As Schillo and Turin note in their writings about “Applications and innovations in typeface design for North American Indigenous languages”; Indigenous communities across the world are actively engaged in language reclamation and revitalization projects that provide urgently needed support to restore fluency and transmission of their ancestral and heritage languages. As a direct consequence of colonization and the ensuing cultural genocide of all of the Indigenous languages spoken in North America are now endangered, and numerous revitalization projects are currently underway to generate new speakers and restore intergenerational language transmission. An element of this process that remains regularly overlooked is the creation of typefaces and keyboards that accommodate the specialized glyphs and specific orthographic needs of Indigenous languages.
I chose to depict the Latin alphabet “Aboriginal serif” typeface, which was designed including many North American aboriginal characters. There is nevertheless controversy among aboriginal scholars regarding how this typeface and others truly represent the many languages.