loaf Fellowship, the Holmes National Poetry Prize, a Hodder Fellowship, and a PEN/Civitella Ranieri Foundation Residency, as well as being awarded a US Artists Ford Fellowship. Diaz teaches at the Arizona State University Creative Writing MFA program. She splits her time between the east coast and Mohave Valley, Arizona, where she works to revitalize the Mojave language. May 8th, 2018 ASU Tempe campus
context_page_description: Mojave or Mohave is the native language of the Mohave people along the Colorado River in northwestern Arizona, southeastern California, and southwestern Nevada. Approximately 70% of the speakers reside in Arizona, while approximately 30% reside in California. It belongs to the River branch of the Yuman language family, together with Quechan and Maricopa.
  The Mojave language became endangered during the manifest destiny movement of the 19th century when Mohave and other Native American children were taken away from their parents and tribes to be placed in boarding schools, where they were prohibited from speak their language. The schools went so far as to prohibit students from speaking their native tongue even with their parents when they occasionally visited home; while many parents did not speak English.
context_section_description: As of 2012, the Center for Indian Education at Arizona State University "has facilitated workshops for both learners and speakers at the Fort Mojave Indian Reservation in northwest Arizona, California and Nevada. Fort Mojave has about 22 elders who speak some Mojave." The project is also bringing elders together with younger people to teach the traditional Mojave "bird songs."
  The language preservation work of poet Natalie Diaz on the reservation was featured on PBS News Hour in March 2012.
caption: Poet and Mojave language activist Natalie Diaz at Arizona State University
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