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Panära Field Materials
- Collection number: 2017-12
- Primary contributors: Saankörä Panära (consultant), Sokkrëë Panära (consultant), Sôpôa Panära (consultant), Myriam Lapierre (researcher, donor)
- Additional contributors: Kunityk Mëtyktire-Panära (consultant), Kjäräsâ Panära (consultant), Kuka Panära (consultant), Kôkâ Panära (consultant), Kôkôsïrä Panära (consultant), Sokriti Panära (consultant), João Denófrio (participant), Sôpôa Panära (recorder)
- Languages: Kayapô, Panära (kre)
- Dates: 2015-
- Historical information: Panära is spoken today by a community of approximately 630 speakers who live in the demarcated Panará Indigenous Land in the Eastern Amazon. The Panära’s territory consists of 495,000 hectares on the boarder between the states of Pará and Mato Grosso in Central Brazil, and it falls within the municipalities of Guarantã do Norte and Altamira. Until 1973, the Panära inhabited a large area in northern Mato Grosso that stretched from the Cachimbo mountain range to the plains where the city of Colíder is located today. The population numbered up to 600 individuals who were divided among nine villages distributed over the entire territory (Schwartzman 1995). In 1973, the Panära were contacted by Brazilian national society, which resulted in a spread of contagious diseases and a dramatic population loss. By 1976, the 68 Panära survivors had been removed from their native land and resettled in the neighbouring Xingú Park, where they never felt at home (Schwartzman 1984: 232-233). The ancestral land of the Panära was made available for colonization and gold prospecting by the Brazilian government; however, in the late 1980s, the Panära began the process of reclaiming a part of their land that was still intact. With the support of several Brazilian and international non-governmental organizations, their current Indigenous Land was identified in 1994 and officially demarcated in 1998. In 1995, the Panará built a new village, Nänsêpôtiti, near the Iriri River, and in 2012, the population began to spread to four new villages, namely Sönkwê, Sökâräsä, Kôtikô, and Canaã. Today, there are a total of five Panära villages.
  The dramatic population loss that resulted from contact was followed by significant efforts to repopulate, as the Panära became aware that they were nearing extinction. Today, approximately 75% of the population is below the age of 18. In spite of the population loss and still low demography, Panära is a vital language spoken by all members of the community. The Panära are nearly all monolingual in their language, with the exception of the young men, who have varying degrees of proficiency in Brazilian Portuguese as a second language. Children and teenagers’ knowledge of Portuguese is limited to basic vocabulary, and elementary school classes are conducted entirely in Panära by NGO-trained Panära school teachers. As for the handful of Kayapó, Trumai and Kawaiwete speakers who have married into the Panära community, they all have, at the very least, a passive knowledge of Panära.
  The materials in this collection were created by Myriam Lapierre during her field trips to the Terra Indígena Panará with the purpose of collecting data for master's and doctoral research. The field trips occurred in May-June 2015, June-July 2016, June-August 2017, August-September 2018, and July 2019.
  Fieldwork in 2015 was funded by a Travel Fund from the Faculty of Arts of the University of Ottawa and by a Globalink Research Award from the Mitacs program of the Government of Canada. Fieldwork in 2016 was funded by a Joseph Armand Bombardier Scholarship of the Canada Graduate Scholarships-Master’s Program awarded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), and by a Michael Smith Foreign Study Supplement awarded by SSHRC. Fieldwork in 2017-2019 was funded by a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship, a Regents Fellowship for Graduate Study awarded by the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley, as well as by an Oswalt Endangered Language Grant awarded by the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages at the University of California, Berkeley.
- Scope and content: Recordings of elicitation and texts, transcriptions, field notes, and related documents, from the villages of Nänsêpôtiti, Sönkwê, and Sökâräsä.
- Repository: Survey of California and Other Indian Languages
- Preferred citation: Saankörä Panära, Sokkrëë Panära, Sôpôa Panära, and Myriam Lapierre. Panära Field Materials, 2017-12, Survey of California and Other Indian Languages, University of California, Berkeley, http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.7297/X20R9MWN.