The N’dee/N’nee/Ndé Lotería Project: Co-Creating a Tool for Language Reclamation
November 10, 2025
People
Denisse Gómez-Retana
ERI/PS2 Public Research Fellow
Denisse Gómez-Retana is a third-year Ph.D. student in Latin American, Iberian, and Latino Cultures. Their ethnographic research examines the linguistic practices within cultural reclamation community projects, focusing on their transnational ties, postcolonial naming processes, and entanglements between language and land. Denisse is a 2025 ERI/PS2 Summer Public Research Fellow.
The n’dee, n’nee, or ndé people, more broadly known by the exonym Apaches, used to inhabit and move freely on the land now occupied by the US-Mexico border. In the 1800s, they faced genocidal persecution from both countries. In Mexico, the attempt at extermination led to the silencing of their cultural identity. The Nación N’dee/N’nee/Ndé is a political organization established in 2019 to seek recognition as an Indigenous community by the Mexican government and reclaim their culture, language, identity, land, and history. In 2022, they established a Language Council to work on their language. I met them in 2023, and from the very beginning, I felt we had been working as collaborators.
As part of the ERI/ PS2 Summer Public Research Fellowship, I began meeting with the Language Council to develop a language revitalization project. During the past two years of fieldwork, I noticed that while the Council members possessed a solid grasp of various forms of their reclaimed language, they still felt uncertain about their proficiency. Therefore, my main intention was to develop a project where they could start sharing what they know to build confidence and be less dependent on instructors. They responded enthusiastically to this recommendation.
One of the ideas was Martín Cristóbal Rojas’s adaptation of Lotería to n’nee biyáti. La Lotería is a traditional Mexican board game similar to bingo, played with cards featuring iconic images of Mexico’s 19th century identity. He substituted traditional cards with symbols relevant to the N’dee/N’nee/Ndé culture. Using the fellowship funds, the Council decided to create a Lotería in two variants of their language, n’nee and ndé. They planned to print it and produce audio recordings of the words, allowing the Lotería to serve as a pedagogical tool for language learning. Emma Rodríguez, a graphic designer and Council member, volunteered to work on the design.
My role was primarily advisory, as the Council owned the ideas and knowledge. Instead, I concentrated on assisting them in ensuring the board game reflected their concepts about language and culture. For example, one card was dahdatsts’ooz, or the flag. The design showed flags of the United States and Mexico. Both nations have histories of extermination against the n’dee n’nee and ndé people, and the members of the Nación N’dee/N’nee/Ndé are very critical of that in their discourses.
Therefore, having these countries’ flags did not really reflect their perspectives, so I suggested using their actual flag instead. Another suggestion was related to the audios; instead of having Council members record all audios, I suggested having 14 cards of each deck recorded by community members to reflect the Nación’s heteroglossia. As a result, a card was recorded by the youngest reclaimer, who was just three years old.
From the very start, the Nación N’dee/N’nee/Ndé emphasized that to engage in research with them, I must also contribute to their language and culture. Our relationship was one of co-labor.
