The Uma Water Glossary is the first in a series of three glossaries, each consisting of five terms for water bodies, water phenomena, geographic features, and/or place names from three different Gulf Coast languages. This project was created in partnership between Ripple Effect and Houma Language Project.

The goal of this project is two-fold: 1) to provide K–12 teachers and students access to the scientific knowledge held by the Indigenous communities around them; and 2) to explore how to ethically source and integrate heritage community knowledge into water literacy teaching products and processes.

Students and teachers can use the Water Glossary during in-school instruction to research words and phrases that describe water bodies, features, and processes of South Louisiana. As a result, they will see their environment through a more intimate lens as they learn the words and meanings from Kreyol, Chitimacha, and Uma languages and their people. 

For this project, we worked with Houma Language Project to develop a special legal contract that specified that all rights to the content remained with the “knowledge holder” who provided the words and definitions included in the glossary.