There are approximately seven thousand languages in the world today. Of these, the majority originated with, and are spoken by, Indigenous peoples. Up to half of the world’s languages are oral, with no orthography, no dictionaries. Knowledge is passed from person to person, through words and stories that formed and evolved alongside the places in which they have long been rooted, as diverse as the ecologies from which they come: Ainu on the island of Hokkaido in Japan, Arabela in the tropical forests of Peru along a tributary of the Arabela River, Tolowa Dee-ni’ among the redwood trees of Northern California.