Indian languages struggle to survive (fwd)

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Indian languages struggle to survive
http://www.marionstar.com/news/stories/20030601/localnews/404466.html

Chester Trigg is proud to say he has both Comanche and Cherokee blood in
his heritage. It's a pride he's trying to install in his younger
daughter as he teaches her the Native American ways, many which he had
to teach himself.

One thing that Trigg won't be able to pass down is the tribes' language.
He doesn't recall knowing his mom, a full-blooded Comanche. While he
remembers his father talking to his grandfather in Cherokee, he wasn't
taught any of the language.

"My daddy told me, 'Don't tell them you're Indian,'" the Mount Gilead,
Ohio resident said. "You know how the blacks had to sit on the back of
the bus? They wouldn't even let the Indians get on the bus.

"He didn't teach it to us so we wouldn't be kicked around."

It's a story similar to many told by American Indians, forced into white
boarding schools and banned from using their language. Many now fear it
may be a death knoll for most of these languages as tribes work to keep
them alive.

Rita Coosewoon, whose last name means "gray eyes" in Comanche, remembers
being forced to skip a meal or sit on the basement steps of her school
all night for speaking her native language.

"I sure had a hard time, because I couldn't ask any (questions) because
they would punish me for not speaking English," said Coosewoon, who is
now 71. "What a twist that they want me to teach a language that they
wanted to get rid of."

Coosewoon is the only public school teacher in Oklahoma teaching
Comanche.

She and others worry that tribes are in a race against time to save
their languages, a vital part of American Indian culture, before they
die off with tribal elders. Consider:

# A 1997 study by the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians found 3
percent of their children under 6 could speak the language.

# Only an estimated 2,000 Ojibwes, or Chippewas, out of more than
100,000 in the United States speak the language.

# One study predicts that 80 percent of the nation's 175 existing Indian
languages will disappear in the next generation if nothing is done
because the vast majority of speakers are older than 60.

The situation is especially dire in California, where there are no
longer any native speakers of 35 tribal languages and only a handful
who speak 50 other languages, according to Leanne Hinton, chairwoman of
the University of California at Berkeley linguistics department.

"Here in California we have 50 languages ... almost all of them are
spoken by people over 60," Hinton said.

Dave Lakota, a Marion, Ohio resident who is part Lakota Indian, said he
believes Native American ceremonies and languages are making a
comeback. "Unfortunately most people practicing it are not Native
American," he said.

He remembers attending a sun dance in North Dakota, during which he sat
with an elder on a hill overlooking the dance. The elder, with a sad
look on his face, pointed to the people below.

While Pinnick said it was quite a turnout, the man asked him, "How many
of my people do you see?" The answer, Pinnick said, was very few. About
80 percent of the participants were non-Indians.

He's started learning some of the Lakota language and believes it's more
powerful when he's able to pray to the Creator in his native tongue.
His Native American or Earth name is tree spider warrior, he said, and
spiders are known as the keepers of the ancient language.

What the Indian nations have to rely on, Pinnick said, is that there are
enough elders left to pass down the language and traditions. Many will
also be forced to depend on whites that have learned the language.

Pinnick, like many, blames the white colonization for causing the
phenomenon. He specifically faults whites in the early 1900s for
kicking American Indians and sending them to white schools in the east
where they were severely punished if caught talking in their native
tongue.

Tribes are taking steps to revive their languages, with the help of
funds from gambling or the government. Some tribes are spending their
casino profits on preschools where children are immersed in their
native tongue. And Sen. Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, has sponsored a bill
to provide more funds to language immersion schools.

Language revitalization started in the 1970s in Hawaii, where the Aha
Punana Leo language organization brought together preschoolers with
island elders. The children then were moved into language immersion
schools. Members of the first senior class, who speak both Hawaiian and
English, graduated in 1999.

The Pechanga Band of Luiseno Indians in Temecula, Calif., started a
preschool program last year that teaches both English and Luiseno.

With fewer than 10 native speakers, all older than 70, the tribe voted
to spend $200,000 of its casino profits on the program, said Gary
DuBois, director of cultural resources. The Pechangas hired Eric
Elliott, a linguist who has learned four California Indian languages,
to repeat in Luiseno what English-speaking teachers say in class.

"We can't use (elders) as resources because they're too frail," DuBois
said. "We're running against time."

The Pechangas could eventually expand their language immersion classes
through elementary and even high school, similar to the Hawaiian
system, he said.

"I'll never become a native speaker," said DuBois, who is taking adult
Luiseno classes. "But these kids will -- or the hope is anyway."

The Blackfeet opened the Nizipuhwahsin -- meaning "original language" --
school in Browning, Mont., in 1995 that teaches children ages 5 through
13 in the Blackfeet language. School director Rosalyn LaPier said the
tribe tried adult and high school classes, summer culture camps, and
Head Start programs but none created any speakers of Blackfeet.

"The only thing that has created fluent speakers is language survival
schools," she said, where all subjects are taught in Blackfeet.

Most tribes don't have big casino profits to plow into language
programs. Congress passed legislation in the early 1990s that funded
language revitalization programs but these short-term grants leave
programs in a constant hunt for funds, said Mary Hermes, an education
professor at the University of Minnesota in Duluth. She also is a board
member and parent at the Waadookodaading Ojibwe language immersion
school in Hayward, Wis.

American Indians blame the government for eradicating their languages by
pushing them off their lands, removing children to English-speaking
boarding schools, like the one Coosewoon attended, and barring them
from talking in school in their native tongue.

Governments in New Zealand and Canada have acknowledged their roles in
eradicating native languages and have provided funding to tribes,
Hermes said.

"It is really the responsibility of the government that we're in this
situation," Hermes said. "We're not asking for money because of the
harm suffered. We're asking for efforts to revitalize our language."

Inouye's bill would provide roughly $10 million a year to help fund
private school efforts to teach Indian languages and provide money for
training to larger institutions like the Blackfeet's Nizipuhwahsin.
Inouye has introduced similar legislation in previous congressional
sessions that failed to pass.

Coosewoon, who finished her second year teaching at Elgin High School in
Elgin, Okla., on May 23, said half of her 10 students studying Comanche
were non-Indians. Ironically, she didn't teach her own children the
language, but now has taught her grandchildren many phrases in
Comanche.

"As I grew older, I realized the mistake I, along with others, had
made," said Coosewoon, whose grandfather and uncles were Comanche Code
Talkers during World War II. "We robbed them of their culture and now
we are struggling to teach them what we can."

Doug Abrahams of Gannett News Service and Kurt Moore of The Marion Star
contributed to this report.

Originally published Sunday, June 1, 2003