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Ofelia Zepeda, an enrolled member of the Tohono O'odham Indian Nation (formerly Papago), is one of the most acknowledged Native American poets of her generation. Zepeda's creative writing can be characterized as eco-poetry, for it is deeply connected with the natural environment of the Tohono O'odham traditional tribal territory in the Sonoran Desert of the American Southwest. The present paper focuses on the motif of language and speech as it is presented in Zepeda's latest collection of verses Where Clouds Are Formed (2008). The paper maps the diverse forms in the work and in studies of individual poems (some of which are bilingual: English and Tohono O'odham), the significance of the traditional language within the context of so-called environmental (in)justice is explored.

Abstract
Shoshone, the northernmost Uto-Aztecan language, originally spoken in the area of the Great Basin (U.S.), has been frequently reported as threatened. In his paper, the author presents a vitality assessment of the Western dialect of the Shoshone language based on the methodology which stems from the UNESCO Ad Hoc Expert Group on Endangered Languages. He takes into account UNESCO′s nine factors in order to determine the degree of language vitality and endangerment for Western Shoshone and to outline strategies which might help to revitalize the language in the future.