The Chukchansi Indian tribe runs a 2,000 slot casino in California. The casino has proven so profitable that the tribe has gone beyond providing healthcare and stipends for its members to make a sizable, and somewhat surprising, donation: They're giving $1 million to linguists at nearby California State University, Fresno, to study their language and, with the help of a few remaining native speakers, teach it to younger generations. The Chuckchansi are one of many tribes, Norimitsu Onishi reports at the New York Times, spending casino earnings on efforts to pull their languages back from the brink of extinction:
The money has given the tribes greater authority over the study of their language, an often culturally fraught discipline. Some tribes wishing to keep their language from outsiders for cultural or religious reasons have retained researchers on the condition that their findings remain unpublished. The control has also persuaded aging speakers---who ...
