Our Teaching Press interns teamed up with the Oneida Bird Monitoring Program (OBMP) to create a new edition of Birds of the Oneida Nation: A Beginner’s Guide to Bird Identification. The guide consists of common birds found in the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin’s restored lands, presenting bird names in both Oneida and English, as well as an Oneida creation story on how birds got their songs and a guide on the Oneida alphabet. In their words, the OBMP wished to build a community and create bridges between the Oneida Nation and non-tribal people.
The Guide has now developed into a book with illustrations, facts, and an Oneida origin story–all of which were copyedited by our wonderful Teaching Press team.
Copyediting a dual-language bird guide also created interesting challenges. Our team had to honor the voice of the OBMP writers and ensure accuracy about bird facts. Despite our unfamiliarity with the language, our interns downloaded the Oneida language font and were eager to learn how to use it.
We also discovered that not all bird names in the guide had a ready translation into Oneida language.
As the guide tells us, this is because “like most Tribes, many Oneida words have sadly been lost or stolen due to European colonization, boarding schools, and assimilation. In other cases, the geographic ranges of some bird species fall within present-day’s Oneida Nation’s boundaries but not within Oneida’s ancestral homelands in New York. Therefore, no Oneida word was created for these bird species.”
While a little “old-school,” we achieved our editing goal by reading the guidebook out loud to one another. By reading every English word aloud, and the English translations of Oneida words, we could hear the poetry within the Oneida language while we listened for errors.
But best of all, a bird guide also features bird sounds, which are spelled out to mimic the bird’s calls. Taking the spirit of this book to heart, we copy-edited like a flock of birds released—and it filled us with confidence that if we were smiling and learning, so would the intended audience. Our editorial team “sang” the calls to our hearts’ content, filling our classrooms with tweeting, cawing, trilling, rattling, whistling, and more.
This collaboration between the Teaching Press and UWGB’s Oneida Bird Monitoring Program has been music to our ears, and we were happy to help launch this book into flight.