Skeena Indigenous

I encountered the phrase ​‘fragile literacies’ in Mirela Ivanova’s recent book about the development of early Cyrillic writing cultures, Inventing Slavonic.¹ Ivanova was describing the first hundred years during which the Cyrillic script evolved in communities across the Balkans and what is now Bulgaria, Ukraine, and southern Russia, when the forms of letters and the composition of alphabets were in flux. Today, the same phrase might be applied to indigenous North American writing cultures, which not only exhibit similarly unstable orthographies, but also contend with language loss, decades of disruption of families and communities, and disadvantages in use of digital technologies that users of English and other settler languages take for granted.

We are in the third year of UNESCO’s International Decade of Indigenous Languages, which has inspired efforts to revitalise languages and to improve access to communications, media, and other information technology for indigenous communities around the world. Some of these efforts are new initiatives such as SILICON² and the Unicode CLDR Digitally Disadvantaged Languages working group, while others build on many years of groundbreaking work by linguists, researchers, font makers, standards organisations, and, of course, indigenous language keepers and teachers.

In late 2022, I was approached by some folk at Microsoft and asked to look at font support for Coast Salish languages spoken in Washington State and southern British Columbia. The conversation quickly expanded into a regular monthly meeting with a group of interested parties inside Microsoft and then with individuals from other companies and organisations. The conversation also quickly expanded to include other languages of the Pacific Northwest, stretching from northern California to the southern Yukon. I was initially asked to work on test documents to evaluate existing Microsoft core fonts such as Times New Roman, to see how good or bad a job they did at displaying text in these languages, but fonts were only a small part of what was discussed. Participants in the ad hoc working group are interested in all aspects of indigenous language support: character encoding and standard locale data, keyboard layouts and input methods in operating systems and mobile devices, text processing and typography, and, most crucially, direct engagement with indigenous communities and language revitalisation organisations. Several of the participants wear multiple hats: as employees of tech companies or font foundries, as officers of standards organisations, and as members of indigenous communities. One of the things that has pleased me most in working with these people is their commitment to respecting the data sovereignty of indigenous peoples: to working within the limits of what communities are willing to share with outsiders.

Skeena Indigenous is one outcome of this larger, ongoing project, and the first to be made public. It consists of a family of indigenous-first fonts and accompanying sources and documentation, all published by Microsoft under the Open Font License v1.1. The intent is for the fonts to eventually support all North American indigenous orthographies derived from the Latin script,³ with default glyph forms that reflect the written and typographic conventions of those writing systems, and appropriate variant forms for specific languages. I won’t be writing in detail here about the type design or the making of the fonts, as this is covered in the extensive project documentation.

I want to thank everyone who has participated in discussions over the past two years and contributed to this project: Ali Basit, Aaron Bell, Peter Biľak, Bridget Chase, Peter Constable, Craig Cummings, Simon Daniels, Zam DeShields, Andrew Glass, Cris Hernández, Greg Hitchcock, Kevin King, Liang Hai, Rob McKaughan, Mark Turin, Leo Vicenti, and all those whom I am sure will contribute to it in future.

I especially want to acknowledge the work of my colleagues at Typotheque and Saja Typeworks, whose parallel work on indigenous typography and character sets fed directly into the development of Skeena Indigenous, and enabled me to extend the list of supported languages beyond what I had initially specified for Microsoft.

Significant credit is due to Paul Hanslow, who created the first letterforms of what became the Skeena typeface when working at Tiro in 2018, and who has been involved in every iteration of the design including Skeena Indigenous. This seems a good place, also, to thank Matt Warburton at UBC, who engaged Paul and me to work on Whitney Salishan, the lessons of which were applied in the development of Skeena Indigenous.

Thanks to our web developer, Kenneth Ormandy, for helping with the publication of the Skeena Indigenous documentation.

Finally, I want to acknowledge the work of Ross Mills, the co-founder of Tiro Typeworks, who since the 1990s has blazed a trail in supporting the typography of North American indigenous languages and scripts. Tiro continues to build on the foundations he has established.

Get the latest build of the fonts.
Twelve static or two variable fonts in TTF format with WOFF2 webfont files.

Read the design and development documentation.
Extensive explanation of the overall project and specific design and development decisions. Includes discussion of common issues in indigenous text such as presence of confusable Unicode characters and unstable encodings, language specific variant letterforms, and OpenType Layout implementation.

Get the sources and build tools.
GitHub repository. Includes design and build sources, instructions to build fonts locally, and the Tiro builder tool.

Submit feature requests or bug reports.
Open an issue to request additional characters or glyph variant (please document), or report a bug in the fonts.

Join the discussion forum.
Ask questions or engage in conversation about the project, or about indigenous language typography in general.