Language status is critical to language revitalization efforts, but it is often decreed not by the language community itself, but by outside institutional entities. Can a language be revitalized? Is the language alive? The way outsiders—and even some members of these communities—find answers to these questions today is to search for answers about language status online, where they will inevitably come across one or more endangered language databases proclaiming the condition of the language. The answers can greatly affect the way members of the heritage community, outsiders, and potential partners view language communities, their validity, and sometimes their existence. The last native speaker of Tunica died in 1948. As such, when the Tunica Language Working Group began, these outside gatekeepers of language status almost universally marked Tunica as “extinct” or, at best, a heritage language. As L2 speakers were emerging, the working group sought to have this information updated, not only to more accurately reflect the current state of the language, but also to positively affect language attitudes within and outside of the tribal community, and to forge partnerships with institutions wary of working with what they would erroneously perceive as a “dead language”. This paper covers the efforts made over the past year and a half to get the status of the Tunica language accurately represented in a variety of online resources by endangered language gatekeepers.