Thanks for coming to the 2024 Language Fair! Please join us again next April!
The 2024 ONAYLF Poster Art theme is “Creating through Language.”
The winners’ lists are now available! Pre K-5th grade | 6th-12th grade
You can view the art and video submissions from this year’s fair here.
How to browse our YouTube channel:
At the top of the “Home” page, you will see the introductory video to the 2024 fair. It includes a welcome by our director Raina Heaton.
Below the introductory video, you can browse all of the fair submissions. They are grouped together by category. From there, each category is organized as a playlist, labeled by age group and category. Posters and comics have been put into slideshows by age group.
Clicking on any of the playlists on the main page will automatically play through all of the entries in that category. To go back to the list of playlists, click the back button, an arrow pointing to the left, on the upper righthand corner of your window. If you are watching the video on a mobile device, you can exit the video by swiping down with your finger, and then tap the back button on the upper righthand corner of your screen. The winners of each category have a ribbon decal on the video and are also listed in the title of each video.
If you’d like to search for a particular performance, you can use the search box (indicated by a magnifying glass and the word “Search” at the top, to the right of “About”) to search for any performance by title. If you are looking for a particular comic or poster, you’ll need to navigate to the video for either Comics & Cartoons or Posters for the right age group, and then skip through the video until you find the poster/comic you are looking for.
Please feel free to leave messages of encouragement to the young people in the comments section of the videos!
The ONAYLF staff would like to extend their gratitude to the fair’s participants, our judges and our sponsors!
Special Event
This year we have a special interactive presentation by Dr. Marwin Begaye (Diné), hosted both days of the Fair! Attendees will be able to use professional print shop materials to create printed notes and booklets with words, phrases, and sentences in their languages to take home. Dr. Begaye and volunteers will be on hand to help everyone as they use the available characters and materials to create new art through language, and explore the printing medium.
Dr. Marwin Begaye is an internationally exhibited printmaker, painter. As Associate Professor of Painting and Printmaking at the University of Oklahoma’s School of Visual Arts, his research has been concentrated on issues of cultural identity, especially the intersection of traditional American Indian culture and pop culture. He also has conducted research in the technical aspects of relief printing and the use of mixed‐media. His work has been exhibited nationally across the U.S. and internationally New Zealand, Argentina, Paraguay, Italy, Siberia and Estonia. He has received numerous awards, including the Oklahoma Visual Artists Coalition Fellowship, Best of Classification in Graphics at 2019 Santa Fe Indian Market among many others. He has been featured in many publications and is represented by Exhibit C in Oklahoma City.
2024 Fair Guest Speakers
Mosiah Bluecloud
Mosiah Bluecloud began working in Indigenous language revitalization in 2008. He started as an intern at the Sauk Language Department. He transitioned from an audio and video technician to a member of the Sauk Language Department’s Modified Master Apprentice Program in 2010. After 1,280 hours of learning Sauk as an apprentice and 668 hours of professional development training in Native language teaching methodologies, Mosiah became the lead instructor of the Sauk Language. He taught community classes across three counties, a Sauk Language course at Bacone College, and two levels of Sauk at Shawnee High School. He left the Sauk Language Department and got his B.A. in Linguistics in Spring 2016 from the University of Oklahoma; and established the Oklahoma Kickapoo Language program that fall. Mosiah built the Kansas Kickapoo teacher training program, and started trainings and workshops for language movements all over the country. He went back to school at the University of Arizona and completed his Masters in Native American Languages and Linguistics in Spring 2020, and is now a PhD Candidate in Linguistics at The University of Arizona. He has taught linguistics courses at the University of Arizona, American Indian Language Development Institute, and at the Institute on Collaborative Language Research (CoLang).
Corey Still
