Returning Archival Heritage: Iskonawa Cultural Heritage in Archives and Its Potential for Cultural and Linguistic Revitalization in the Peruvian Amazon

The second 2026–2027 Indigenous Learning Forum will take place October 8, 2026, at 3:00 p.m. ET on Zoom. This talk will be given in English with Spanish translation.

Se ofrecerá interpretación en español/inglés.

This event is open to all but registration is required.

Carolina Rodríguez Alzza is a Peruvian linguistic anthropologist and currently a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests include language reclamation and revitalization, language documentation and description, and increasing access to Indigenous heritage collections. Carolina’s work is grounded in collaborative and community-based methodologies developed in partnership with Indigenous communities. Her current research examines language ideologies in the context of the Iskonawa language revitalization movement in the Peruvian Amazon.

“Returning Archival Heritage: Iskonawa Cultural Heritage in Archives and Its Potential for Cultural and Linguistic Revitalization in the Peruvian Amazon”

The Iskonawa Indigenous people are actively reclaiming their ethnic identity, culture, and language in the Peruvian Amazon. Through a grassroots organization, these efforts have increasingly benefited from the return of heritage collections found in museums and archives around the world. In this presentation, I examine experiences of return, including artifacts, recordings, and photographs, to explore their potential for cultural and linguistic revitalization. In doing so, I highlight the emerging desire among the youth leading these reclamation efforts to make this heritage more accessible by bringing together dispersed and fragmented materials into a community archive created to hold and preserve their heritage on their own terms.