Eythana Miller (2025)
Heritage in Translation: The Oral History of an Unconventional Amish Community
Heritage in Translation documents the language and cultural heritage of the Amish community in Libby, Montana. The project focuses first on how this particular community has navigated the shift from Amish traditionalism to a more modern lifestyle, while maintaining many of their customs and holding onto the Amish identity in significant ways. The other project goal is to document and preserve the Pennsylvania Dutch language in the region through an extensive oral history archive, as it is under-documented and linguistic research on it is limited.
The Amish have a fascinating role in American history and are still a living, dynamic minority group. There is little real understanding about them among the general public and media portrayals are often misrepresentative. Hearing directly from the people who lived this way, in their own language, will offer a rare perspective that will be valuable to scholars, linguists, cultural historians, and anyone interested in learning about this complex religious community.
Biography
Eythana Miller grew up in Libby, Montana and is the first in her family to attend college, studying political economy at Berkeley. She has pursued both journalistic and creative writing for several years, and her work appears in CalMatters, The Daily Californian, and Edible Shasta-Butte. She speaks Pennsylvania Dutch fluently and is learning standard German; the relationship between these languages has sparked many of the questions about heritage and identity that appear throughout her work. She’s deeply interested in development economics, literature, and the rich textures of world cultures. Over time, she became increasingly aware of how unique her upbringing was, and her reflections in this direction have manifested in many ways, one being this project.
