Arin Peywa
Arin Peywa is a native of Zuni Pueblo and a native speaker of the language, despite the fact that she endured years of punishment for speaking it while enrolled at a Catholic school at Zuni Pueblo. Later, as an adult, Arin revived her fluency with fervor. Her efforts to revive the language for herself ultimately transformed into efforts to revive and preserve the language for others. She accomplished this in two ways. First, by spending four years painstakingly digitizing pre existing linguistic and cultural curricular materials, written in Zuni by and for Zuni educators. Second, by becoming an educator in Zuni Public Schools, where she teaches English language arts to middle and high schoolers. The capstone projects she developed for her seniors was nothing short of amazing, where they focused on such things as traditional waffle gardening, sacred Zuni sites, cultural healing, and even how to correctly slaughter and prepare a sheep for cultural purposes.