CoLang 2022 in Montana: A Turning Point in Indigenous Representation

The Institute on Collaborative Language Research (CoLang) is a biennial training venue for language documentation and revitalization. It aims to assist all stakeholders, who collaborate across the boundaries of speaking communities and academe. While including Indigenous participation has always been a goal of CoLang, that goal has been conceived and realized differently at each meeting, and it has been common for the number of non-Indigenous linguists to exceed that of Indigenous participants. To address this issue, when planning CoLang 2022 we focused on CoLang’s stated goal by expanding on the concept of collaboration. As a result, the number of Indigenous attendees was twice what we expected, and over 70 Indigenous communities from throughout the world were represented. We consider that CoLang 2022 was a turning point in changing the approach to reach the actual goal of CoLang. We hope that the changes we initiated will be perpetuated and that persisting issues will be addressed at future CoLang Institutes. In this article, we (i) discuss the increase in Indigenous participation in CoLang 2022, (ii) describe the process of designing CoLang 2022 toward that goal, and (iii) address the issues and challenges that remain for future CoLang meetings.