From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Thu Oct 2 03:22:48 2003 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (Phil CashCash) Date: Wed, 1 Oct 2003 20:22:48 -0700 Subject: Blending native language, education & culture (fwd) Message-ID: Blending native language, education & culture Navajo-Hopi Observer- News By Rosanda Suetopka Thayer TC District Media Team http://www.navajohopiobserver.com/NAVAJOHOPIOBSERVER/myarticles.asp?P=827170&S=392&PubID=11368 TUBA CITY — With linguistic statistical studies proving Native American languages are in danger of becoming extinct and used less on a daily conversation basis, many tribes are starting to take drastic steps to ensure that their culture and language does not die. Tuba City Unified School District No. 15 sees tribal language loss as a serious issue for its 3,000-plus students and, on Sept. 24, devoted its annual Cultural Symposium to the idea of integrating tribal language in every aspect of curriculum activity. More than 26 presenters gave individual session workshops at the Tuba City High School as an annual in-service for its more than 500 staff members. Parents and the public in the surrounding Tuba City District area also participated in the sessions. The workshops addressed traditional technique and art forms, native consideration in modern research, cross parallels of different tribal cultures and native ways to relieve stress in the home and workplace. The importance of student character building using native language and traditional cultural considerations was another area of emphasis. TCUSD Associate Superintendent Dr. Harold G. Begay, who gave an opening address, spoke to the very heart of tribal language concerns. “It seems rather strange that there are many people across the U.S. today wanting formal status as federally-recognized tribes,” he said. “There are pending court litigations, on-going federal appeals for recognition as an Indian tribe, and each day we’re seeing more and more people of diverse backgrounds who have this desire to be recognized as indigenous peoples. “Meanwhile, we are also seeing more and more documentation about major indigenous language crisis or language decline and loss. Is this why we seeing more and more quest for formal Federal tribal recognition? This may be the beginning of a major pan-national tribal cultural renaissance. Dr. Begay pointed out revenue’s role in native culture’s revival. “It is pretty evident that the current resurgence in tribalism by many people across our nation is driven not by culture and language interest and revival but more by casino revenues, the potentially high profitable economics of tribalism,” he said. Is there a lesson to be learned from this? “Maybe if our language and culture had a price tag, or if there were dollars associated with it, we as speakers of our indigenous languages would have a thriving economy or even be millionaires.” Dr. Begay explained that the presenters would share their thoughts on the non-commercial aspects of sustaining our native language and culture. “We could also dialogue on the potential profitability of native language and cultures, seeing how we are an educational institution,” he said. “As an educational institution, it is important that we take the lead in shedding light on the value of our language and culture.” Dr. Begay stressed the importance of retaining native language. “You may also hear or have heard quite often that our language and culture are priceless,” he said. “If that is the case, why is it so expensive to have a traditional ceremony? “With English education, learning their language and culture is not priceless but rather, it is extremely expensive in more ways than one, especially with us as native peoples. There is a huge exacting cost incurred when we are native peoples lose ourselves in English education.” According to Dr. Begay, there are many questions to raise on the value of native language. “As you go about the country, we often hear other nationalities converse with their young in their native tongue,” he said. But, with our native peoples, we seem to make it a point to converse with our children in only one foreign language, the English language. Why? “I am hoping that today’s speakers and presenters will allow us the opportunity to dialogue on the value of our native language and culture, not only for the present, but for years to come.” Tuba City District currently has a Navajo language program developed for grades kindergarten to 12t grade and, in the spring of 2004, will implement a Hopi language program for its junior high and high school students. The Hopi language classes have been a long time in coming and have been highly anticipated by its TC high’s Hopi student population. The focus of this Hopi language project will be to provide an educational support from the TC district for a teen population to be fluent in everyday Hopi conversation. The materials and curriculum developed for Tuba City District will be under the guidance and support the Hopi Tribe’s Hopi Lavayi Project, Emory Sekaquaptewa, a professor of linguisitics at the University of Arizona in Tucson; and Sheila Nicolas, the director of American Indian Language Development Institute also located in Tucson. Tuba City District also designated last week Dual Language Week and encouraged all indigenous speaking people working at TC district to speak in their native language only. The idea was to help heighten the awareness and importance of maintaining and supporting original language and allowing the student population to hear languages from countries all around the world as well as their own local tribal languages. From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Thu Oct 2 13:26:23 2003 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (Phil CashCash) Date: Thu, 2 Oct 2003 06:26:23 -0700 Subject: $14.5 million in federal funds to boost Native school programs across the state (fwd) Message-ID: $14.5 million in federal funds to boost Native school programs across the state Thursday, October 2, 2003 By ERIC FRY JUNEAU EMPIRE © 2003 http://www.juneauempire.com/stories/100203/loc_culture.shtml The office of Sen. Ted Stevens announced this week that $14.5 million in federal funds will go to Native education programs in Alaska. In Juneau, the money will help expand a Tlingit-oriented elementary school program, continue a popular science summer camp that has a Native focus and provide home educational and social services to preschoolers. The funding comes from the U.S. Department of Education under the Alaska Native Education Equity Act, an amendment sponsored by Stevens, an Alaska Republican, to the federal No Child Left Behind Act. Among this year's 32 grants, funds will go toward distance learning for rural school aides, CD-ROMs and books about Yup'ik culture, vocational training, development of Athabascan- and Inupiaq-oriented math and science curricula and family literacy. The Juneau School District received a $497,613 grant to expand its Tlingit-oriented classrooms at Harborview Elementary School to the fifth grade and to prepare more schools to add such classrooms. The classes, which include non-Natives, incorporate Tlingit language and culture in the curriculum. The program, now in its fourth year, has 48 students from kindergarten to fourth grade in two multi-age classrooms. The fifth-grade expansion could take place next school year, and the program could start up in other district schools two years from now, said Assistant Superintendent Bernie Sorenson. A recent study of the program's first three years showed that most of its students read at the appropriate grade level, and on average the classes do as well as, or better than, other classrooms in the district on reading and writing tests. The Juneau schools also received a $455,806 grant to continue Camp W.A.T.E.R. - a science- and Native-oriented summer program in its seventh year - and to offer academic help and after-school activities to those students throughout the school year. The summer camp serves about 40 middle school students a year, about half of whom are Native. The camp's name stands for wilderness, adventure, traditions, exploration and research. Both grants are the first year of a three-year appropriation. "The grants that we're trying to target are ones where we're looking at successful programs or at least promising practices, and figure out how to make them continue beyond the life of the grant," Sorenson said. The Southeast Regional Resource Center, a statewide nonprofit educational organization based in Juneau, received $520,000 to continue its ANSWER Camps, a summer program for rural seventh- and eighth-graders. The camps, now in their seventh year and held in Sitka, have offered science, math and Native ways of knowing to about 180 students a year in recent years. The latest grant is the first year of a three-year grant. But it's smaller than usual, and unless SERRC finds more funds, the program will serve fewer students next summer, said Sheryl Weinberg, the program director and SERRC's associate director. "We have married traditional values and content - Native ways of knowing - with Western academic content," Weinberg said. "We have data that shows that (ANSWER) camp makes a difference in academic performance, success in high school, attitudes toward math and science, and how they see themselves as students," she said. The Tlingit-Haida Central Council, whose services include Head Start preschool programs, received $412,500, the first of three annual grants. It will pay for a program called Creating Cultural Foundations, which will develop a Tlingit-oriented curriculum for preschoolers at home and in Head Start centers. The grant also will pay for home-based educational and social services to preschoolers and their families in Juneau, Petersburg and Craig/Klawock, said Jackie Tagaban, the Head Start assistant manager. "It's a wonderful opportunity for us at a time when the political climate is looking at English-language acquisition," Tagaban said. "An important foundation for young children is to be able to connect with their culture in school, which typically has not been the case." Sealaska Heritage Institute in Juneau received $467,772 to develop curriculum and teaching materials for Haida-language programs for young children in Hydaburg, on Prince of Wales Island. The grant will allow the institute to work with all 10 Alaskans who speak Haida fluently, said Rosita Worl, the institute's president. "The primary objective really is to develop the curriculum so it can be taught in schools," Worl said. "Students who have the opportunity to study in their Native heritage language do better academically." In other Southeast grants, Hoonah schools received $269,128 for a program in which parents teach their children. And Craig schools received $353,168 for a math teacher who will work with struggling children and their caregivers, and for parenting education, day care and transportation. • Eric Fry can be reached at efry at juneauempire.com. From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Thu Oct 2 13:32:06 2003 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (Phil CashCash) Date: Thu, 2 Oct 2003 06:32:06 -0700 Subject: Gaelic survey 'hugely significant'(fwd) Message-ID: Gaelic survey 'hugely significant' Gaelic survey 'hugely significant' (fwd) Gaelic survey 'hugely significant' Gaelic survey 'hugely significant' Gaelic survey 'hugely significant' MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" Content-Disposition: inline Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable User-Agent: Internet Messaging Program (IMP) 4.0-cvs Gaelic survey 'hugely significant' Story from BBC NEWS: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/3156980.stm Published: 2003/10/02 08:27:51 GMT More than two thirds of people in Scotland consider Gaelic to be an important part of Scottish life, according to a survey. Almost 90% of those questioned were in favour of allowing children to learn the language in school. However, a similar number admitted that they did not know how to read or speak Gaelic. The survey was jointly funded by the BBC and B=C3=B2rd Gaidhlig na h-Alba, the Gaelic development agency, to identify the need for a multi-media language learning resource. MRUK questioned 1,020 people in August, 87% of whom admitted that they had no knowledge of the language. More opportunities However, 66% agreed that Gaelic is an important part of Scottish life which needs to be promoted. A majority of those questioned said there should be more opportunities to learn Gaelic and that more Scots should try to learn the language. There was also support for the extension of bi-lingual education, while 87% were in favour of school children being allowed to learn Gaelic. This research... demonstrates the unique standing of Gaelic in the cultural identity of Scotland B=C3=B2rd Gaidhlig na h-Alba chairman Duncan Ferguson said the findings were "extremely encouraging". The organisation is preparing the first national plan for Gaelic development in Scotland. Mr Ferguson said: "The fact that almost 90% of the Scottish population believe Gaelic medium education should be available where there is demand is hugely significant, particularly at a time when the Scottish Executive is preparing to bring forward a Gaelic language bill for consultation. "There has been anecdotal evidence in the past suggesting that there was a substantial level of support for Gaelic across Scotland. "This research now confirms this, and it also demonstrates the unique standing of Gaelic in the cultural identity of Scotland. 'Exciting project' "This is good news for Gaelic and for Scotland as a whole, in that it demonstrates the recognition and value attached to Scottish cultural heritage." The agency's chief executive Alan Campbell said it was the first time scientific evidence had backed up its belief about Gaelic's popularity. David Crystal, professor of linguistics at the University of Wales, said he was "absolutely thrilled" at the results. But he warned that the language would have to be helped more than just by "ticking a box in a survey". Margaret-Mary Murray, BBC Scotland's Gaelic executive editor, said the study was the first major Scotland-wide research on attitudes to the language in recent years. "BBC Scotland will be using its findings to inform the development of an exciting new project aimed at creating a new language learning resource for Gaelic. "It will encompass programming for television, radio, online services and printed materials that will appeal to a broad audience," she said. From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Thu Oct 2 13:37:29 2003 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (Phil CashCash) Date: Thu, 2 Oct 2003 06:37:29 -0700 Subject: Lecture ponders dying culture (fwd) Message-ID: Lecture ponders dying culture By Erin Raterman http://www.dailylobo.com/news/510939.html Women in Guatemala have seen civil war destroy not only their lives and society, but also their culture and language, a UNM associate professor says. But Melissa Axelrod is researching ways to preserve Guatemalan language and culture and help the women who have suffered through 36 years of war. Axelrod, an associate linguistics professor, spoke to a crowd of more than 50 at the SUB on Wednesday about more than two months of research on "La Violencia" - the toll the conflict is exacting on the country's society. Axelrod said she is baffled by the way the Guatemalan women have not only survived, but succeeded in a battered economy and an uncertain future. "Even though many of these women have lost their families and children, they were able to survive," she said. "These women found a way to build a life with nearly nothing." Axelrod said the Guatemalan women are an example of the human spirit's triumph. She and three other American women have traveled to Guatemala four times in the last two years to study the region's indigenous women and their dying language. She said she hopes her research will help the Guatemalan women maintain their traditional knowledge, which is in danger from the civil war. Axelrod plans on donating any money produced by her research to help preserve their culture and rebuild the country's economy. Axelrod's lecture was the first of a three-part Brown Bag lecture series planned for this semester. UNM's Women Study Program and the Feminist Research Institute are sponsoring the series. The lectures are free and provide UNM students the opportunity to learn about various research University faculty members are conducting, said Gail Houston, associate UNM English professor. Houston said Axelrod was an ideal speaker to kick off the lecture series because of her acclaimed expertise in women's studies. Axelrod said she plans to apply for a grant from the National Science Foundation in January to create a dictionary of the Guatemalan women's native language. She is going to return to Guatemala in late December and again in the summer to continue her research, she said. Axelrod recently received the 2003 Susan Geiger award for her research in Guatemala. The award, established last year, is meant to recognize women who have made considerable advancements in cross-cultural research projects for women studies. For the last 20 years, Axelrod has focused her work on the study and documentation of indigenous languages throughout the world. From pasxapu at DAKOTACOM.NET Thu Oct 2 13:38:58 2003 From: pasxapu at DAKOTACOM.NET (phil cash cash) Date: Thu, 2 Oct 2003 06:38:58 -0700 Subject: Gaelic survey 'hugely significant'(fwd) In-Reply-To: <1065101526.2b218d5a6067c@www.email.arizona.edu> Message-ID: oops... phil UofA, ILAT On Thursday, October 2, 2003, at 06:32 AM, Phil CashCash wrote: > Gaelic survey 'hugely significant' > Gaelic survey 'hugely significant' (fwd) > Gaelic survey 'hugely significant' > Gaelic survey 'hugely significant' > Gaelic survey 'hugely significant' > > MIME-Version: 1.0 > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" > Content-Disposition: inline > Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable > User-Agent: Internet Messaging Program (IMP) 4.0-cvs > > Gaelic survey 'hugely significant' > > Story from BBC NEWS: > http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/3156980.stm > > Published: 2003/10/02 08:27:51 GMT > > More than two thirds of people in Scotland consider Gaelic to be an > important part of Scottish life, according to a survey. > > Almost 90% of those questioned were in favour of allowing children to > learn the language in school. > > However, a similar number admitted that they did not know how to read > or > speak Gaelic. > > The survey was jointly funded by the BBC and B=C3=B2rd Gaidhlig na > h-Alba, > the Gaelic development agency, to identify the need for a multi-media > language learning resource. > > MRUK questioned 1,020 people in August, 87% of whom admitted that they > had no knowledge of the language. > > More opportunities > > However, 66% agreed that Gaelic is an important part of Scottish life > which needs to be promoted. > > A majority of those questioned said there should be more opportunities > to learn Gaelic and that more Scots should try to learn the language. > > There was also support for the extension of bi-lingual education, while > 87% were in favour of school children being allowed to learn Gaelic. > > This research... demonstrates the unique standing of Gaelic in the > cultural identity of Scotland > > B=C3=B2rd Gaidhlig na h-Alba chairman Duncan Ferguson said the > findings were > "extremely encouraging". > > The organisation is preparing the first national plan for Gaelic > development in Scotland. > > Mr Ferguson said: "The fact that almost 90% of the Scottish population > believe Gaelic medium education should be available where there is > demand is hugely significant, particularly at a time when the Scottish > Executive is preparing to bring forward a Gaelic language bill for > consultation. > > "There has been anecdotal evidence in the past suggesting that there > was > a substantial level of support for Gaelic across Scotland. > > "This research now confirms this, and it also demonstrates the unique > standing of Gaelic in the cultural identity of Scotland. > > 'Exciting project' > > "This is good news for Gaelic and for Scotland as a whole, in that it > demonstrates the recognition and value attached to Scottish cultural > heritage." > > The agency's chief executive Alan Campbell said it was the first time > scientific evidence had backed up its belief about Gaelic's popularity. > > David Crystal, professor of linguistics at the University of Wales, > said > he was "absolutely thrilled" at the results. > > But he warned that the language would have to be helped more than just > by "ticking a box in a survey". > > Margaret-Mary Murray, BBC Scotland's Gaelic executive editor, said the > study was the first major Scotland-wide research on attitudes to the > language in recent years. > > "BBC Scotland will be using its findings to inform the development of > an > exciting new project aimed at creating a new language learning resource > for Gaelic. > > "It will encompass programming for television, radio, online services > and printed materials that will appeal to a broad audience," she said. > From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Tue Oct 7 16:41:14 2003 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (Phil CashCash) Date: Tue, 7 Oct 2003 09:41:14 -0700 Subject: TEACHING YAQUI LANGUAGE (fwd) Message-ID: TEACHING YAQUI LANGUAGE High-tech tools http://www.azstarnet.com/star/mon/31006PASCUAYAQUICOMPUTERS.html [PICTURE] David Sanders / Staff Frankie Coronado, 9, left, and Estevana Buenamea, 6, work on a cultural project with a movielike program using the new Intel computers. [PICTURE] David Sanders / Staff Olivia Morillo, the Intel computer clubhouse coordinator, and her daughter Angelica, 13, watch a movie Angelica made using the technology that includes video, digital cameras and music software. By Sarah Garrecht Gassen ARIZONA DAILY STAR Pascua Yaqui children will use the latest in technology to help preserve and learn their traditional language through a new computer clubhouse. The Intel computer clubhouse, which is sponsored by the technology giant, will give Yaqui children ages 8-18 access to powerful computers, video programs, digital cameras and music software through an after-school program. Students will team with tribal elders to make documentaries about their culture and language, said Eugenia Echols, Intel education manager at the clubhouse. Fewer than 150 people out of about 13,000 tribal members in Arizona are fluent in the traditional Yaqui language, said Maria Amarillas, administrator of the tribe's language development department. "We're on the move now and hopefully our language will not die," she said. Amarillas and other fluent speakers will record audio and video language tutorials at the clubhouse. Children can pull those up when they're at the clubhouse and will also make their own, Echols said. The Pascua Yaqui Intel Computer Clubhouse is the third of its kind built on American Indian land, Echols said. Intel sponsors 86 computer clubhouses around the world. Children are already linking their traditional culture with current technology at the clubhouse. They created a short video of a Deer Dancer, taken from a painting in the clubhouse, animated the figure against a golden sunset and set the production to Yaqui music. Kids at the clubhouse were joking about needing Hollywood agents to get them big-time movie deals as they created their own short videos complete with special effects. "Remember how I made a bomb come out of my hand before?" 11-year-old Miguel Robles asked his friend at the computer. "I erased that by accident." Students ask several adults for help when necessary, but they learn the computer programs by doing and asking each other. "I just play around with the computers and learn them," said Jasmine Cupis, 11. "If I really want to do something and it sounds interesting, I learn it fast." Jasmine said the new technology will help her artistic side flourish. "It can help you with your creativity and your imagination," she said. "It can help you create things you didn't know you wanted to do - any art you do could be abstract art or using color gradations or drawing something the way it looks." Jasmine, like several other students, was having fun putting her own photo in improbable places, like outer space and in a rainbow. "You can have your body with somebody else's head," she said. "I think this will help me with my future and what I can do with computers." * Contact reporter Sarah Garrecht Gassen at 573-4117 or at sgassen at azstarnet.com. From sdp at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Tue Oct 7 18:02:03 2003 From: sdp at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (Sue Penfield) Date: Tue, 7 Oct 2003 11:02:03 -0700 Subject: Fw: Indian Education Grants Announced Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- Subject: Indian Education Grants Announced FOR RELEASE September 30, 2003 Contacts: Elaine Quesinberry (202) 401-1576 U.S. Department of Education Office of Public Affairs, News Branch 400 Maryland Ave., S.W. Washington, D.C. 20202 NEARLY $105 MILLION IN INDIAN EDUCATION GRANTS ANNOUNCED Indian tribes, schools and state and local agencies that serve Indian children will share nearly $105 million in grants to improve education opportunities for nearly half a million Indian students, U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige said today. "The U.S. Department of Education recognizes and reaffirms the special relationship of the federal government to American Indians and their sovereign tribal nations, and we renew our commitment to educational excellence and opportunity for American Indian and Alaska Native children," Secretary Paige said. "President Bush believes every child should have access to a high-quality education, and that American Indian children are no exception." On behalf of Secretary Paige, Office of Indian Education Director Vicki Vasques made the announcement during a meeting of tribal college presidents sponsored by the White House Initiative for Tribal Colleges and Universities. Today's grant announcement includes $5 million in competitive grants for professional development, college preparation, and early childhood education, and nearly $100 million in formula grants to help 1,200 local education agencies improve the education opportunities for approximately 470,000 Indian students. Activities funded by the grants may include services to students from preschool to high school in areas such as family-based preschool; partnerships between schools and universities to assist and encourage students in transitioning from high school to college; enrichment programs to increase Indian children's achievement in one or more core academic subjects; programs to increase the rate of secondary school graduation; programs that preserve and teach the native language and culture; and programs to increase the number of new, highly qualified Indian individuals in professions that serve Indian people. Individuals who receive training under the Professional Development Program are required to perform work that is related to the training received and that benefits Indian people, or else they are required to repay all or a prorated part of the assistance received. President Bush created the White House Initiative on Tribal Colleges and Universities in July 2002 to ensure that the nation's 34 Tribal Colleges and Universities are more fully recognized and have full access to federal programs that benefit other postsecondary institutions. Tribal colleges and universities serve more than 30,000 full-time and part-time students and offer vocational certificate programs and associate, bachelor's and master's degrees. These institutions are often the only postsecondary institutions in some of our nation's poorest rural areas and serve a variety of people, including young adults, senior citizens, American Indians and non-American Indians. President Bush's 2004 budget proposal includes a 5 percent increase for tribal colleges and universities, bringing the total requested amount to $19 million. The president has proposed funding increases for these programs for the past two fiscal years. More information about the White House Initiative on Tribal Colleges and Universities is available at http://www.ed.gov/about/inits/list/whtc/edlite-index.html. More information about Indian education grants is available from the Office of Indian Education at http://www.ed.gov/aout/offices/list/ous/oie/contacts.html. # # # New Indian Education Discretionary Grants for 2003 SLATE FOR NEW AWARDS -- CFDA 84.299A DEMONSTRATION GRANTS FOR INDIAN CHILDREN APPLICANT STATE FY 2003 PINE RIDGE SCHOOL, SD, $267,211 NATIVE AMERICAN YOUTH ASSOCIATION, OR, $381,078 SHONTO PREP TECHNOLOGY HIGH SCHOOL, AZ, $22,288 GILA RIVER INDIAN COMMUNITY, AZ, $284,335 PRIBILOF SCHOOL DISTRICT, AK, $360,888 SAN PASQUAL VALLEY UNIFIED SCHOOL DISTRICT, CA, $369,644 MESCALERO APACHE SCHOOL, NM, $300,500 CONFEDERATED TRIBES OF GRAND RONDE, OR, $199,455 FLANDREAU INDIAN SCHOOL, SD, $365,239 TOTAL $2,550,638 SLATE FOR NEW AWARDS -- CFDA 84.299B PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT APPLICANT STATE FY 2003 CROSS CULTURAL EDUCATION CENTER, INC., OK, $445,548 UNITED TRIBES TECHNICAL COLLEGE, ND, $372,754 UNIVERSITY OF OREGON, OR, $264,070 TOHONO O'ODHAM COMMUNITY COLLEGE, AZ, $499,303 UNIVERSITY OF UTAH, UT, $498,397 HOPI TRIBE, AZ, $442,391 TOTAL $2,522,463 Message distributed to American Indian Disability Technical Assistance Center list at the request of Julie Clay, by: Diana Spas, Information Coordinator Research and Training Center on Disability in Rural Communities The University of Montana Rural Institute: A Center for Excellence in Disability Research, Education and Services 52 Corbin Hall Missoula, MT 59812-7056 (888)268-2743 (406) 243-5760 (my office) (406) 243-2349 fax http://rtc.ruralinstitute.umt.edu http://aidtac.ruralinstitute.umt.edu -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- X-Sieve: CMU Sieve 2.2 Resent-Date: Wed, 1 Oct 2003 08:42:15 -0600 From: "Diana Spas" To: "AIDTAC Distribution List" Subject: Indian Education Grants Announced Date: Wed, 1 Oct 2003 08:45:23 -0600 X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2800.1158 Sender: owner-aidtac at ruralinstitute.umt.edu Resent-From: aidtac at ruralinstitute.umt.edu Resent-Cc: recipient list not shown: ; X-Virus-Scanned: by amavisd-new at email.arizona.edu X-Spam-Status: No, hits=2.7 required=7.0 tests=HOT_NASTY, HTML_10_20, HTML_MESSAGE, US_DOLLARS_3 X-Spam-Level: xx FOR RELEASE September 30, 2003 Contacts: Elaine Quesinberry (202) 401-1576 U.S. Department of Education Office of Public Affairs, News Branch 400 Maryland Ave., S.W. Washington, D.C. 20202 NEARLY $105 MILLION IN INDIAN EDUCATION GRANTS ANNOUNCED Indian tribes, schools and state and local agencies that serve Indian children will share nearly $105 million in grants to improve education opportunities for nearly half a million Indian students, U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige said today. "The U.S. Department of Education recognizes and reaffirms the special relationship of the federal government to American Indians and their sovereign tribal nations, and we renew our commitment to educational excellence and opportunity for American Indian and Alaska Native children," Secretary Paige said. "President Bush believes every child should have access to a high-quality education, and that American Indian children are no exception." On behalf of Secretary Paige, Office of Indian Education Director Vicki Vasques made the announcement during a meeting of tribal college presidents sponsored by the White House Initiative for Tribal Colleges and Universities. Today's grant announcement includes $5 million in competitive grants for professional development, college preparation, and early childhood education, and nearly $100 million in formula grants to help 1,200 local education agencies improve the education opportunities for approximately 470,000 Indian students. Activities funded by the grants may include services to students from preschool to high school in areas such as family-based preschool; partnerships between schools and universities to assist and encourage students in transitioning from high school to college; enrichment programs to increase Indian children's achievement in one or more core academic subjects; programs to increase the rate of secondary school graduation; programs that preserve and teach the native language and culture; and programs to increase the number of new, highly qualified Indian individuals in professions that serve Indian people. Individuals who receive training under the Professional Development Program are required to perform work that is related to the training received and that benefits Indian people, or else they are required to repay all or a prorated part of the assistance received. President Bush created the White House Initiative on Tribal Colleges and Universities in July 2002 to ensure that the nation's 34 Tribal Colleges and Universities are more fully recognized and have full access to federal programs that benefit other postsecondary institutions. Tribal colleges and universities serve more than 30,000 full-time and part-time students and offer vocational certificate programs and associate, bachelor's and master's degrees. These institutions are often the only postsecondary institutions in some of our nation's poorest rural areas and serve a variety of people, including young adults, senior citizens, American Indians and non-American Indians. President Bush's 2004 budget proposal includes a 5 percent increase for tribal colleges and universities, bringing the total requested amount to $19 million. The president has proposed funding increases for these programs for the past two fiscal years. More information about the White House Initiative on Tribal Colleges and Universities is available at http://www.ed.gov/about/inits/list/whtc/edlite-index.html. More information about Indian education grants is available from the Office of Indian Education at http://www.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ous/oie/contacts.html. # # # New Indian Education Discretionary Grants for 2003 SLATE FOR NEW AWARDS -- CFDA 84.299A DEMONSTRATION GRANTS FOR INDIAN CHILDREN APPLICANT STATE FY 2003 PINE RIDGE SCHOOL, SD, $267,211 NATIVE AMERICAN YOUTH ASSOCIATION, OR, $381,078 SHONTO PREP TECHNOLOGY HIGH SCHOOL, AZ, $22,288 GILA RIVER INDIAN COMMUNITY, AZ, $284,335 PRIBILOF SCHOOL DISTRICT, AK, $360,888 SAN PASQUAL VALLEY UNIFIED SCHOOL DISTRICT, CA, $369,644 MESCALERO APACHE SCHOOL, NM, $300,500 CONFEDERATED TRIBES OF GRAND RONDE, OR, $199,455 FLANDREAU INDIAN SCHOOL, SD, $365,239 TOTAL $2,550,638 SLATE FOR NEW AWARDS -- CFDA 84.299B PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT APPLICANT STATE FY 2003 CROSS CULTURAL EDUCATION CENTER, INC., OK, $445,548 UNITED TRIBES TECHNICAL COLLEGE, ND, $372,754 UNIVERSITY OF OREGON, OR, $264,070 TOHONO O'ODHAM COMMUNITY COLLEGE, AZ, $499,303 UNIVERSITY OF UTAH, UT, $498,397 HOPI TRIBE, AZ, $442,391 TOTAL $2,522,463 Message distributed to American Indian Disability Technical Assistance Center list at the request of Julie Clay, by: Diana Spas, Information Coordinator Research and Training Center on Disability in Rural Communities The University of Montana Rural Institute: A Center for Excellence in Disability Research, Education and Services 52 Corbin Hall Missoula, MT 59812-7056 (888)268-2743 (406) 243-5760 (my office) (406) 243-2349 fax http://rtc.ruralinstitute.umt.edu http://aidtac.ruralinstitute.umt.edu -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From dzo at BISHARAT.NET Tue Oct 7 20:42:52 2003 From: dzo at BISHARAT.NET (Don Osborn) Date: Tue, 7 Oct 2003 22:42:52 +0200 Subject: Native Language Email (article) Message-ID: Greetings! I am new to this list and am looking over some off the archives. Hope it's okay to comment on some older postings. Matthew Ward's comments are very interesting. I've personally noticed the evolution of e-mail and the internet in Chinese over the last decade or so (my wife is Chinese). In the case of Africa and African languages things are moving also, though the sociolinguistic terrain varies and has some differences from much of Asia (the higher prominence of former colonial languages being one, less of a written tradition, non-use of maternal languages in instruction, and in the case of some less-spoken languages, lack of standard orthography). One wonders about the potential for more multimedia uses of ICT, including more creative use of audio, as the lines between technologies become more blurred. >From a technical point of view, there are no particular problems for text e-mail for languages using basically the same Latin alphabet as West European languages. For the many languages using modified letters and those using non-Latin scripts the technical hurdles are no more insurmountable than those faced in Asia. Oddly it sometimes seems that the orthographies with extended Latin orthographies have more issues, because there may only be a few characters outside the European character set - one can get by with substitute measures, more or less, and if you use the extended characters, still some browsers and many e-mail readers mess them up. Just recently on the Unicode-Afrique list, someone actually wondered about creating an ISO-8859 for the Latin transcription of Tamazight (not likely to happen, and a backwards step from implementation of Unicode if it did). Re the MailAfrica.net e-mail system that Phil Cash Cash brought to the list's attention, there has also been another one out there for a while at http://www.africast.com . Haven't checked to see if the two are intercompatible. Don Don Osborn, Ph.D. dzo at bisharat.net *Bisharat! A language, technology & development initiative *Bisharat! Initiative langues - technologie - développement http://www.bisharat.net Date: Wed, 13 Nov 2002 10:52:11 -0700 From: Matthew Ward Subject: Re: Native Language Email (article) Good article, thanks. I lived in Asia in the 1990's and the early part of this decade, and I witnessed an amazing revolution in terms of native language use of e-mail and Internet. In Thailand in the early 90's, for example, e-mail use was restricted to an elite who could communicate in English, as then-current technology could not handle the Thai writing system. Technological advances not only caused most people to switch to Thai, they also brought in the majority of Thais who do not speak English. Today, the idea of writing e-mail in English to other native speakers of Thai would seem quaint indeed to most Thai teenagers, who have already grown up with technology which allows them to use their native language online with ease. People who are fluent in English may use it to communicate with native speakers of other languages, but native speakers of Thai now use almost exclusively Thai to communicate among themselves. This revolution has also occurred in Japan and Taiwan, the other two Asian countries that I have lived in. Now, with the need to write e-mail in English already a thing of the past, the new trend has been towards e-mail programs which allow minority languages and dialects to be used, which lessens the dependance on national Asian languages like Standard Japanese, Standard Thai, and Mandarin Chinese. Last year, my Japanese wife and I were riding a train in Japan, and she was transfixed by a huge advertisement for a program which would allow her to write her native dialect, Kansai Japanese, online. The advertisement showed what would happen if you input Kansai Japanese into a standard program (the computer would "misread" the phonetic input) vs. what would happen if you used the program advertised (the program would correctly interpret the phonetic input). It is my experience that if you create technology which allows people to easily use their native languages online, they will do it, just as people prefer to use all other technologies in their native languages. The only real challenge is creating the technology and making it available to everyone. Matthew Ward Phil Cash Cash wrote: >Dear ILAT members, > >Many of you might find this recent news interesting where e-mail is used >for African languages such as Swahili, Kikuyu, Luaya, Luo, Yoruba, Hausa >and Igbo. Below is a link to the article, "Kenyan Company Creates Native >Language Email Services." > >http://www.time.com/time/interactive/stories/technology/inside_africa.html > >Enjoy! Note the multimedia links as well. > >Phil Cash Cash (cayuse/nez perce) >ILAT, UofA > > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From dzo at BISHARAT.NET Tue Oct 7 20:44:12 2003 From: dzo at BISHARAT.NET (Don Osborn) Date: Tue, 7 Oct 2003 22:44:12 +0200 Subject: Microsoft translates software into African languages (fwd) Message-ID: FYI, there is also an opensource translation effort for South African languages at http://translate.org.za that has been ongoing for a while. (It's good to have both.) Don Osborn Bisharat.net Date: Sat, 27 Sep 2003 20:33:18 -0700 From: Phil CashCash Subject: Microsoft translates software into African languages (fwd) Microsoft translates software into African languages http://www.sundaytimes.co.za/2003/09/28/business/technology/tech10.asp A software tool that will help computer programs to be translated into six African languages has been developed by Microsoft. Zulu and Afrikaans programs are ready for demonstration after three months of work by six members of Microsoft's technical team. The other languages in development are Setswana, Xhosa, Swahili and Sepedi. The software makes it easier for people speaking indigenous languages to get to grips with technology. [ . . . ] -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Wed Oct 8 06:49:54 2003 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (Phil CashCash) Date: Tue, 7 Oct 2003 23:49:54 -0700 Subject: Winnebagos mourn Whitewater (fwd) Message-ID: Winnebagos mourn Whitewater By Michele Linck, Journal staff writer http://www.siouxcityjournal.com/articles/2003/10/08/news/regional/27dfd9853bca379186256db900197c50.txt WINNEBAGO, Neb. -- The Winnebago Tribe is mourning the death of a beloved elder today, but also remembering the legacy he left for them to carry on. Stanford Whitewater Sr., 90, died Sunday at his home in Winnebago, which he shared with his wife of 66 years, Marie Wolf Whitewater. After earning his living as a farmer and working for the Burlington Northern Railroad, Whitewater dedicated his final years to teaching and preserving Ho-Chunk, the tribe's native language, and its culture. It was a passion that had always been close to his heart, three of his daughters recalled Tuesday. They are among 11 children born to the Whitewaters. Nine survive. They spoke at the Blackhawk Community Center here, where their father's body lay in state, attended by five generations of the family and many members of the community who had come to pay respects. "The older kids grew up speaking Ho-Chunk," Thelma Whitewater remembered. "I guess we weren't into learning it when he wanted to teach it," said daughter Gloria Sheridan. "He always tried to teach us. Like a lot of people, we didn't care about it until it was almost gone. We aren't the only ones. They say there are only 20 people left who speak it." Marie Whitewater, 84, noted that both Stanford and herself had gone to government-run Indian schools where they were forced to learn and speak English and were punished for "talking Indian." Perhaps that explained his dedication for preserving his native tongue. Whitewater taught Ho-Chunk any place he could, but more formally at Little Priest Tribal College for more than 10 years, until his health failed. In the last few years, he held class in his home three times a week, with students gathered at the kitchen table. "He had one student who came back to learn the language," Sheridan said. "In four years, he turned her into a fluent speaker. He's gone now, but she's going to carry it on." That student was Elaine Rice. Like Whitewater, Rice became a Ho-Chunk instructor at the tribal college. She has recently left to be an instructor in a new language and culture program, the Winnebago Renaissance Project. Just two years old, it has a staff of 17, including two VISTA volunteers. Rice said she feels the same urgency as Whitewater to preserve Ho-Chunk. "He kept the language alive in the academic community," said Rice, who had studied under Whitewater since 1995. "He was one of the few who was willing to teach it in a formal setting." Along with teaching youngsters the language, the project is building on the 2,700 audio tapes of Ho-Chunk words and lessons recorded by Whitewater while teaching at Little Priest. "He never gave up," Sheridan said. "He said it was real important, that everything we do has to do with our language." His family remembers a 'simple man' Marie Whitewater remembered her husband as a man of peace and a spiritual leader in the community. He woke daily before dawn and went outside the house to pray, in the tradition way. The last time he was able to walk, he went outside for prayer and built a ceremonial fire. Even on his sickbed, people came to him for spiritual guidance, Thelma Whitewater said. The daughters recalled Whitewater's love of the land and acute observations of the natural world. Even after he no longer farmed, he kept a garden. Until a year ago he would still drive his tractor. And until a few years ago, he would go get the mail and run back up the driveway. Even a year ago, he was still doing traditional dancing at powwows. Sheridan remembered her father as such a good storyteller, that a friend dropping by his house on a brief errand once found he was still there five hours later. Naturally he stayed for dinner. Another time, she said, Morman missionaries dropped by. Whitewater, who spear-fished for carp, told them he was going fishing, but they could come along and talk to him. Pretty soon, they were all standing in deep water, white shirts and all. Stanford Whitewater was also a musician. He played saxophone, drums and harmonica. One time during the big band era he and his band were performing in North Sioux City while Lawrence Welk was also in town, they said. Whitewater was 'Eagle Man' The caption beneath a photo of Whitewater displayed near his casket among some awards and flowers, reads "Caxsep-ga." It is his name in Ho-Chunk and means "Eagle Man." Beside it is the honorary degree of Doctorate of Humane Letters, bestowed upon him by Little Priest Tribal College during the tribe's annual powwow in July. The community now refers to him as Dr. Whitewater. The college had named a scholarship after him in March. Whitewater was named 1996 Elder of the Year by the National Indian Education Association, an award presented to him in a ceremony in Rapid City, S.D. Whitewater was the father of 11 children, grandfather to 50, great-grandfather to 99 and great-great-grandfather to seven, with five more great-great grandbabies expected to be born soon. In the traditional way, the family planned to stay up all night Tuesday, playing "moccasin games" and remembering Whitewater. Then, the daughters will perform a ritual, putting new clothes on their mother and combing her hair, a sign she is a "free woman." Whitewater's funeral will be Thursday. From mward at LUNA.CC.NM.US Wed Oct 8 21:27:07 2003 From: mward at LUNA.CC.NM.US (Matthew Ward) Date: Wed, 8 Oct 2003 15:27:07 -0600 Subject: Native Language Email (article) Message-ID: Welcome, Don Below is an expanded account of my personal observations about language and technology in Asia. It repeats some of the same information as before, but if you didn't read my first post, or if you are interested in finding out more, you might find it interesting: When I was living in Asia in the 1990's, computer technology relating to Asian languages was evolving with remarkable speed. In the early 90's, it was extremely inconvenient to use non-Latin Asian writing systems over the Internet, hence the small number of speakers of those languages who used the Internet tended to use English, other European languages, or romanized versions of their own languages. Now, in 2003, the situation has completely changed--the idea of not using one's native language on the Internet has already become incredibly quaint. Go to an Internet cafe in Taiwan or Thailand (two of the countries that I have lived in) and you will see young natives of those countries writing to each other exclusively in their native languages. Indeed, this has become a necessity, because while, for example, the small minority of Thai businessmen who used the Internet to communicate with each other in the early 90's could write English well enough to communicate, now that even tiny rural villages in Thailand have Internet cafes, the large majority of Thais would not be able to communicate well in English even if they did not now have the technology that allows them to communicate in Thai. It has been a kind of circular revolution: the technology has allowed people to use the Internet in their own languages, which in turn has brought huge numbers of new users and new native-language content, which in turn has spurred more technological development. My wife is an interesting example: she is Japanese, but was living in Guatemala for a short time in the 90's. By that time, Japanese-language e-mail was well established in Japan, but it was not a feature you could count on having on computers outside of Japan. Her e-mail messages to other Japanese people during that time were mainly romanized Japanese (which is not particularly easy to read), with some English and Spanish words mixed in. As soon as the technology allowed her to write in Japanese, she immediately switched to the Japanese writing system. Japanese-language software, also allowed her, by the way, to have a very wide access to Japanese language media, even while she was not living in Japan. A couple of years ago, we were living in Osaka, Japan. One evening, we were going home on the train, and she suddenly got very excited, and pointed out a large advertisement. In fact, most of the people in the car seemed to be discussing that advertisement. It was for software for her native dialect, the Kansai dialect, which is quite different from standard Japanese. It showed two examples of phonetically inputing the Kansai dialect into a word processor. The first was using normal software, which would result in the program misreading variant Kansai-dialect grammatical particles as Chinese-character vocabulary items. Correcting this would require time-consuming manual input which would discourage the writer from using the dialect on a personal computer at all. The second example showed the same phonetic input using the new Kansai-dialect software, which would correctly "read" the variant grammatical particles, resulting in a much quicker and more easy writing experience; one which certainly encourages Kansai-dialect speakers to write e-mail in their own dialect, rather than in Standard Japanese. Now, in Japan, as in most of the rest of the world, the minority languages and dialects are losing ground to the "standard," dominant native language--in effect, standard Japanese is swallowing other Japanese dialects, as well as other traditional languages like Ainu and Okinawan. The Kansai dialect is bucking this trend, however--in my experience, it is the dialect that the vast majority of Kansai children speak at home--there is no question that it is the dialect that my wife will speak to our future children. Part of this stems from the reality that Kansai people have made it very cleare that they want the media and technology to be available to them in their own dialect. As in the case of the software program I mention above, the demand is creating a supply, which in turn reinforces the continuing viability of the dialect. Another good example of this is in Hong Kong--although the software for most minority (non-Mandarin) Chinese languages has not yet been sufficiently developed, Chinese language software for speakers of Cantonese (which includes a fairly large number of characters which are used in Cantonese but not in Mandarin) is very widely available and widely used. The Chinese language software I have on my computer at home, for example, includes Cantonese characters. Although I personally have no understanding of Cantonese, the software I downloaded for Mandarin Chinese included software for Cantonese characters as well. With this state of affairs, you can imagine that Cantonese speakers have a much easier time writing in their own dialects than do speakers of other non-Mandarin Chinese languages, and that this contributes to the very healthy state of the Cantonese language. Obviously, most indigenous people find themselves in a much more difficult situation than do the Kansai Japanese or Kong Kong Chinese, the latter which enjoy great economic power and large regions with millions of native speakers of local dialect or language. Still, there is no question in my mind that developing software for all languages has tremendous benefits. It is certainly a huge incentive to people to use their own native languages on computers, online and in e-mail. Since there seems to be a wide degree of agreement that in order for languages to continue to be viable in the long-term, they need to be able to be used in all contexts, making the computer technology available to speakers of all languages is one of the most important things that needs to be accomplished. With that in mind, I have to say this: given the tremendous complexity of the Chinese and Japanese writing systems, if those two languages can be made fully operational on computers and online (as, indeed, they have) then the technical aspects of writing indigenous languages (which are, worldwide, mostly written in some form of the Latin alphabet) cannot really be a huge obstacle. Don Osborn wrote: > Greetings! I am new to this list and am looking over some off the > archives. > Hope it's okay to comment on some older postings. > > Matthew Ward's comments are very interesting. I've personally noticed the > evolution of e-mail and the internet in Chinese over the last decade or so > (my wife is Chinese). In the case of Africa and African languages things > are moving also, though the sociolinguistic terrain varies and has some > differences from much of Asia (the higher prominence of former colonial > languages being one, less of a written tradition, non-use of maternal > languages in instruction, and in the case of some less-spoken languages, > lack of standard orthography). One wonders about the potential for more > multimedia uses of ICT, including more creative use of audio, as the lines > between technologies become more blurred. > > From a technical point of view, there are no particular problems for text > e-mail for languages using basically the same Latin alphabet as West > European languages. For the many languages using modified letters and > those > using non-Latin scripts the technical hurdles are no more insurmountable > than those faced in Asia. Oddly it sometimes seems that the orthographies > with extended Latin orthographies have more issues, because there may only > be a few characters outside the European character set - one can get > by with > substitute measures, more or less, and if you use the extended characters, > still some browsers and many e-mail readers mess them up. Just > recently on > the Unicode-Afrique list, someone actually wondered about creating an > ISO-8859 for the Latin transcription of Tamazight (not likely to > happen, and > a backwards step from implementation of Unicode if it did). > > Re the MailAfrica.net e-mail system that Phil Cash Cash brought to the > list's attention, there has also been another one out there for a while at > http://www.africast.com . Haven't checked to see if the two are > intercompatible. > > Don > > Don Osborn, Ph.D. dzo at bisharat.net > *Bisharat! A language, technology & development initiative > *Bisharat! Initiative langues - technologie - développement > http://www.bisharat.net > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Thu Oct 9 16:49:42 2003 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (Phil CashCash) Date: Thu, 9 Oct 2003 09:49:42 -0700 Subject: Revised Language Act fails to impress (fwd) Message-ID: Revised Language Act fails to impress WebPosted Oct 8 2003 09:13 AM CDT YELLOWKNIFE http://north.cbc.ca/regional/servlet/EmailStory?filename=oct08nwtlanguag08102003®ion=North The N.W.T.'s Official Languages Act is about to undergo a major revision. The new Act is almost exactly what a special review committee recommended earlier this year. But the changes come at the eleventh hour, only after the chair of that committee blasted the government for the bill it initially proposed. Tu Nedhe MLA Steve Nitah accused the government of foot-dragging for the late notice given of a public hearing held Tuesday night on revisions to the Act. "By the time we agreed on a bill for first and second reading, for public hearings that happened we had less than 48 hours to notify the public," he says. The revised act proposes two new boards: one to revitalize aboriginal languages, and another to allow each language group a say about the delivery of government services in different official languages. That's one more board than the review committee proposed. People who deliver language programming at the community level say that's duplication and a waste of money. Sabet Biscaye works to help preserve and promote the Chipewyan language. "If money becomes available, we'd certainly like to use it at the community level to continue with our programming," he says. "Just because they're going to use existing money doesn't mean it couldn't be diverted back to the communities." Inuktitut to remain on list At the public hearing there was also discussion of dropping one of the 11 official languages. The Inuvialuit requested that Inuktitut be deleted from the act. They don't want to share Inuit-specific language funding with the few Inuktitut-speaking people who live in the Northwest Territories. The legislative committee reviewing the bill rejected the call. From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Fri Oct 10 17:06:45 2003 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (Phil CashCash) Date: Fri, 10 Oct 2003 10:06:45 -0700 Subject: Inuktitut fluency overstated, watchdog says (fwd) Message-ID: October 10, 2003 Inuktitut fluency overstated, watchdog says Statistics Canada survey could mislead decision-makers: Eva Aariak PATRICIA D'SOUZA http://www.nunatsiaq.com/news/nunavut/31010_06.html The overwhelming strength of the Inuktitut language reported in Statistics Canada's Aboriginal Peoples Survey last month does not reflect the reality in Nunavut, the territory's language watchdog says. Statistics Canada researchers collected data from about 9,000 Inuit in 53 communities in the Canadian Arctic, including 4,500 Nunavummiut. Of those, 90 per cent of adults and children reported being able to speak or understand an aboriginal language. About 89 per cent of adults and 70 per cent of children said they could speak it relatively or very well. But in an interview last week, Nunavut Language Commissioner Eva Aariak said the numbers sound surprisingly high for a language that has been in steady decline for the past 50 years. The 2001 Nunavut Household Survey reported that three-quarters of the territory's population identified Inuktitut or Inuinnaqtun as the first language learned at home. That's a more accurate reflection of the current state of the language, Aariak said. And the most recent census, which included Inuit respondents in southern Canada, found that 82 per cent spoke and understood enough Inuktitut to carry on a conversation. Karen Kelly-Scott, an Statistics Canada analyst on the Aboriginal Peoples Survey, said the word "understand" may account for the high numbers. Many more people can understand at least part of their mother tongue than actually speak it. But the danger of the Aboriginal Peoples Survey's high numbers, Aariak said, is that they could threaten future support for programs aimed at strengthening the Inuktitut language in Nunavut. "It's great to have figures at that level at this point, but on the other hand, I hope that it will not portray to the decision-makers that, hey, the Inuktitut language is surviving well so we don't have to worry about it," Aariak said. "It's not like that." However, Statistics Canada researchers did not evaluate language proficiency as they collected their data, so the numbers do not indicate the true strength of Inuktitut in the Canadian North. What they do indicate is the individual perceptions of a sample group of Inuit who were asked to rate their ability to speak or understand Inuktitut. And what that shows, Aariak said, is an overwhelmingly strong desire to speak and understand Inuktitut, regardless of actual ability. "There is that desire by the young people to learn their language, especially since the creation of Nunavut. There is this enhanced sense of expectation that, hey, now that we have our own territory, our culture and language will be more present and more readily available for me to learn," she said. The problem is that the language has not actually been more readily available to learn. The desire to learn Inuktitut among Inuit youth has not been paired with the tools of instruction, a reality that the Aboriginal Peoples Survey does not accurately reflect. "The increasing number of people who are not learning [Inuktitut] is evident among the youth especially," Aariak said. "Perhaps the reason it's surviving is that there's enough [instructional] spaces to date that are keeping it alive, but still, our government has stated that Inuktitut will be the working language of government by the year 2020." But the resources aren't available to help Inuit who are functional but not fluent in Inuktitut improve their language skills. "We have young civil servants now who are recruited after Grade 12 and post secondary who are not very comfortable in their written and comprehension levels in Inuktitut. And in our schools, the [Inuktitut] language of instruction only goes up as far as Grade 3 or 4 and not much beyond that," she said. "There is a high expectation from the younger generation that these kinds of programs will be available to them, but they're not readily available to them yet." But if they were, Aariak said, the Inuktitut levels in Nunavut would soar. "Fifty years ago in our environment, the majority of people in Nunavut were unilingual Inuktitut-speaking people. And the decrease in the numbers of speakers, the rapid decrease, is kind of scary within that short period of time," she said. "We learned our English language skills from school only. It wasn't taught at home.... I think it's very well understood that speaking the Inuktitut language at home is most desirable, but in today's society, we also have to supplement it from outside the home. "What you're learning at home is mostly spoken word in Inuktitut. And that has to be enhanced by teaching Inuktitut in terms of proper speaking, reading and writing. And that is in the hands of our education system today." Survey participants in the four Canadian Arctic regions were asked, "Who helps children learn an aboriginal language?" [see original for statistics] From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Fri Oct 10 21:35:25 2003 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (Phil CashCash) Date: Fri, 10 Oct 2003 14:35:25 -0700 Subject: Keeping a voice alive (fwd) Message-ID: Keeping a voice alive Squamish Nation puts together CD-ROM to teach its language   By Todd Lawson Reporter http://www.squamishchief.com/madison%5CWQuestion.nsf/SClocal/84FBCC402C1DBF7A88256DBB006371DF?OpenDocument   In the early 19th century, the Squamish Valley was populated with 16,000 First Nations peoples who lived with a deep respect and understanding of the land and spirits around them. Through a culture of tradition and celebration, the natives forged a strong bond between each other as time passed. To communicate with members from other tribes and strengthen this connection, the natives developed a rich language called Skomish Snachem – a language that has nearly been wiped out from a once-thriving culture. When the Europeans came to settle in the valley in the early 1800s, they brought with them diseases that had never before been experienced by the natives — not to mention a steadfast desire to eradicate Native culture altogether. Traditional longhouses, a meeting ground for ceremonies and rituals, were burnt to the ground. Potlatch gatherings were disallowed and speaking in their native tongue was strictly forbidden. Those who were caught speaking Skomish Snachem were beaten and whipped by church and government officials. As a result of disease and constant abuse, a proud and healthy society was, in a matter of years, decimated to just 320 survivors. The remaining populace, represented by 16 different tribes, formed the Squamish Nation in 1923 and struggled to keep their way of life in a white man’s world. Along with the language, a culture began to die. Today however, fuelled by the desire to keep the traditional language from becoming extinct, a group of Squamish First Nations locals have collaborated on a history-making learning tool to prevent this tragedy from happening. Spearheaded by Shirley Lewis, a language and culture worker at Totem Hall, a unique Squamish Nation Education CD-ROM has been produced to teach the Skomish Snachem language to anyone willing to learn. “When I first started working for the education department, I saw the need to revitalize our traditional language,” said Lewis. “We need to save part of our culture. The language is almost extinct and if we don’t do something now it will be gone.” Her vision was shared by Totem Hall Education Director Joy Joseph McCullough, and together they started the intensive project after receiving funding from the First Peoples Heritage and Language Culture Council. Lewis quickly came to realize, producing an accurate, user-friendly learning device is not an easy task. She decided to get some help, and began by enlisting the expertise of local photography/media expert Dave Humphreys as project manager, who would oversee the many different multi-media aspects involved. Humphreys became involved in the project as a result of attending First Nations gatherings — drum circles, sweat lodges and fire-walking ceremonies, at every opportunity possible. “When they approached me with the idea, I was definitely interested because it was something completely new,” said Humphreys, who was responsible for everything from conceptional ideas to working with “super-talented” local software developer Peter Wellnhofer, to organizing native art, photography, graphic design and printing and packaging. “I learned to take things one step at a time,” said Humphreys. “There were so many different aspects involved—it was a huge project. It was an honour to work with the Squamish First Nations and help them build something that they’re proud of. The storytelling was amazing, and for them to share their legends with me was really honourable—they’re very kind-hearted people.” The CD-ROM features strong visuals and a bold, easy-to-follow layout geared towards anyone with even the most basic computer skills. By simply clicking the mouse on any English word you would like to learn in Skomish Snachem, an image appears followed by the voice of any one of the three Squamish Nation elders who provide the translated word in the ancestral language. The CD-ROM teaches aspects of human relations, Indian implements, nature’s environment, nature’s elements, body parts, emotions, dwelling, clothing, domestic animals, wild animals, sea animals, reptiles, insects, birds, numbers and colours. The project would not have been possible without the voices and knowledge behind the words. Addie Kermeen and Alex Williams, Squamish First Nations elders fluent in Skomish Snachem, along with Alice Harry, are the only remaining natives who speak the language in the Squamish Valley. Besides lending their voices to provide proper pronunciation of all language covered in the instructional CD, the elders shared a vast amount of tradition and culture, which gave the project a completely authentic feel. Growing up speaking English as a child, Alice Harry was taught the native language as a little girl at the old Totem Hall by the late Dominic Charlie. Along with her father Ernie Harry and the late Chief Alvie Andrews, they began to develop what she now calls “our Bible” — a detailed categorization of all words in Skomish Snachem. “I thank the Creator for blessing me with this gift,” she says of her language, “but as we say, it is not a gift unless we share it.” On the opposite side of the spectrum, Addie Kermeen spoke Skomish Snachem from birth, and didn’t learn any English until the age of 12. Because she didn’t attend the feared residential schools where the language was beaten out of all native children, she was able to teach her children and grandchildren the traditional and cultural ways of her people. “I didn’t go through the punishment because I stayed at home, so I was able to pass on the language to my kids,” said Kermeen, born on the Seachim Reserve in 1936. Alex Williams was also born on the Seachim Reserve, and started his first job at the age of 13 in the booming logging industry. He struggled to connect with the white man as he never spoke a word of English, but was forced to learn quickly. “I had to learn — [the logging workers] had a lot of fun with me because I couldn’t speak properly but I did it,” said Williams. At the time, Williams and many other Squamish Nation natives were caught between a white man’s world and a native world, they didn’t know where they belonged — their culture was becoming lost. This was the main reason he was more than happy to lend his voice to the project. “We’d like to see the younger generations come back to their language. The trouble is they’re not interested. So if we can teach them some of their history and traditions—it’ll keep them out of trouble.” Currently, the CD-ROM is being taught by First Nations support workers in all schools in the Howe Sound School District where native students are enrolled, as well as in nursery schools and day cares. According to Lewis, a future vision for the education department is to have an immersion school for children from Kindergarten to Grade 5 that will focus primarily on studying the language. “The project is aimed towards First Nations youth who are willing to become part of the process to bring back the language and culture—they both go hand in hand. The kids are all learning on computers now so we had to get something in front of them. We’ve never had a tool like this before.” Although the traditional way of learning Skomish Snachem involves passing it down from the elders to the youth, the First Nations society has chosen to embrace technology in a bid to save the language. “We’re using technology to help us to get the community to learn the language. It’s not the traditional method but it’s a great way to get people to learn. We’re very fortunate to be able to hold onto it and pass it down — it’s our way of life.” From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Mon Oct 13 16:36:22 2003 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (Phil CashCash) Date: Mon, 13 Oct 2003 09:36:22 -0700 Subject: Experts speak out to save Midwestern tribal tongues (fwd) Message-ID: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0310120457oct12,1,6043008.story?coll=chi-newsnationworld-hed Experts speak out to save Midwestern tribal tongues By Tom Nugent Special to the Tribune October 12, 2003 EAST LANSING, Mich. -- Drop by professor Helen Roy's Native American linguistics class at Michigan State University on a typical afternoon and you'll probably find her drilling a dozen students on difficult-to-pronounce words such as bmijigoe. The word, loosely translated, means a dress in the Ojibwe language once spoken by Native Americans across the Midwest. But teaching grammar and pronunciation to university students is only part of 55-year-old Roy's educational mission. As a Native American, she is engaged in a passionate struggle to save her tribal language, a Michigan version of the Algonquin-family language, Ojibwe, from vanishing within the next few decades. Like Ojibwe, more than 30 Native American languages in the Midwest are threatened with extinction during the next 20 to 30 years, according to linguistics researchers. Increasingly, American Indian parents are insisting that their children concentrate on English to get good jobs, those experts say. Meanwhile, some Midwestern tribal leaders warn that only a handful of their elderly members still are able to speak the native tongue fluently and that when they die, the traditional language will vanish along with them. For Roy and many other Native American language teachers, the prospect of "losing our language" is a potential tragedy. "I'm teaching a language, but I'm also teaching a way of life," Roy said. "If we lose the [Ojibwe] language, the danger is that we'll also lose the culture to which it belongs. I don't think anyone one wants that to happen, and that's why we work so hard in class every day." But teachers such as Roy face an uphill battle, said Wayne State University linguistics expert Anthony Aristar, who is directing efforts to build a nationwide, $2 million database aimed in part at preserving dying languages. Aristar and other researchers say that at least half of America's 200 remaining native languages will vanish within the next century. More than words disappear "Losing a language is a major setback for everyone, because along with the language, you will also lose all of the poems, the stories, the songs," Aristar said. "And those things are of immense importance to all of us as human beings. "On the other hand, we have to accept the fact that many families choose to have their children learn the language of the mainstream culture, so they can land good jobs and gain economic power." Aristar predicts that perhaps as many as 500 of the world's approximately 6,500 languages will become extinct in the next few decades. He said the chances for preserving the 30 or so Native American tribal languages still spoken in the Midwest are "not very good, if you look at the history involved." "I think the Native American languages that will survive are probably those in the West--Navajo, for example--where the local Indian tribes were not nearly as injured and fragmented as those around the Great Lakes. "Unfortunately, I think it will be very difficult for [Midwestern] languages such as Potawatomi and Ojibwe to survive beyond the next few decades," he added. Regardless of the long odds against them, however, many Native American language researchers and teachers are not giving up the fight. "I spend a lot of time working with tribal elders and doing my best to tape and preserve their language," said Monica Macaulay, a University of Wisconsin linguistics professor who has spent six years compiling a dictionary of the Menominee language spoken by the 8,800-member Menominee Nation in Wisconsin. "We have collected more than 11,000 words for this bilingual dictionary," said Macaulay, "and that's important because there are only about 40 elderly members of the tribe who can still speak the language fluently. I'm trying to document as much of the language as I can, so I drive out there [to the Menominee reservation] every month and tape and tape and tape!" Roland Marmon, a North Dakota Turtle Mountain Ojibwa who teaches at White Earth Tribal and Community College in Mahnomen, Minn., said it is important for Native Americans to study their languages to preserve their cultural identity. `Sense of empowerment' "Many of our students find that studying Ojibwe is a good way to get in closer touch with their own culture," Marmon said. "For students who feel like they've lost their Native American roots, learning the original language can bring a new sense of empowerment and identity." George Cornell, director of the Native American Institute and a professor of linguistics at Michigan State, said there are "important historical reasons to study languages," regardless of their future viability. "All you have to do is ask, `Why study Latin?'--a language that's been dead for a thousand years--and then you realize how much these Native American languages have to teach us," said Cornell, a Native American. To illustrate how language can "open a window" on culture, he cited an incident several years ago when he asked a tribal member in Ontario, Canada, to define the word aki. The Ojibwe word usually is translated as the Earth. "The elder thought about it for a while," Cornell explained, "and then he looked at me and said, `Aki means that which is sacred!'" Copyright © 2003, Chicago Tribune From Jon.Reyhner at NAU.EDU Mon Oct 13 21:10:48 2003 From: Jon.Reyhner at NAU.EDU (Jon Reyhner) Date: Mon, 13 Oct 2003 14:10:48 -0700 Subject: Eleventh Annual Stabilizing Indigenous Languages Conference Message-ID: The Eleventh Annual Stabilizing Indigenous Languages Conference will be held at the University of California at Berkeley on June 11-15, 2004. More information will follow in early spring regarding registration and a call for papers. Also, Nurturing Native Languages with papers from the 8th, 9th, and 10th Stabilizing Indigenous Languages conferences is now available on-line at http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~jar/NNL/ Nurturing Native Languages includes two articles related to technology: Sustaining Indigenous Languages in Cyberspace by Courtney B. Cazden and Saving a Language with Computers, Tape Recorders, and Radio by Ruth Bennett Jon Reyhner http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~jar/ From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Fri Oct 17 16:23:53 2003 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (Phil CashCash) Date: Fri, 17 Oct 2003 09:23:53 -0700 Subject: Language, culture focus of Indian event (fwd) Message-ID: Language, culture focus of Indian event BEE STAFF REPORTS American Indian culture and language are the focus of the third annual Native California People's Fall Gathering, set for Saturday at San Luis Reservoir State Recreation Area. The Mutsun Language Foundation sponsors the event in conjunction with the state Parks and Recreation Department. The public is invited. The foundation aims to revive the Mutsun (pronounced moot-soon) language of the Amah-Mutsun Indians who lived in the Central California coastal region and inland to what is now Interstate 5. Organizers of the fall gathering said the event will feature dancing and storytelling, arts and crafts, the making of necklaces with abalone and other shells, and a talk on traditional herbs and medicines. Also planned are demonstrations of basket making, fire making and soap root brush making. The program also lists tule boat races and traditional games. Food booths will serve hamburgers and Indian tacos, organizers said. The gathering is scheduled from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. at the San Luis Creek picnic grounds. The recreation area is off Highway 152 west of the junction of Highway 33, west of Los Banos and south of Santa Nella. Organizers noted a $4 park day-use fee per car, and advised people to bring lawn chairs, hats and sunscreen, and blankets for the evening. Posted on 10/17/03 08:50:14 http://www.modbee.com/local/story/7604586p-8512431c.html From andrekar at NCIDC.ORG Fri Oct 17 23:45:22 2003 From: andrekar at NCIDC.ORG (Andre Cramblit) Date: Fri, 17 Oct 2003 16:45:22 -0700 Subject: Inter-Tribal (Announcement) Message-ID: Please consider donating time or money to help celebrate all Elders in our Community!! The Northern California Indian Development Council is pleased to host the 22nd annual Elders Dinner and Inter-Tribal Gathering. The Gathering is an annual event established to HONOR ALL ELDERS OF THE NORTHWESTERN CALIFORNIA REGION, and also in keeping with the spirit of THANKSGIVING and NATIONAL AMERICAN INDIAN HERITAGE MONTH. This years event will include traditional Indian dance demonstrations, Inter-Tribal dancing, Indian card games, authentic Indian Arts and Crafts exhibits and sales, and the Dinner. The Dinner will be served from 12 Noon to 5 p.m. on Saturday and includes salmon baked on sticks the traditional Indian way, and turkey with all the trimmings. There is no charge for entrance to the Gathering and the main gates open at 10 AM. The dinner is free to all Elders (Age 55 & Over). For those under 55 a $6.00 donation for dinner tickets is requested. This event is sponsored by The Northern California Indian Development Council but relies on the assistance of community partners and volunteers to help make the day a success. Donations are needed to support this effort. If you would like to volunteer please contact Anna House at (707) 445-8451 To download a full color copy of this years poster please go to: http://www.ncidc.org/nwit.htm From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Mon Oct 20 04:44:42 2003 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (Phil CashCash) Date: Sun, 19 Oct 2003 21:44:42 -0700 Subject: Linguist helps preserve Vanuatu languages (fwd) Message-ID: Massey News 20 October, 2003 Linguist helps preserve Vanuatu languages http://masseynews.massey.ac.nz/2003/masseynews/oct/oct20/stories/24-18-03.html As an anthropological linguist, Dr Martin Paviour-Smith immerses himself in a language and its people. A linguist’s work towards language preservation is a misunderstood mission, he says. Dr Paviour-Smith is part of a Marsden-funded three-person team which will collect and study languages in the Vanuatu islands, working with the people to develop their own systems of conservation. “Vanuatu has the highest number of languages per person in the world – 110 among 180,000 people at the last count. Very few of the dialects have more than 1000 speakers, and consequentially, there are a high proportion of struggling or endangered languages.” With Professor Terry Crowley from Waikato University and Dr Liz Pearce from Victoria University, Dr Paviour-Smith, from the School of Language Studies, will travel to the island of Malakula for three months each year for the next three years. Professor Crowley will focus on moribund languages (with fewer than 20 speakers), Dr Pearce on the Unua dialect and Dr Paviour-Smith on the closely-related Aulua dialect. He has lived for several months previously in the Aulua village for the first stage of his project developing an orthography (writing system) that he hopes will one day be used in the island’s schools. Missionaries first set an orthography in the 1880s, which was later swamped when the Vanuatu government legislated the use of English or French in schools. Dr Paviour-Smith says the gradual introduction of international languages has been responsible for a shift in the importance people place on languages and the number of people who use the vernacular. “Traditionally people knew more than one language so they could communicate between villages but now the prevalence of French and English and the Creole language Bislama means most young people are more confident speaking Bislama than Aulua.” He explains that, depending on which year a child started school, they may learn in either English or French, so siblings are not necessarily schooled in the same language. “But because children leave school around age 11, they are not proficient in English, French or Aulua.” When he returns to Malakula, and the village of Aulua, Dr Paviour-Smith will help the people compile a dictionary while continuing with the orthography. “There was great interest in my getting a dictionary together, but the real value lies in these people taking control of their situation, setting a precedent for other villages.” Staying in Aulua (population 500) is crucial to his task; being with the community for up to three months at a time will enable him to collect a comprehensive set of language rules and patterns beyond grammar. “Social factors, such as they way children are taught language and stories, are integral to linguistic research. In Aulua, children are prompted by their families to call out to other families, in the dark at night before the village settles down for the night. Other children will call back with the appropriate response prompted by their families and so learn this particular oral tradition.” He says traditions such as story-telling, which is particularly strong among the Aulua islanders, are vital when learning and documenting a language. “It is really important to collect big pieces of language like stories, to see how words are put together. In Aulua when someone has finished telling a story to a group they say ‘kusve kusve’, or ‘thanks for listening and I hope you enjoyed it’ all in one. The group will then yell ‘kusve kusve’ back.” Dr Paviour-Smith is currently working on a collection of Kastom (fables and histories) in the language and recently lectured Massey staff and students on Kastom narrative features. He has documented a recurrent theme within stories in which women, or a female animal in a fable, burn their own houses to the ground. “This is basically a trick used by the character to return to her own family – when a woman in Aulua marries, she leaves her home and family to live in her husband’s village. To burn her house is to reject her obligations and duties, it is a statement.” He will collect more stories and Kastom over the next few years. From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Mon Oct 20 17:36:44 2003 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (Phil CashCash) Date: Mon, 20 Oct 2003 10:36:44 -0700 Subject: NSF Funding Opportunities (fwd) Message-ID: NSF Funding Opportunities http://www.nsf.gov/home/programs/recent.cfm Universal Access - nsf03612 (Posted: Sep 30 2003) http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2003/nsf03612/nsf03612.htm Human Language and Communication - nsf03613 (Posted: Sep 29 2003) http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2003/nsf03613/nsf03613.htm Digital Society and Technologies - nsf03611 (Posted: Sep 29 2003) http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2003/nsf03611/nsf03611.htm Human-Computer Interaction - nsf03610 (Posted: Sep 29 2003) http://www.nsf.gov/pubsys/ods/getpub.cfm?ods_key=nsf03610 Deadline:  Most of these have a Jan 2004 deadline.   From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Tue Oct 21 07:30:34 2003 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (Phil CashCash) Date: Tue, 21 Oct 2003 00:30:34 -0700 Subject: Campers learn about their tribal language (fwd) Message-ID: Campers learn about their tribal language They also created a CD that will allow the tribes to share what the youths learned with other young people. By Jessica Delos Reyes of the Union-Bulletin Monday, October 20, 2003 http://www.union-bulletin.com/main.asp?SectionID=1&SubSectionID=1&ArticleID=18813 MISSION - "We're to always teach our children, so they will know our Indian ways." "Taa minwa na sapskiwata naami miyanishma Kupa shugwata naami tananawit." The program opens with this song and images of children in regalia projected onto a screen. Children point at their images and giggle as they snack on pizza and cake. Few are aware they created a tool for future generations to learn the Imatalam (Umatilla) language, one spoken by only about 17 people. Nine of the original 12 elementary school campers of the Flash Story Camp were honored during a reception Friday at the Tamastslikt Cultural Institute. The campers devoted three hours a day, Monday through Thursday this summer to learning their language. With Flash software, they also produced "Coyote Chef," a program with language games and each camper's rendition of the story of "Spilyay Kuukithla," as told to them by instructor Thomas Morning Owl. Spilyay (Coyote) tricks the Squirrel people into cooking themselves for his meal. Flash is an interactive multimedia program campers used to mix animation and sound. The program was made possible through a $20,000 grant from First Nations Development in collaboration with Tamastslikt's Language Enhancement Program and Education Department, and the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation. The Flash Story Camp was modeled after the elementary school language program by the Tulalip tribe in Marysville, Wash. Students there used technology to learn the Lushootseed language from instructor David Cort. Prior to Tamastslikt's camp, Cort conducted a one-week Flash training for instructors. "Students of this age are capable of picking up a second language very readily," Cort said in a news release. "It's their nature to understand technology in a heartbeat." Mildred Quaempts, language coordinator for Tamastslikt and one of the camp instructors, said most of the students had never really been exposed to their native language. She estimated 50 people still speak the three languages of the Confederated Tribes: Imatalam (Umatilla), Walla Walla and Nez Perce, spoken by Cayuse native speakers. Camp instructor Tessie Williams said the CDs will be distributed to area tribal governments and schools. From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Wed Oct 22 19:09:07 2003 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (Phil CashCash) Date: Wed, 22 Oct 2003 12:09:07 -0700 Subject: Proud time for Mohawk grandmothers (fwd) Message-ID: Proud time for Mohawk grandmothers PEGGY CURRAN The Gazette Wednesday, October 22, 2003 http://www.canada.com/montreal/montrealgazette/columnists/story.asp?id=C92FA476-1024-450C-AA94-282BC6E83993 As a little girl growing up in the 1950s, Tiorensawes Zachary loved to listen to her mother talking to her grandmother and great-uncle in their native Mohawk. But when they spoke to her, Tiorensawes answered in English, the new language she was learning from the nuns at school in Kahnawake. "My grandmother barely spoke more than a few words of English," said Zachary, 53. "She was always disappointed that I couldn't speak to her in our own language." A generation later, Karahkwénhawe Goodleaf, 22, learned Mohawk at the immersion school in Kahnawake. For conversation outside the classroom, she had to visit her great-grandmother. Her parents had never learned the language. It's a proud week for grandmothers. Zachary, Goodleaf and 15 other students from Kahnawake are to receive Certificates in Aboriginal Education at McGill University's fall convocation tomorrow. It's the first time the program, launched in 1993 in conjunction with the Cree School Board, has been offered in Mohawk. Last week, 23 Mi'kmaq students in Wagmatook, N.S., collected diplomas after completing a two-year program offered in Cape Breton through McGill's Office of First Nations and Inuit Education. Donna Lee Smith, director of the McGill program, said those who enroll know the native language, but must brush up oral and written skills before they can teach. It's hoped many will get a bachelor's of education. Most have found work as language assistants in neighbourhood schools in their communities. In doing so, they are helping to prop up indigenous languages, at risk from English, what Mark Abley, author of Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages, calls "the Wal-Mart of languages." Of the dozens of languages once spoken by Canada's aboriginal peoples, only Cree, Inuktitut and Ojibway are still relatively healthy. "All the others are at risk or have disappeared," Smith said. Among the endangered ones, Mohawk is in a better position than most. "There's so much passion behind the effort to have it stabilized. And there are Mohawk-speaking elders still young and energetic enough to take on the job of teaching the language to others. Elders like Dorothy (Karihwénhawe) Lazore, who started teaching Mohawk at Howard S. Billings High School in Châteauguay more than 30 years ago. When Kahnawake introduced an immersion program for elementary school in 1981, Lazore was recruited to teach Grade 1 - and eventually became the school's principal. An Akwesasne Mohawk who speaks six languages, Lazore was an obvious choice when Eddie Cross, director of education services in Kahnawake, asked McGill to offer the program on the South Shore reserve. Lazore and Konwaronhiá:wi Deer spent last year teaching McGill students at the United Church hall in Kahnawake. Now they're working on a curriculum to help Mohawk-language teachers explain grammar, legends and even traditional speech patterns. Cross said the program met a desperate need to replace teachers who were rapidly approaching retirement age. But with only about 5 per cent of adults in Kahnawake fluent in the language, the community is looking to bolster use of Mohawk beyond the classroom - through radio and TV broadcasts, the Internet and adult language lessons. Smith said aboriginal education programs have "a ripple effect" as students speak to their children, parents and pupils. Like Cross, however, she favours other initiatives to get people to speak indigenous languages on a daily basis. Yet after half a century of listening, Zachary finds she can't speak her language enough. She's proud to say she can read and write Mohawk, even prouder to be able to chat with her aunt in the mother tongue she was once too shy to speak. "Oh my gosh, it's who we are." pcurran at thegazette.canwest.com © Copyright 2003 Montreal Gazette From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Wed Oct 22 19:17:08 2003 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (Phil CashCash) Date: Wed, 22 Oct 2003 12:17:08 -0700 Subject: 13 year old Tibetan boy able to tell world's longest epic (fwd) Message-ID: 13 year old Tibetan boy able to tell world's longest epic www.chinaview.cn 2003-10-22 16:40:05 http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2003-10/22/content_1137240.htm LHASA, Oct. 22 (Xinhuanet) -- Allegedly having had a dream, a 13-year-old Tibetan boy has since been able to tell Tibetans' most respected story about a legendary hero -- King Gesser, which is also the longest epic in the world. This has aroused enormous interest among experts to explain the boy's mysterious capability. The boy, named Sitar Doje in the Tibetan language, is a fifth-grade student at a local elementary school in Shading Town, Banbar County in Qamdo Prefecture. He said he fell asleep one day when hewas 11 years old, and woke up miraculously able to tell the story of King Gesser. Now the boy can talk and sing about the story for six consecutive hours. The 10-million-word Tibetan epic portraying legendary hero King Gesser has more than 200 parts that have been passed down from generation to generation as oral works of folk art. According to Tibetan tradition, people who learned to tell the epic story through dreaming are addressed as "God-taught Master." In Tibet, many epic-tellers since ancient times claimed that they had learned to tell the story in dreams. Cering Puncog, vice director of the Ethnic Institute of the Tibetan Academy of Social Sciences, said there have been many excellent talkers of the King Gesser story in Qamdo Prefecture. Hesaid Sitar Doje became a capable talker probably because he had listened to old talkers' presentations many times, thought of themvery often in his mind and dreams, and finally recited the epic asa "natural" talker. The Cultural Bureau of Qamdo Prefecture has dispatched staff to check the boy's ability and video tape a live performance of the boy. Cering Puncog said the most interesting point is that the boy was an educated person who has almost finished his elementary schooling, receiving a modern education. So he is far different from old story talkers most of whom were illiterate. Among the 40 best talkers publicly acknowledged in Tibet, only four can read. For example, Samzhub, a 82-year-old Tibetan folk story-teller, is regarded as the master of talking and singing Gesser. Although unable to read a single word, the old man can tell 65 parts of the epic, totaling more than 20 million words. The Tibetan edition of a five-part King Gesser, compiled according to Samzhub's telling about the long story, was published in 2001. China has about 140 Gesser story-telling masters. They are mainly from three ethnic groups that had some close relation with the legendary King in their ancient culture: Tibetans, Mongolians or Tu ethnic people. These masters are all now cherished as "national treasures." According to Cering, far fewer people can talk and sing Gesser's story, and most living talkers are in their late years. The 13-year-old boy who can talk and sing about the epic indicates that the valuable oral heritage has young successors and can survive inmodern times. To save the epic, the country has published the Academic Works Collection of Gesserology, edited by Zhao Bingli, a research fellow at the Academy of Social Sciences of Qinghai Province. There are two different views about the time of the creation ofthe epic: one says that the epic was produced in the period from the beginning of the Christian era to the 6th century, based on the story of a real tribal chief who tamed forces of evil such as ghosts and goblins, and safeguarded a stable environment for people. Some hold that the epic emerged between the 11th and 13th centuries, when Tibetans hoped for a hero to appear and unify separated Tibet. The Chinese government set up a special organization to save and catalogue the epic in 1979, and listed the research work as a major research program in every Five-Year Plan. Currently, Tibet has collected nearly 300 hand-written or woodcut copies of the epic. More than 3 million copies of the Tibetan version of the epic have been printed. The epic has been translated into Chinese, English, Japanese, French and other foreign languages. From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Thu Oct 23 16:31:40 2003 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (Phil CashCash) Date: Thu, 23 Oct 2003 09:31:40 -0700 Subject: CULTURE: UNESCO Unified over Diversity (fwd) Message-ID: CULTURE: UNESCO Unified over Diversity Julio Godoy http://www.ipsnews.net/interna.asp?idnews=20767 UNESCO director-general Koïchiro Matsuura will go ahead with preparing a binding convention to defend cultural diversity despite initial U.S. opposition. PARIS, Oct 23 (IPS) - This mandatory set of rules would give all countries the right to set policy to preserve and promote national production of cultural goods such as films, music recordings, and books, the international group agreed at a conference. Matsuura has two years to prepare a draft. He will do so after consulting international organisations ruling on international trade such as the World Trade Organisation, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, and the World Intellectual Property Organisation. A compulsory convention to protect cultural diversity is a long cherished project at UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation). UNESCO members had unanimously adopted a non-binding resolution over this in 2001. That declaration described cultural diversity as a ”common heritage of humanity” and considered its safeguarding a concrete and ethical imperative, inseparable from respect for human dignity. The convention became controversial after the United States rejoined UNESCO this year and announced at first that it would reject a binding convention. The United States returned to UNESCO last month after quitting the organisation in 1984. Members agreed to draft a binding convention at the 32nd UNESCO conference held in Paris Sep. 29 to Oct. 17. This conference brings members together every two years. With the return of the United States and East Timor joining, UNESCO now has 190 members. A record 3,580 delegates, including five heads of state and close to 300 ministers attended the conference in Paris. A mandatory convention to preserve cultural diversity was widely supported at the discussions. ”The world needs a convention to give every state the right to adopt or maintain the necessary public policies to preserve and develop its cultural and linguistic patrimony,” French President Chirac said in a speech ahead of the conference. ”Such a convention would support the uniqueness of cultural creation.” Chirac rejected the U.S. argument that a binding convention would restrain free circulation of cultural goods. ”Freedom flourishes within laws and rules, and gets strangled in anarchy,” he said. Several diplomats privately criticised U.S. opposition to the convention.. ”In the eyes of the U.S. government, culture is just another merchandise, and therefore there cannot be a cultural policy,” a Latin American diplomat told IPS earlier. Another diplomat said: ”It's obvious that the big film studios in Hollywood are behind this U.S. attitude.” Delegates, including the U.S. delegates, finally approved a resolution that ”cultural diversity, as regards the protection of the diversity of cultural contents and artistic expressions shall be the subject of an international convention.” The resolution calls on the director-general to submit a first draft convention to the next general conference in 2005. At this session delegates adopted several conventions on protection of cultural heritage, on human genetic data, and against doping in sport. UNESCO adopted the International Convention on the Preservation of the Intangible Cultural Heritage as a complement to the 1972 Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage, which concerns monuments and natural sites. This new convention aims to preserve oral traditions and expressions, including languages as vehicles of cultural heritage, as well as the performing arts, social practices, rituals and festive events, knowledge and practices concerning nature and the universe, and traditional craftsmanship. The convention needs to be approved by at least 30 states to take effect.. It provides for the drawing up of national inventories of cultural property, and the establishment of an Intergovernmental Committee for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage. The convention proposes in addition the creation of two lists: a Representative List of the Intangible Heritage of Humanity and a List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding. The first list has been drawn up partially after the last conference listed 19 Masterpieces of Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity. These include the Garifuna language, dance and music practised by communities of African origin in Belize, Honduras, and Nicaragua, the Oruro carnival in Bolivia, the Chinese Kunqu opera, Georgian polyphonic singing, the Indian Kutiyattam Sanskrit theatre, the Japanese Nogaku theatre, and the Sicilian opera puppet theatre. The conference also adopted a Declaration Concerning the Intentional Destruction of Cultural Heritage. This declaration recalls ”the tragic destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan” and expresses ”serious concern about the growing number of acts of intentional destruction of cultural heritage.” The declaration says countries should ”take all appropriate measures to prevent, avoid, stop and suppress acts of intentional destruction of cultural heritage, wherever such heritage is located.” The International Declaration on Human Genetic Data approved at the conference lays down ethical principles that should govern collection, processing, storage and use of genetic data. These principles include confidentiality and free consent. ”The privacy of an individual participating in a study using human genetic data, proteomic data or biological samples should be protected and the data should be treated as confidential,” the declaration says. UNESCO is also preparing to take on doping in sport. The conference approved a proposal made by a round table of ministers and senior officials in Paris in January this year to prepare an international convention against doping in sport. (END/2003) From andrekar at NCIDC.ORG Mon Oct 27 17:24:57 2003 From: andrekar at NCIDC.ORG (Andre Cramblit) Date: Mon, 27 Oct 2003 09:24:57 -0800 Subject: Go MAC Go (language) Message-ID: Two tribal school teachers" reach out to the world http://www.apple.com/ca/education/profiles/firstvoices/ English-speaking people can scarcely imagine losing their language, but many people around the world are facing this disturbing prospect. As transportation and telecommunication technologies make the world smaller, they also reinforce the dominance of a few modern language groups. Regional languages spoken by relatively small population groups, including Aboriginal peoples, risk extinction within a few generations as young people leave them behind. From sburke at CPAN.ORG Mon Oct 27 23:01:03 2003 From: sburke at CPAN.ORG (Sean M. Burke) Date: Mon, 27 Oct 2003 14:01:03 -0900 Subject: Go MAC Go (language) In-Reply-To: <3F9D54E9.344246A3@ncidc.org> Message-ID: At 08:24 AM 2003-10-27, Andre Cramblit wrote: >Two tribal school teachers" reach out to the world >http://www.apple.com/ca/education/profiles/firstvoices/ Which says: >What exactly is FirstVoices? It's an easy-to-use, secure, cost-effective >web-based tool that enables any language group to develop its own >authentic and authoritative archiving and language reference resource from >within its own community. Regrettably, it's also junk. You're better off using, well, absolutely anything else. -- Sean M. Burke http://search.cpan.org/~sburke/ From sdp at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Tue Oct 28 20:25:21 2003 From: sdp at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (Sue Penfield) Date: Tue, 28 Oct 2003 13:25:21 -0700 Subject: Fw: Conf. on documentation of endangered languages (Germany) Message-ID: Everyone, This might be of interest to some of you.... _________________________________________________________________ A World of Many Voices: Interfaces in Language Documentation Date: Mon, 27 Oct 2003 11:50:35 +0000 From: gippert Subject: A World of Many Voices: Interfaces in Language Documentation A World of Many Voices: Interfaces in Language Documentation Short Title: DOBES-Conference Date: 04-Sep-2004 - 05-Sep-2004 Location: Frankfurt / Main, Germany Contact: Jost Gippert Contact Email: gippert at em.uni-frankfurt.de Meeting URL: http://titus.fkidg1.uni-frankfurt.de/curric/dobes/conf1cir.htm Linguistic Sub-field: Typology, Language Description, General Linguistics, Computational Linguistics, Anthropological Linguistics Call Deadline: 01-Feb-2004 Meeting Description: International conference on language documentation as an interdisciplinary research area (Linguistics, Anthropology, Speech Communities, and Technology), organised within the DOBES (Documentation of Endangered Languages) Programme of the Volkswagen Foundation. A WORLD OF MANY VOICES Interfaces in Language Documentation: Linguistics, Anthropology, Speech Communities, and Technology University of Frankfurt / Main 4th - 5th of September, 2004 First Circular The DOBES (Documentation of Endangered Languages) Programme will organise a conference on language documentation as an interdisciplinary research area, pending funding from the Volkswagen Foundation. The conference will take place in conjunction with a summer school on the documentation of endangered languages at the same venue (Frankfurt, Sep. 1-11th 2004). The organising team consists of Arienne Dwyer, Jost Gippert, Raquel Guirardello, David Harrison, Ulrike Mosel, Peter Wittenburg (DOBES members), and Marcel Erdal, Bernd Nothofer, and Rainer Voßen (local committee). CALL FOR PAPERS The conference will bring together experts in the field of language documentation and also representatives of endangered speech communities, and focuses on two themes: - the impact of language documentation techniques and technologies on linguistic methodologies and theories, such as new insights from research on (a) text corpora, (b) spontaneous spoken language, (c) non-verbal communication, and (d) the joint research of linguists and anthropologists; - the impact of active cooperation between speech communities and outside researchers on methods and goals and on power relationships between participants: (a) conflicts and compromises between the goals of the linguists and the speech community; (b) innovative cooperative methodology; (c) the linguists' contribution to language maintenance and revitalisation. Researchers who are members of endangered-language communities are particularly encouraged to submit abstracts. Accepted papers will be allocated 20 minutes for presentation plus 10 minutes for discussion. To allow for in-depth discussion, conference sessions will be plenary, and the conference will conclude with a roundtable discussion. The organisers intend to publish the conference papers in printed form. The DEADLINE for abstracts is the 1st of February, 2004. Please send your one-page abstract (in any format) to Jost Gippert (gippert at em.uni-frankfurt.de) _________________________________________________________________ From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Wed Oct 29 04:32:49 2003 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (Phil CashCash) Date: Tue, 28 Oct 2003 21:32:49 -0700 Subject: Hit by disease, deforestation and war, Colombia's last nomadic tribe faces extinction (fwd) Message-ID: Hit by disease, deforestation and war, Colombia's last nomadic tribe faces extinction 2003/10/29 BARRANCON, Colombia, AP http://www.chinapost.com.tw/detail.asp?onNews=1&GRP=A&id=21099 For thousands of years, the Nukak-Maku Indians roamed the jungles of southeast Colombia, hunting game with blow guns and gathering berries, as oblivious to the modern world as it was to them. Then one day in 1988, the two worlds collided when a group of Nukak men ventured into a town carved out of the jungle. Townspeople stared in disbelief at the naked Nukak as the Indians _ astonished, too _ stared back. That first encounter was peaceful, with the Nukak men feeling so trusting that they brought out their women and children who had been waiting in the bush. But the aftershocks of that meeting are now devastating the Nukak. Cut down by diseases brought by settlers, lured by the conveniences of the modern world and caught in the crossfire of Colombia's civil war, the tribe is being driven along a path to extinction that more than 100 other Indian tribes across the Amazon region have walked before. What is happening to the Nukak is especially worrisome; it is Colombia's last nomadic tribe. At least 1,200 Nukak roamed the jungles in groups of about 30 when that first hesitant contact was made in the town of Calamar, according to missionaries' estimates. Just 15 years later, their number has plunged to about 380, the Health Ministry says. "At this rate, in a very short time there will be no more Nukak," said Humberto Ruiz, an anthropologist who has studied the tribe. "They will be a vague memory." The Nukak are a branch of the Maku family of nomadic Indians who have journeyed the northwest Amazon River basin of current-day Colombia, Peru and Brazil for thousands of years. The branches the Maku are tied together by language. Since the first contact with settlers, influenza has obliterated most of the Nukak, which had no resistance to the disease. Deforestation has cut their food supply and led to malnutrition. Anthropologists believe there are only a few dozen Nukak still living deep in the jungle, relatively untouched by civilization. Added to the pressures on the tribe, leftist rebels and outlawed right-wing militias have been battling in the Indian's homelands for control of coca, the base ingredient of cocaine, which flourishes naturally in the region and provides the warring groups with huge revenues. No Nukak has been reported killed, but the clashes have terrified the Indians and caused some to flee ancestral grounds. A Nukak clan of 10 families fled its camp, near a settlers' village on the edge of their reservation, in January because of the fighting. "We were afraid, afraid of the explosions," said Yeuna, the clan's leader who goes by only one name. The clan is now idled at a makeshift camp in a jungle clearing near the village of Barrancon, a half-hour boat ride upriver from San Jose del Guaviare, the provincial capital of Guaviare state. Aid workers have been bringing rice, lentils and yucca every 15 days to the camp, where colorful hammocks swing from trees whose dense leaves filter the sun's burning rays. The aid has led to stomach ailments because of the change from the Indians' traditional fare, but moreover it is increasing their dependence on others. Which points to the irony of helping nomadic tribes: while it may be well-meaning, it can lead to their destruction by eroding native ways. Hugo Quijano, one of the workers, acknowledged the aid is "interfering with Nukak culture" but said it is needed because Yeuna's clan lacks the wide areas needed to hunt and fish. "We are trying to limit our contact with them as much as possible, but the conditions of the area they are in make that difficult," Quijano said. The United Nations estimates there are more than 300 indigenous tribes in the Amazon basin, but only about 60 remain in isolation, in Brazil and Peru. Symbolizing what is happening across the Amazon region, Yeuna's clan is gradually trading nomadic ways for a more sedentary existence: They are learning Spanish, wearing T-shirts and baseball caps and drinking Coca-Cola. Still, Yeuna's clan maintains many traditions. The women keep their eyebrows plucked and their hair very short. The men, who are lean and practically hairless, sometimes leave the camp to fish or to hunt monkeys. The Indians also maintain strong ecological practices. As nomads, they plant seeds before abandoning a camp, and raise baby monkeys whose mothers have been hunted and eaten, even going so far as to breast-feed them. When they are grown, the Indians release the monkeys into the wild, symbolically replenishing the natural supply. During a recent visit by a reporter, Nukak children _ ignoring a radio in the camp _ became mesmerized by a woman of the clan as she broke into song in the Nukak's native language. More than half of the 40 Indians in the camp are children, and they all speak Nukak. There are no elders. They have all died. The oldest known living Nukak is estimated to be in her early 40's. Ruiz said the Nukak used to live into their 60s, but contact with diseases appears to have shortened their life span. While everyone agrees that first contact with the modern world has forever changed the Nukak, there is little consensus on how to preserve their culture while still allowing those who want to integrate into modern society to do so. "One cannot force a group to conserve itself, like an artifact in a museum," Ruiz noted. Assimilation appears to be unstoppable, in any case. Nukak clans _ like Yeuna's _ are drifting closer to towns and cities, where the settlers' lifestyle is seen as being easier and more attractive than living hand-to-mouth in the remote jungle. The Indians are still susceptible to the flu, but access to health care means it is less likely to turn into pneumonia and kill them. Once they leave the old ways behind, it's hard to go back. Manuel Garcia grew up with his Nukak clan, but after both his parents died when he was 8 years old, he was adopted by a settler in San Jose del Guaviare. After turning 18, he reconnected with a group of Nukak. "I tried to live with them in the jungle, but I only lasted six months. I had to leave. I just didn't have the same toughness that they did," said Garcia, who is now a health worker and is helping Yeuna's clan. Yeuna, sitting in a hammock and surrounded by his five children and his pregnant wife, insisted that he eventually wants to lead the clan to their ancestral lands. "We want to go back," Yeuna said in broken Spanish. "But we are waiting for them to stop fighting." There is no sign, however, that the Colombian Army _ which is stretched thin as it battles the rebels across the nation _ will be able to oust the outlawed warring factions from Yeuna's homeland anytime soon. In the meantime, the clan continues to wait, and adapt to life in the 21st century. From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Wed Oct 29 04:42:48 2003 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (Phil CashCash) Date: Tue, 28 Oct 2003 21:42:48 -0700 Subject: Indigenous Language Institute debuts community-based handbooks (fwd) Message-ID: [ilat list manager note: although this article is from September 2003, it seemed appropriate to post since it mentions some beneficial and important information. pcc] ~~~ Indian Country Today (Lakota Times) 9/3/2003 V.23; N.12 B1 Indigenous Language Institute debuts community-based handbooks Author Woodard, Stephanie SANTA FE, N.M. - The Indigenous Language Institute (ILI), an 11-year-old nonprofit, is getting ready to send to the printer a set of 18- to 32-page how-to handbooks for tribal language instruction. Topics in the 10-volume series include doing an initial community language survey, teacher training, and evaluating an existing curriculum. Funding for the project came from the Ford Foundation, the Educational Foundation of America, and the John B. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. "The handbooks will be available by November 2003," said ILI's Executive Director, Inee Yang Slaughter. "They're designed for ease of use. You can pull out the one you need, rather than deal with a bulky book." The series is self-contained and can be put to use immediately - a boon to those without time to travel to training sessions. Dr. Ofelia Zepeda, a Tohono O'odham professor of linguistics at the University of Arizona, noted that the information in the booklets is not language-specific and can work in a variety of communities. "In the past, some tribes have had programs, but the approaches were not necessarily adaptable to other tribes. Or perhaps there was no way to disseminate materials that had been created," said Zepeda. "In other cases, a community may have heard about a program somewhere else, but couldn't get information on it. Accessibility has been a problem." Zepeda, a board member of ILI, formulated the project in collaboration with Dr. Akiro Yamamoto, a professor of anthropology and linguistics at the University of Kansas. To execute the concept - which included collecting up-to-date information from tribes around the country - ILI then called in Dr. Tessie Naranjo, a sociologist from Santa Clara Pueblo whose Ph.D. is from the University of New Mexico, Sheilah Nicholas, a Hopi doctoral candidate in American Indian Studies at the University of Arizona, and Dr. Mary Linn, curator of Native American languages for the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History at the University of Oklahoma and a professor in the school's anthropology department. According to Dr. Michael Krauss of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, only 175 languages remain of some 300 extant at the onset of European colonization; of the surviving ones, just 20 are widely spoken by children. The most oft-cited cause for the decline is the Native-language eradication policy of the boarding schools to which many Indian children were sent during the 19th and 20th centuries. The situation in the Western Hemisphere is part of a global trend, observed Dr. Douglas Whalen, president of the Endangered Language Fund, a nonprofit at Yale University that funds community - and university-based projects worldwide, including research on Paiute and Creek. The large regional languages - English, Spanish, Swahili, Chinese, and others - are overwhelming the smaller languages, said Whalen. Sometimes, even minority languages are swallowing up other small ones. It's a complex picture," he added. "But lately there has been a lot more activity and awareness of the small languages at the grassroots level." Slaughter has watched that happening in the United States. "In the past few years, we have seen a tremendous increase in the number of tribal language programs," she said. "It's a credit to the young people who are learning their languages," said Ernie Stevens, a member of the Oneida Tribe of Wisconsin and Chairman of the National Indian Gaming Association, which has just sent out an appeal to member tribes to support ILI. "These children are stepping up to their responsibilities. The damage the government did is just now being reversed." The handbook series joins other ILI programs, including symposia, training seminars, a resource directory, community honoring events, and an annual Youth Language Fair that recognizes children for songs, prayers, readings, and other presentations that use their heritage languages. The organization's Web site contains such information as lists of funding organizations and experts, a paper on intellectual property issues, and a bibliography. The creation of a Language Materials Development Center is under way, thanks to a recent $100,000 grant from The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. In addition to producing teaching materials, the center will offer training and networking opportunities for language practitioners and teachers. To develop a secure financial base, ILI has launched a $5-million endowment campaign, with Cherokee actor Wes Studi as honorary chairperson. The handbook project commenced with evaluations of tribal needs and existing curricula. Starting in 1999, Naranjo, Linn, Nicholas and others toured 54 communities from coast to coast and from the Arctic to the Sonoran Desert. In each locale, they learned how many people at what ages understood or spoke the language, and at what level. They also looked at how it was taught: for example, in a classroom or in a mentor-student relationship, with immersion instruction or in combination with English. Naranjo described a visit to the Pechangas, in southern California. "They have an incredible program at their Head Start," she said. "While a teacher instructs the children in English, a linguist, who's a non-tribal member, repeats everything in their Luiseno language. The kids pick it up subliminally, which you can see when they're working independently. I liked that a whole lot." The elementary school at Cochiti Pueblo, in New Mexico, had an immersion-style approach, according to Slaughter, who accompanied the evaluators on some of the trips. "As soon as the children cross the threshold of the language classroom, they hear only Keres," she recounted. "The main instructor, a Keres speaker from the community who has had teacher training, leads activities like acting out a traditional story or responding to flash cards. Two assistants, one a young adult and the other an elder, reinforce the lessons through repetition. The children are always addressed and respond in full sentences, so they learn the entire structure of the language." According to Naranjo, the ILI handbooks, as she and her fellow evaluators have written them, strive to help each group decide what will work best for its situation. "We heard their voices, their descriptions of what works and what doesn't. Now, we're trying to give them back what they really want. And we make it easy for them," she said. "That's the ingeniousness of this concept as Ofelia Zepeda and Akiro Yamamoto devised it." For more on the series or other ILI programs, contact the organization at 560 Montezuma Avenue, Suite 202, Santa Fe, NM 87501; (505) 820-0311; www.indigenous-language.org. From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Wed Oct 29 16:40:03 2003 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (Phil CashCash) Date: Wed, 29 Oct 2003 09:40:03 -0700 Subject: ILAT anniversary! Message-ID: dear ILAT subscribers, this week marks the one year anniversary (Oct 2002-Oct 2003) of ILAT! the Indigenous Languages and Technology discussion list originally came into being as an idea to generate insights and ideas on the potential interface between technology, language, and indigenous communities. efforts at the University of Arizona’s Learning Technology Center (ltc) provided the initial inspiration for this endeavor. one of the more immediate outcomes was the creation of a short technology course at AILDI (American Indian Language Development Institute) this past summer. you can view the course webpage at: http://www.u.arizona.edu/~cashcash/aildi/LRC430.html. also, an ILAT technology page is in the works: http://projects.ltc.arizona.edu/gates/ilat2003.html ehée qeciyéewyew...many thanks to all of you for joining and participating in ILAT! please continue with your introductions, discussions, and support for indigenous languages. phil cash cash (cayuse/nez perce) UofA, ILAT list manager phd student in anthropology and linguistics ~~~ ILAT List Description: Indigenous Languages and Technology discussion list is an open forum for community language specialists, linguists, scholars, and students to discuss issues relating to the uses of technology in language revitalization efforts. ILAT Statistics: 146 subscribers ILAT Subscribers by Country: Bolivia=1 Canada=1 Fiji=1 Italy=1 USA=138 ILAT Web Page: http://www.u.arizona.edu/~cashcash/ILAT.html ILAT News and Postings: novessl http://cultura.gencat.es/llengcat/noves/noticies/ilat.htm Foundation for Endangered Languages http://www.ogmios.org/209.htm MSN http://groups.msn.com/BayAreaIndianCalendar/resources.msnw?action=get_message&mview=0&ID_Message=1129&LastModified=4675395672608226085 From CRANEM at MAIL.ECU.EDU Wed Oct 29 16:55:09 2003 From: CRANEM at MAIL.ECU.EDU (Bizzaro, Resa Crane) Date: Wed, 29 Oct 2003 11:55:09 -0500 Subject: ILAT anniversary! Message-ID: Hi, everyone. Thanks, Phil, for making the ILAT list work. I'm sure it takes quite a bit of monitoring and adding/subtracting to make the list functional. Thanks for everything you do. Thanks to everyone else for some very stimulating discussions and ideas. Resa Resa Crane Bizzaro English Department East Carolina University Greenville, NC 27858 (252) 328-1395 - Office (252) 328-4889 - Fax -----Original Message----- From: Phil CashCash [mailto:cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU] Sent: Wednesday, October 29, 2003 11:40 AM To: ILAT at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU Subject: ILAT anniversary! dear ILAT subscribers, this week marks the one year anniversary (Oct 2002-Oct 2003) of ILAT! the Indigenous Languages and Technology discussion list originally came into being as an idea to generate insights and ideas on the potential interface between technology, language, and indigenous communities. efforts at the University of Arizona's Learning Technology Center (ltc) provided the initial inspiration for this endeavor. one of the more immediate outcomes was the creation of a short technology course at AILDI (American Indian Language Development Institute) this past summer. you can view the course webpage at: http://www.u.arizona.edu/~cashcash/aildi/LRC430.html. also, an ILAT technology page is in the works: http://projects.ltc.arizona.edu/gates/ilat2003.html ehée qeciyéewyew...many thanks to all of you for joining and participating in ILAT! please continue with your introductions, discussions, and support for indigenous languages. phil cash cash (cayuse/nez perce) UofA, ILAT list manager phd student in anthropology and linguistics ~~~ ILAT List Description: Indigenous Languages and Technology discussion list is an open forum for community language specialists, linguists, scholars, and students to discuss issues relating to the uses of technology in language revitalization efforts. ILAT Statistics: 146 subscribers ILAT Subscribers by Country: Bolivia=1 Canada=1 Fiji=1 Italy=1 USA=138 ILAT Web Page: http://www.u.arizona.edu/~cashcash/ILAT.html ILAT News and Postings: novessl http://cultura.gencat.es/llengcat/noves/noticies/ilat.htm Foundation for Endangered Languages http://www.ogmios.org/209.htm MSN http://groups.msn.com/BayAreaIndianCalendar/resources.msnw?action=get_messag e&mview=0&ID_Message=1129&LastModified=4675395672608226085 From pasxapu at DAKOTACOM.NET Wed Oct 29 19:01:10 2003 From: pasxapu at DAKOTACOM.NET (phil cash cash) Date: Wed, 29 Oct 2003 12:01:10 -0700 Subject: First Voices (was Re: Go MAC Go (language)) In-Reply-To: <6.0.0.22.1.20031027135854.02608810@mailstore.pobox.com> Message-ID: nobody seems tempted by this...so here it goes, gee Sean, what do you mean when you say First Voices is "junk"? phil cash cash ps: i'm not sure but it seems we have First Voices people here on the list. On Monday, October 27, 2003, at 04:01 PM, Sean M. Burke wrote: > At 08:24 AM 2003-10-27, Andre Cramblit wrote: >> Two tribal school teachers" reach out to the world >> http://www.apple.com/ca/education/profiles/firstvoices/ > > Which says: > >> What exactly is FirstVoices? It's an easy-to-use, secure, >> cost-effective >> web-based tool that enables any language group to develop its own >> authentic and authoritative archiving and language reference resource >> from >> within its own community. > > Regrettably, it's also junk. You're better off using, well, absolutely > anything else. > > -- > Sean M. Burke http://search.cpan.org/~sburke/ > From fnkrs at UAF.EDU Wed Oct 29 20:01:57 2003 From: fnkrs at UAF.EDU (Hishinlai') Date: Wed, 29 Oct 2003 11:01:57 -0900 Subject: ILAT anniversary! Message-ID: Phil, I'd also like to thank you for this site. I've read some great insights regarding all types of issue besides technology. Mahsi' choo (a big thank you). Hishinlai' ps I think the upcoming conference in Frankfurt, Germany will be a great opportunity to share about language documentation. >===== Original Message From Indigenous Languages and Technology ===== >Hi, everyone. Thanks, Phil, for making the ILAT list work. I'm sure it >takes quite a bit of monitoring and adding/subtracting to make the list >functional. Thanks for everything you do. > >Thanks to everyone else for some very stimulating discussions and ideas. > >Resa > >Resa Crane Bizzaro >English Department >East Carolina University >Greenville, NC 27858 >(252) 328-1395 - Office >(252) 328-4889 - Fax > > >-----Original Message----- >From: Phil CashCash [mailto:cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU] >Sent: Wednesday, October 29, 2003 11:40 AM >To: ILAT at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU >Subject: ILAT anniversary! > > >dear ILAT subscribers, > >this week marks the one year anniversary (Oct 2002-Oct 2003) of ILAT! >the Indigenous Languages and Technology discussion list originally came into >being as an idea to generate insights and ideas on the potential interface >between technology, language, and indigenous communities. > >efforts at the University of Arizona's Learning Technology Center (ltc) >provided the initial inspiration for this endeavor. one of the more >immediate outcomes was the creation of a short technology course at AILDI >(American Indian Language Development Institute) this past summer. you can >view the course webpage at: > >http://www.u.arizona.edu/~cashcash/aildi/LRC430.html. > >also, an ILAT technology page is in the works: > >http://projects.ltc.arizona.edu/gates/ilat2003.html > >eh�e qeciy�ewyew...many thanks to all of you for joining and participating >in ILAT! please continue with your introductions, discussions, and support >for indigenous languages. > >phil cash cash (cayuse/nez perce) >UofA, ILAT list manager >phd student in anthropology and linguistics > >~~~ > >ILAT List Description: > >Indigenous Languages and Technology discussion list is an open forum for >community language specialists, linguists, scholars, and students to discuss >issues relating to the uses of technology in language revitalization >efforts. > >ILAT Statistics: > >146 subscribers > >ILAT Subscribers by Country: > >Bolivia=1 >Canada=1 >Fiji=1 >Italy=1 >USA=138 > >ILAT Web Page: > >http://www.u.arizona.edu/~cashcash/ILAT.html > >ILAT News and Postings: > >novessl http://cultura.gencat.es/llengcat/noves/noticies/ilat.htm > >Foundation for Endangered Languages http://www.ogmios.org/209.htm > >MSN >http://groups.msn.com/BayAreaIndianCalendar/resources.msnw?action=get_messag >e&mview=0&ID_Message=1129&LastModified=4675395672608226085 <><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> Hishinlai' "Kathy R. Sikorski", Gwich'in Instructor University of Alaska Fairbanks Alaska Native Language Center P. O. Box 757680 Fairbanks, AK 99775-7680 P (907) 474-7875 F (907) 474-7876 E fnkrs at uaf.edu ANLC-L at www.uaf.edu/anlc/ Hah! Nakhweet'ihthan t'ihch'yaa! From gforger at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Wed Oct 29 20:11:37 2003 From: gforger at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (Garry Forger) Date: Wed, 29 Oct 2003 13:11:37 -0700 Subject: ILAT anniversary! Message-ID: I agree that this is a great list. Can't believe its a year since it started, where has the time gone. Its obvious from the postings and traffic that this list is filling a great need, and is long overdue in existing. Way to go Phil. -- Garry J. Forger, MLS Technology Coordinator The University of Arizona Learning Technologies Center 1077 N. Highland Ave Tucson, AZ 85721-0073 gforger at u.arizona.edu http://www.ltc.arizona.edu/ Phone 520-626-7761 Fax 520-626-8220 From dzo at BISHARAT.NET Thu Oct 30 04:19:58 2003 From: dzo at BISHARAT.NET (Don Osborn) Date: Thu, 30 Oct 2003 05:19:58 +0100 Subject: ILAT anniversary! Message-ID: Congratulations on the first anniversary of ILAT! Although I just recently joined, it is easy to see that it serves a vital role. And as one who manages several specialized fora on aspects of African languages and technology, I recognize the effort that goes into building and maintaining such a list. Sannu da aiki, fo nda goy, aan e tiyabu, i ni ce - as they would say in several of the languages of the Sahel - good work! Don Don Osborn, Ph.D. dzo at bisharat.net *Bisharat! A language, technology & development initiative *Bisharat! Initiative langues - technologie - développement http://www.bisharat.net ----- Original Message ----- From: "Phil CashCash" To: Sent: Wednesday, October 29, 2003 5:40 PM Subject: ILAT anniversary! dear ILAT subscribers, this week marks the one year anniversary (Oct 2002-Oct 2003) of ILAT! the Indigenous Languages and Technology discussion list originally came into being as an idea to generate insights and ideas on the potential interface between technology, language, and indigenous communities. efforts at the University of Arizona�~Rs Learning Technology Center (ltc) provided the initial inspiration for this endeavor. one of the more immediate outcomes was the creation of a short technology course at AILDI (American Indian Language Development Institute) this past summer. you can view the course webpage at: http://www.u.arizona.edu/~cashcash/aildi/LRC430.html. also, an ILAT technology page is in the works: http://projects.ltc.arizona.edu/gates/ilat2003.html ehée qeciyéewyew...many thanks to all of you for joining and participating in ILAT! please continue with your introductions, discussions, and support for indigenous languages. phil cash cash (cayuse/nez perce) UofA, ILAT list manager phd student in anthropology and linguistics ~~~ ILAT List Description: Indigenous Languages and Technology discussion list is an open forum for community language specialists, linguists, scholars, and students to discuss issues relating to the uses of technology in language revitalization efforts. ILAT Statistics: 146 subscribers ILAT Subscribers by Country: Bolivia=1 Canada=1 Fiji=1 Italy=1 USA=138 ILAT Web Page: http://www.u.arizona.edu/~cashcash/ILAT.html ILAT News and Postings: novessl http://cultura.gencat.es/llengcat/noves/noticies/ilat.htm Foundation for Endangered Languages http://www.ogmios.org/209.htm MSN http://groups.msn.com/BayAreaIndianCalendar/resources.msnw?action=get_message&mview=0&ID_Message=1129&LastModified=4675395672608226085 From andrekar at NCIDC.ORG Fri Oct 31 16:32:59 2003 From: andrekar at NCIDC.ORG (Andre Cramblit) Date: Fri, 31 Oct 2003 08:32:59 -0800 Subject: Resolution Message-ID: You may be interested to learn of the following resolution passed at the Annual General meeting of Foundation for Endangered Languages, at Broome, West Australia, on 23 September 2003. To: David Navenburg, Director Population Census Development Australian Bureau of Statistics Locked Bag 10 Belconnen ACT 2616 Australia Recognising · that the Australian bureau of statistics has improved the language question in the census over the past two decades; and · that the collection of accurate language data is valuable in monitoring the health of AustraliaÕs language heritage; This forum opposes the suggestion that the language question be dropped from the Australian Bureau of Statistics Census questions, especially with relation to AustraliaÕs indigenous languages. Furthermore, this forum proposes that future questions relating to language in the census must take into consideration the following three categories, noting that they are already included in the Canadian census: a) a personÕs first language or languages b) a personÕs home language or languages c) a personÕs competence in other language or languages. -- André Cramblit: andre.p.cramblit.86 at alum.dartmouth.org Operations Director Northern California Indian Development Council NCIDC (http://www.ncidc.org) is a non-profit that meets the development needs of American Indians and operates an art gallery featuring the art of California tribes (http://www.americanindianonline.com) COMMUNICATION IS THE KEY TO THE FUTURE OF AMERICAN INDIANS/NATIVE AMERICANS/ALASKAN NATIVES & HAWAIIAN ISLANDERS. For news of interest to Natives subscribe send an email to: IndigenousNewsNetwork-subscribe at topica.com or go to: http://www.topica.com/lists/IndigenousNewsNetwork/subscribe/?location=listinfo From andrekar at NCIDC.ORG Fri Oct 31 16:33:31 2003 From: andrekar at NCIDC.ORG (Andre Cramblit) Date: Fri, 31 Oct 2003 08:33:31 -0800 Subject: 2nd Resolution Message-ID: You may be interested to learn of the following resolution passed at the Annual General meeting of Foundation for Endangered Languages, at Broome, West Australia, on 23 September 2003. (The theme of the conference, during which the AGM took place, was Maintaining the Links: Language, Identity and the Land.) To: Commonwealth Heads of Government Secretariat Commonwealth Policy Studies Unit Commonwealth Association for Indigenous PeoplesÊ (CAIP) Whereas: · Thousands of world languages are at risk of dying out; · Geographic place names are an important record and expression of peopleÕs knowledge, heritage and culture; · Geographic place names may carry valuable ecological, environmental, spiritual, moral and cultural meanings; · The process of European and other colonisation of indigenous peoplesÕ territories has led to the removal or distortion of geographic place names; · The practice of various Commonwealth governments is notably uneven with regard to restitution of indigenous place names; · There is a Commonwealth Association of Indigenous Peoples which has called for greater awareness and dialogue in the Commonwealth on the issue of indigenous peoplesÕ rights and empowerment; · 2004 is the final year of the United Nations Decade on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples; Be it resolved that: The Foundation for Endangered Languages calls on Commonwealth Governments and the Commonwealth Secretariat to take appropriate actions to promote the use of orthographically correct and properly documented place names, particularly those in endangered languages and the languages of indigenous and tribal peoples. From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Fri Oct 31 18:24:53 2003 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (Phil CashCash) Date: Fri, 31 Oct 2003 11:24:53 -0700 Subject: Yaqui youth celebrating their culture, byte by byte (fwd) Message-ID: Yaqui youth celebrating their culture, byte by byte By JOYESHA CHESNICK Tucson Citizen 10/31/2003 http://www.azdailysun.com/non_sec/nav_includes/story.cfm?storyID=75939 TUCSON (AP) -- The legends, songs and history of the Pascua Yaqui Tribe are finding a new high-tech life in the hands of the tribe's young people. The first Intel Computer Clubhouse in southern Arizona opened on the reservation in October giving children ages 10 to 18 the opportunity to learn how to use audiovisual equipment and other electronics to preserve the culture of the tribe. The Intel Computer Clubhouse Network uses technology to allow young people to explore their interests and become confident learners. "If you want to play games, you have to design them. If you want to be on the Internet, you have to design a Web page," Clubhouse assistant coordinator Felipe Flores said. Students might not realize it now, but they are learning important interpersonal and leadership skills, Flores said. One Yaqui senior, Rita Coronado, put four days of training to good use, animating a digital photograph of a Yaqui dancer and setting her work to traditional music. "It's possibly the world's first Pascua Yaqui music video," said Debora Norris, spokeswoman for the tribe. The program is open to kids from the reservation and the larger Tucson community. "It's fabulous," Norris said. "It gives kids a new way to look at culture and make it their own." Club members work individually and in teams on short films of one another and other projects. "They're going to be making these videos and computer games instead of buying them," Norris said. "It's interesting watching them watch themselves on television, and their friends and parents. It's not something, coming from here, that they're used to seeing. They love it." Yaqui ninth-grader Chris Herber, the 3-D graphics expert in the lab, spends a majority of his time in the lab teaching other students how to create images in the Bryce 5 visual arts program. "I'm the only one that knows it," Chris said. Adding, that while he is still in the process of learning the computer program's intricacies, he quickly picked up the basics by his third day. "There are a lot of things you can do here. Learn new stuff, meet new people." The entire Yaqui community will be able to take advantage of the clubhouse's equipment during school hours for a project aimed at preserving the written and oral Yaqui dialect. "Very few people are fluent in the Yaqui language, so that's the priority right now," Norris said. "We haven't been able to address it up to this point through the traditional school system, so this makes the best of a bad situation." The Pascua Yaqui Intel Computer Clubhouse is one of 60 worldwide and five in Arizona. Four are in the Phoenix area, said Jeanne Forbis, spokeswoman for Intel Corp. Nancy Mager, grant administrator for the Pascua Yaqui Tribe, said the clubhouse is funded for three years by a $50,000 grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and a $10,000 grant from Intel Corp. Various companies donated more than $300,000 worth of software and computer hardware, she said. "Intel launches the program with the idea being the tribe will make it sustainable," she said. "After three years, we'll remain in the Intel network, which provides training and support. And the kids will be part of the network through the Intel science fair and things like that." Alex Manuel, a Yaqui fifth grader, said he's lucky to have the latest technology and computers available to him five days a week at the Clubhouse. "It's fun," Alex said. "I'm just trying to figure out how to do things myself. From mikinakn at SHAW.CA Fri Oct 31 18:55:50 2003 From: mikinakn at SHAW.CA (Rolland Nadjiwon) Date: Fri, 31 Oct 2003 13:55:50 -0500 Subject: Yaqui youth celebrating their culture, byte by byte (fwd) Message-ID: Phil...do you know if that is New Pasqua or Old Pasqua? ---- wahjeh rolland nadjiwon ----- Original Message ----- From: "Phil CashCash" To: Sent: Friday, October 31, 2003 1:24 PM Subject: Yaqui youth celebrating their culture, byte by byte (fwd) > Yaqui youth celebrating their culture, byte by byte > > By JOYESHA CHESNICK > Tucson Citizen > 10/31/2003 > http://www.azdailysun.com/non_sec/nav_includes/story.cfm?storyID=75939 > > TUCSON (AP) -- The legends, songs and history of the Pascua Yaqui Tribe > are finding a new high-tech life in the hands of the tribe's young > people. From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Fri Oct 31 20:06:16 2003 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (Phil CashCash) Date: Fri, 31 Oct 2003 13:06:16 -0700 Subject: Yaqui youth celebrating their culture, byte by byte (fwd) In-Reply-To: <000d01c39fe0$9a6aff60$23394c18@su.shawcable.net> Message-ID: hi rolland, sorry i don't know where it is located, but i do know there is an old and new pascua yaqui. later, phil > ----- Message from mikinakn at SHAW.CA --------- > Date: Fri, 31 Oct 2003 13:55:50 -0500 > From: Rolland Nadjiwon > Reply-To: Indigenous Languages and Technology > Subject: Re: Yaqui youth celebrating their culture, byte by byte (fwd) > To: ILAT at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU > > Phil...do you know if that is New Pasqua or Old Pasqua? > > ---- > wahjeh > rolland nadjiwon > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Phil CashCash" > To: > Sent: Friday, October 31, 2003 1:24 PM > Subject: Yaqui youth celebrating their culture, byte by byte (fwd) > > > > Yaqui youth celebrating their culture, byte by byte > > > > By JOYESHA CHESNICK > > Tucson Citizen > > 10/31/2003 > > > http://www.azdailysun.com/non_sec/nav_includes/story.cfm?storyID=75939 > > > > TUCSON (AP) -- The legends, songs and history of the Pascua Yaqui > Tribe > > are finding a new high-tech life in the hands of the tribe's young > > people. > > > ----- End message from mikinakn at SHAW.CA ----- From andrekar at NCIDC.ORG Fri Oct 31 22:07:52 2003 From: andrekar at NCIDC.ORG (Andre Cramblit) Date: Fri, 31 Oct 2003 14:07:52 -0800 Subject: Website Message-ID: Native Languages: Legacy and Lifeline http://www.in-forum.com/specials/DyingTongues/ Timeline http://www.in-forum.com/specials/DyingTongues/timeline/timeline.html This eclectic and innovative website will be of interest to those involved in safeguarding indigenous languages as well as traditional culture in general. Three Native American tribes -- the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara, jointly known as the Three Affiliated Tribes -- are making strong efforts to save their languages and culture from extinction, thereby enhancing the prospects for other efforts to improve local well being. Multimedia offerings on the website include historical pieces, oral recollections, interviews, photo essays, graphic data presentations, and vocabulary lessons. -- André Cramblit: andre.p.cramblit.86 at alum.dartmouth.org Operations Director Northern California Indian Development Council NCIDC (http://www.ncidc.org) is a non-profit that meets the development needs of American Indians and operates an art gallery featuring the art of California tribes (http://www.americanindianonline.com) COMMUNICATION IS THE KEY TO THE FUTURE OF AMERICAN INDIANS/NATIVE AMERICANS/ALASKAN NATIVES & HAWAIIAN ISLANDERS. For news of interest to Natives subscribe send an email to: IndigenousNewsNetwork-subscribe at topica.com or go to: http://www.topica.com/lists/IndigenousNewsNetwork/subscribe/?location=listinfo From Rrlapier at AOL.COM Fri Oct 31 23:56:58 2003 From: Rrlapier at AOL.COM (Rr Lapier) Date: Fri, 31 Oct 2003 18:56:58 EST Subject: Smithsonian Message-ID: Piegan Institute is in the Fall issue of the Big Sky Journal and the November issue of the Smithsonian Magazine. A little regional and national exposure for Native languages. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian/issues03/nov03/poi.html Rosalyn LaPier Piegan Institute www.pieganinstitute.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Thu Oct 2 03:22:48 2003 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (Phil CashCash) Date: Wed, 1 Oct 2003 20:22:48 -0700 Subject: Blending native language, education & culture (fwd) Message-ID: Blending native language, education & culture Navajo-Hopi Observer- News By Rosanda Suetopka Thayer TC District Media Team http://www.navajohopiobserver.com/NAVAJOHOPIOBSERVER/myarticles.asp?P=827170&S=392&PubID=11368 TUBA CITY ??With linguistic statistical studies proving Native American languages are in danger of becoming extinct and used less on a daily conversation basis, many tribes are starting to take drastic steps to ensure that their culture and language does not die. Tuba City Unified School District No. 15 sees tribal language loss as a serious issue for its 3,000-plus students and, on Sept. 24, devoted its annual Cultural Symposium to the idea of integrating tribal language in every aspect of curriculum activity. More than 26 presenters gave individual session workshops at the Tuba City High School as an annual in-service for its more than 500 staff members. Parents and the public in the surrounding Tuba City District area also participated in the sessions. The workshops addressed traditional technique and art forms, native consideration in modern research, cross parallels of different tribal cultures and native ways to relieve stress in the home and workplace. The importance of student character building using native language and traditional cultural considerations was another area of emphasis. TCUSD Associate Superintendent Dr. Harold G. Begay, who gave an opening address, spoke to the very heart of tribal language concerns. ?It seems rather strange that there are many people across the U.S. today wanting formal status as federally-recognized tribes,? he said. ?There are pending court litigations, on-going federal appeals for recognition as an Indian tribe, and each day we?re seeing more and more people of diverse backgrounds who have this desire to be recognized as indigenous peoples. ?Meanwhile, we are also seeing more and more documentation about major indigenous language crisis or language decline and loss. Is this why we seeing more and more quest for formal Federal tribal recognition? This may be the beginning of a major pan-national tribal cultural renaissance. Dr. Begay pointed out revenue?s role in native culture?s revival. ?It is pretty evident that the current resurgence in tribalism by many people across our nation is driven not by culture and language interest and revival but more by casino revenues, the potentially high profitable economics of tribalism,? he said. Is there a lesson to be learned from this? ?Maybe if our language and culture had a price tag, or if there were dollars associated with it, we as speakers of our indigenous languages would have a thriving economy or even be millionaires.? Dr. Begay explained that the presenters would share their thoughts on the non-commercial aspects of sustaining our native language and culture. ?We could also dialogue on the potential profitability of native language and cultures, seeing how we are an educational institution,? he said. ?As an educational institution, it is important that we take the lead in shedding light on the value of our language and culture.? Dr. Begay stressed the importance of retaining native language. ?You may also hear or have heard quite often that our language and culture are priceless,? he said. ?If that is the case, why is it so expensive to have a traditional ceremony? ?With English education, learning their language and culture is not priceless but rather, it is extremely expensive in more ways than one, especially with us as native peoples. There is a huge exacting cost incurred when we are native peoples lose ourselves in English education.? According to Dr. Begay, there are many questions to raise on the value of native language. ?As you go about the country, we often hear other nationalities converse with their young in their native tongue,? he said. But, with our native peoples, we seem to make it a point to converse with our children in only one foreign language, the English language. Why? ?I am hoping that today?s speakers and presenters will allow us the opportunity to dialogue on the value of our native language and culture, not only for the present, but for years to come.? Tuba City District currently has a Navajo language program developed for grades kindergarten to 12t grade and, in the spring of 2004, will implement a Hopi language program for its junior high and high school students. The Hopi language classes have been a long time in coming and have been highly anticipated by its TC high?s Hopi student population. The focus of this Hopi language project will be to provide an educational support from the TC district for a teen population to be fluent in everyday Hopi conversation. The materials and curriculum developed for Tuba City District will be under the guidance and support the Hopi Tribe?s Hopi Lavayi Project, Emory Sekaquaptewa, a professor of linguisitics at the University of Arizona in Tucson; and Sheila Nicolas, the director of American Indian Language Development Institute also located in Tucson. Tuba City District also designated last week Dual Language Week and encouraged all indigenous speaking people working at TC district to speak in their native language only. The idea was to help heighten the awareness and importance of maintaining and supporting original language and allowing the student population to hear languages from countries all around the world as well as their own local tribal languages. From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Thu Oct 2 13:26:23 2003 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (Phil CashCash) Date: Thu, 2 Oct 2003 06:26:23 -0700 Subject: $14.5 million in federal funds to boost Native school programs across the state (fwd) Message-ID: $14.5 million in federal funds to boost Native school programs across the state Thursday, October 2, 2003 By ERIC FRY JUNEAU EMPIRE ? 2003 http://www.juneauempire.com/stories/100203/loc_culture.shtml The office of Sen. Ted Stevens announced this week that $14.5 million in federal funds will go to Native education programs in Alaska. In Juneau, the money will help expand a Tlingit-oriented elementary school program, continue a popular science summer camp that has a Native focus and provide home educational and social services to preschoolers. The funding comes from the U.S. Department of Education under the Alaska Native Education Equity Act, an amendment sponsored by Stevens, an Alaska Republican, to the federal No Child Left Behind Act. Among this year's 32 grants, funds will go toward distance learning for rural school aides, CD-ROMs and books about Yup'ik culture, vocational training, development of Athabascan- and Inupiaq-oriented math and science curricula and family literacy. The Juneau School District received a $497,613 grant to expand its Tlingit-oriented classrooms at Harborview Elementary School to the fifth grade and to prepare more schools to add such classrooms. The classes, which include non-Natives, incorporate Tlingit language and culture in the curriculum. The program, now in its fourth year, has 48 students from kindergarten to fourth grade in two multi-age classrooms. The fifth-grade expansion could take place next school year, and the program could start up in other district schools two years from now, said Assistant Superintendent Bernie Sorenson. A recent study of the program's first three years showed that most of its students read at the appropriate grade level, and on average the classes do as well as, or better than, other classrooms in the district on reading and writing tests. The Juneau schools also received a $455,806 grant to continue Camp W.A.T.E.R. - a science- and Native-oriented summer program in its seventh year - and to offer academic help and after-school activities to those students throughout the school year. The summer camp serves about 40 middle school students a year, about half of whom are Native. The camp's name stands for wilderness, adventure, traditions, exploration and research. Both grants are the first year of a three-year appropriation. "The grants that we're trying to target are ones where we're looking at successful programs or at least promising practices, and figure out how to make them continue beyond the life of the grant," Sorenson said. The Southeast Regional Resource Center, a statewide nonprofit educational organization based in Juneau, received $520,000 to continue its ANSWER Camps, a summer program for rural seventh- and eighth-graders. The camps, now in their seventh year and held in Sitka, have offered science, math and Native ways of knowing to about 180 students a year in recent years. The latest grant is the first year of a three-year grant. But it's smaller than usual, and unless SERRC finds more funds, the program will serve fewer students next summer, said Sheryl Weinberg, the program director and SERRC's associate director. "We have married traditional values and content - Native ways of knowing - with Western academic content," Weinberg said. "We have data that shows that (ANSWER) camp makes a difference in academic performance, success in high school, attitudes toward math and science, and how they see themselves as students," she said. The Tlingit-Haida Central Council, whose services include Head Start preschool programs, received $412,500, the first of three annual grants. It will pay for a program called Creating Cultural Foundations, which will develop a Tlingit-oriented curriculum for preschoolers at home and in Head Start centers. The grant also will pay for home-based educational and social services to preschoolers and their families in Juneau, Petersburg and Craig/Klawock, said Jackie Tagaban, the Head Start assistant manager. "It's a wonderful opportunity for us at a time when the political climate is looking at English-language acquisition," Tagaban said. "An important foundation for young children is to be able to connect with their culture in school, which typically has not been the case." Sealaska Heritage Institute in Juneau received $467,772 to develop curriculum and teaching materials for Haida-language programs for young children in Hydaburg, on Prince of Wales Island. The grant will allow the institute to work with all 10 Alaskans who speak Haida fluently, said Rosita Worl, the institute's president. "The primary objective really is to develop the curriculum so it can be taught in schools," Worl said. "Students who have the opportunity to study in their Native heritage language do better academically." In other Southeast grants, Hoonah schools received $269,128 for a program in which parents teach their children. And Craig schools received $353,168 for a math teacher who will work with struggling children and their caregivers, and for parenting education, day care and transportation. ? Eric Fry can be reached at efry at juneauempire.com. From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Thu Oct 2 13:32:06 2003 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (Phil CashCash) Date: Thu, 2 Oct 2003 06:32:06 -0700 Subject: Gaelic survey 'hugely significant'(fwd) Message-ID: Gaelic survey 'hugely significant' Gaelic survey 'hugely significant' (fwd) Gaelic survey 'hugely significant' Gaelic survey 'hugely significant' Gaelic survey 'hugely significant' MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" Content-Disposition: inline Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable User-Agent: Internet Messaging Program (IMP) 4.0-cvs Gaelic survey 'hugely significant' Story from BBC NEWS: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/3156980.stm Published: 2003/10/02 08:27:51 GMT More than two thirds of people in Scotland consider Gaelic to be an important part of Scottish life, according to a survey. Almost 90% of those questioned were in favour of allowing children to learn the language in school. However, a similar number admitted that they did not know how to read or speak Gaelic. The survey was jointly funded by the BBC and B=C3=B2rd Gaidhlig na h-Alba, the Gaelic development agency, to identify the need for a multi-media language learning resource. MRUK questioned 1,020 people in August, 87% of whom admitted that they had no knowledge of the language. More opportunities However, 66% agreed that Gaelic is an important part of Scottish life which needs to be promoted. A majority of those questioned said there should be more opportunities to learn Gaelic and that more Scots should try to learn the language. There was also support for the extension of bi-lingual education, while 87% were in favour of school children being allowed to learn Gaelic. This research... demonstrates the unique standing of Gaelic in the cultural identity of Scotland B=C3=B2rd Gaidhlig na h-Alba chairman Duncan Ferguson said the findings were "extremely encouraging". The organisation is preparing the first national plan for Gaelic development in Scotland. Mr Ferguson said: "The fact that almost 90% of the Scottish population believe Gaelic medium education should be available where there is demand is hugely significant, particularly at a time when the Scottish Executive is preparing to bring forward a Gaelic language bill for consultation. "There has been anecdotal evidence in the past suggesting that there was a substantial level of support for Gaelic across Scotland. "This research now confirms this, and it also demonstrates the unique standing of Gaelic in the cultural identity of Scotland. 'Exciting project' "This is good news for Gaelic and for Scotland as a whole, in that it demonstrates the recognition and value attached to Scottish cultural heritage." The agency's chief executive Alan Campbell said it was the first time scientific evidence had backed up its belief about Gaelic's popularity. David Crystal, professor of linguistics at the University of Wales, said he was "absolutely thrilled" at the results. But he warned that the language would have to be helped more than just by "ticking a box in a survey". Margaret-Mary Murray, BBC Scotland's Gaelic executive editor, said the study was the first major Scotland-wide research on attitudes to the language in recent years. "BBC Scotland will be using its findings to inform the development of an exciting new project aimed at creating a new language learning resource for Gaelic. "It will encompass programming for television, radio, online services and printed materials that will appeal to a broad audience," she said. From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Thu Oct 2 13:37:29 2003 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (Phil CashCash) Date: Thu, 2 Oct 2003 06:37:29 -0700 Subject: Lecture ponders dying culture (fwd) Message-ID: Lecture ponders dying culture By Erin Raterman http://www.dailylobo.com/news/510939.html Women in Guatemala have seen civil war destroy not only their lives and society, but also their culture and language, a UNM associate professor says. But Melissa Axelrod is researching ways to preserve Guatemalan language and culture and help the women who have suffered through 36 years of war. Axelrod, an associate linguistics professor, spoke to a crowd of more than 50 at the SUB on Wednesday about more than two months of research on "La Violencia" - the toll the conflict is exacting on the country's society. Axelrod said she is baffled by the way the Guatemalan women have not only survived, but succeeded in a battered economy and an uncertain future. "Even though many of these women have lost their families and children, they were able to survive," she said. "These women found a way to build a life with nearly nothing." Axelrod said the Guatemalan women are an example of the human spirit's triumph. She and three other American women have traveled to Guatemala four times in the last two years to study the region's indigenous women and their dying language. She said she hopes her research will help the Guatemalan women maintain their traditional knowledge, which is in danger from the civil war. Axelrod plans on donating any money produced by her research to help preserve their culture and rebuild the country's economy. Axelrod's lecture was the first of a three-part Brown Bag lecture series planned for this semester. UNM's Women Study Program and the Feminist Research Institute are sponsoring the series. The lectures are free and provide UNM students the opportunity to learn about various research University faculty members are conducting, said Gail Houston, associate UNM English professor. Houston said Axelrod was an ideal speaker to kick off the lecture series because of her acclaimed expertise in women's studies. Axelrod said she plans to apply for a grant from the National Science Foundation in January to create a dictionary of the Guatemalan women's native language. She is going to return to Guatemala in late December and again in the summer to continue her research, she said. Axelrod recently received the 2003 Susan Geiger award for her research in Guatemala. The award, established last year, is meant to recognize women who have made considerable advancements in cross-cultural research projects for women studies. For the last 20 years, Axelrod has focused her work on the study and documentation of indigenous languages throughout the world. From pasxapu at DAKOTACOM.NET Thu Oct 2 13:38:58 2003 From: pasxapu at DAKOTACOM.NET (phil cash cash) Date: Thu, 2 Oct 2003 06:38:58 -0700 Subject: Gaelic survey 'hugely significant'(fwd) In-Reply-To: <1065101526.2b218d5a6067c@www.email.arizona.edu> Message-ID: oops... phil UofA, ILAT On Thursday, October 2, 2003, at 06:32 AM, Phil CashCash wrote: > Gaelic survey 'hugely significant' > Gaelic survey 'hugely significant' (fwd) > Gaelic survey 'hugely significant' > Gaelic survey 'hugely significant' > Gaelic survey 'hugely significant' > > MIME-Version: 1.0 > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" > Content-Disposition: inline > Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable > User-Agent: Internet Messaging Program (IMP) 4.0-cvs > > Gaelic survey 'hugely significant' > > Story from BBC NEWS: > http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/3156980.stm > > Published: 2003/10/02 08:27:51 GMT > > More than two thirds of people in Scotland consider Gaelic to be an > important part of Scottish life, according to a survey. > > Almost 90% of those questioned were in favour of allowing children to > learn the language in school. > > However, a similar number admitted that they did not know how to read > or > speak Gaelic. > > The survey was jointly funded by the BBC and B=C3=B2rd Gaidhlig na > h-Alba, > the Gaelic development agency, to identify the need for a multi-media > language learning resource. > > MRUK questioned 1,020 people in August, 87% of whom admitted that they > had no knowledge of the language. > > More opportunities > > However, 66% agreed that Gaelic is an important part of Scottish life > which needs to be promoted. > > A majority of those questioned said there should be more opportunities > to learn Gaelic and that more Scots should try to learn the language. > > There was also support for the extension of bi-lingual education, while > 87% were in favour of school children being allowed to learn Gaelic. > > This research... demonstrates the unique standing of Gaelic in the > cultural identity of Scotland > > B=C3=B2rd Gaidhlig na h-Alba chairman Duncan Ferguson said the > findings were > "extremely encouraging". > > The organisation is preparing the first national plan for Gaelic > development in Scotland. > > Mr Ferguson said: "The fact that almost 90% of the Scottish population > believe Gaelic medium education should be available where there is > demand is hugely significant, particularly at a time when the Scottish > Executive is preparing to bring forward a Gaelic language bill for > consultation. > > "There has been anecdotal evidence in the past suggesting that there > was > a substantial level of support for Gaelic across Scotland. > > "This research now confirms this, and it also demonstrates the unique > standing of Gaelic in the cultural identity of Scotland. > > 'Exciting project' > > "This is good news for Gaelic and for Scotland as a whole, in that it > demonstrates the recognition and value attached to Scottish cultural > heritage." > > The agency's chief executive Alan Campbell said it was the first time > scientific evidence had backed up its belief about Gaelic's popularity. > > David Crystal, professor of linguistics at the University of Wales, > said > he was "absolutely thrilled" at the results. > > But he warned that the language would have to be helped more than just > by "ticking a box in a survey". > > Margaret-Mary Murray, BBC Scotland's Gaelic executive editor, said the > study was the first major Scotland-wide research on attitudes to the > language in recent years. > > "BBC Scotland will be using its findings to inform the development of > an > exciting new project aimed at creating a new language learning resource > for Gaelic. > > "It will encompass programming for television, radio, online services > and printed materials that will appeal to a broad audience," she said. > From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Tue Oct 7 16:41:14 2003 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (Phil CashCash) Date: Tue, 7 Oct 2003 09:41:14 -0700 Subject: TEACHING YAQUI LANGUAGE (fwd) Message-ID: TEACHING YAQUI LANGUAGE High-tech tools http://www.azstarnet.com/star/mon/31006PASCUAYAQUICOMPUTERS.html [PICTURE] David Sanders / Staff Frankie Coronado, 9, left, and Estevana Buenamea, 6, work on a cultural project with a movielike program using the new Intel computers. [PICTURE] David Sanders / Staff Olivia Morillo, the Intel computer clubhouse coordinator, and her daughter Angelica, 13, watch a movie Angelica made using the technology that includes video, digital cameras and music software. By Sarah Garrecht Gassen ARIZONA DAILY STAR Pascua Yaqui children will use the latest in technology to help preserve and learn their traditional language through a new computer clubhouse. The Intel computer clubhouse, which is sponsored by the technology giant, will give Yaqui children ages 8-18 access to powerful computers, video programs, digital cameras and music software through an after-school program. Students will team with tribal elders to make documentaries about their culture and language, said Eugenia Echols, Intel education manager at the clubhouse. Fewer than 150 people out of about 13,000 tribal members in Arizona are fluent in the traditional Yaqui language, said Maria Amarillas, administrator of the tribe's language development department. "We're on the move now and hopefully our language will not die," she said. Amarillas and other fluent speakers will record audio and video language tutorials at the clubhouse. Children can pull those up when they're at the clubhouse and will also make their own, Echols said. The Pascua Yaqui Intel Computer Clubhouse is the third of its kind built on American Indian land, Echols said. Intel sponsors 86 computer clubhouses around the world. Children are already linking their traditional culture with current technology at the clubhouse. They created a short video of a Deer Dancer, taken from a painting in the clubhouse, animated the figure against a golden sunset and set the production to Yaqui music. Kids at the clubhouse were joking about needing Hollywood agents to get them big-time movie deals as they created their own short videos complete with special effects. "Remember how I made a bomb come out of my hand before?" 11-year-old Miguel Robles asked his friend at the computer. "I erased that by accident." Students ask several adults for help when necessary, but they learn the computer programs by doing and asking each other. "I just play around with the computers and learn them," said Jasmine Cupis, 11. "If I really want to do something and it sounds interesting, I learn it fast." Jasmine said the new technology will help her artistic side flourish. "It can help you with your creativity and your imagination," she said. "It can help you create things you didn't know you wanted to do - any art you do could be abstract art or using color gradations or drawing something the way it looks." Jasmine, like several other students, was having fun putting her own photo in improbable places, like outer space and in a rainbow. "You can have your body with somebody else's head," she said. "I think this will help me with my future and what I can do with computers." * Contact reporter Sarah Garrecht Gassen at 573-4117 or at sgassen at azstarnet.com. From sdp at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Tue Oct 7 18:02:03 2003 From: sdp at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (Sue Penfield) Date: Tue, 7 Oct 2003 11:02:03 -0700 Subject: Fw: Indian Education Grants Announced Message-ID: ----- Original Message ----- Subject: Indian Education Grants Announced FOR RELEASE September 30, 2003 Contacts: Elaine Quesinberry (202) 401-1576 U.S. Department of Education Office of Public Affairs, News Branch 400 Maryland Ave., S.W. Washington, D.C. 20202 NEARLY $105 MILLION IN INDIAN EDUCATION GRANTS ANNOUNCED Indian tribes, schools and state and local agencies that serve Indian children will share nearly $105 million in grants to improve education opportunities for nearly half a million Indian students, U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige said today. "The U.S. Department of Education recognizes and reaffirms the special relationship of the federal government to American Indians and their sovereign tribal nations, and we renew our commitment to educational excellence and opportunity for American Indian and Alaska Native children," Secretary Paige said. "President Bush believes every child should have access to a high-quality education, and that American Indian children are no exception." On behalf of Secretary Paige, Office of Indian Education Director Vicki Vasques made the announcement during a meeting of tribal college presidents sponsored by the White House Initiative for Tribal Colleges and Universities. Today's grant announcement includes $5 million in competitive grants for professional development, college preparation, and early childhood education, and nearly $100 million in formula grants to help 1,200 local education agencies improve the education opportunities for approximately 470,000 Indian students. Activities funded by the grants may include services to students from preschool to high school in areas such as family-based preschool; partnerships between schools and universities to assist and encourage students in transitioning from high school to college; enrichment programs to increase Indian children's achievement in one or more core academic subjects; programs to increase the rate of secondary school graduation; programs that preserve and teach the native language and culture; and programs to increase the number of new, highly qualified Indian individuals in professions that serve Indian people. Individuals who receive training under the Professional Development Program are required to perform work that is related to the training received and that benefits Indian people, or else they are required to repay all or a prorated part of the assistance received. President Bush created the White House Initiative on Tribal Colleges and Universities in July 2002 to ensure that the nation's 34 Tribal Colleges and Universities are more fully recognized and have full access to federal programs that benefit other postsecondary institutions. Tribal colleges and universities serve more than 30,000 full-time and part-time students and offer vocational certificate programs and associate, bachelor's and master's degrees. These institutions are often the only postsecondary institutions in some of our nation's poorest rural areas and serve a variety of people, including young adults, senior citizens, American Indians and non-American Indians. President Bush's 2004 budget proposal includes a 5 percent increase for tribal colleges and universities, bringing the total requested amount to $19 million. The president has proposed funding increases for these programs for the past two fiscal years. More information about the White House Initiative on Tribal Colleges and Universities is available at http://www.ed.gov/about/inits/list/whtc/edlite-index.html. More information about Indian education grants is available from the Office of Indian Education at http://www.ed.gov/aout/offices/list/ous/oie/contacts.html. # # # New Indian Education Discretionary Grants for 2003 SLATE FOR NEW AWARDS -- CFDA 84.299A DEMONSTRATION GRANTS FOR INDIAN CHILDREN APPLICANT STATE FY 2003 PINE RIDGE SCHOOL, SD, $267,211 NATIVE AMERICAN YOUTH ASSOCIATION, OR, $381,078 SHONTO PREP TECHNOLOGY HIGH SCHOOL, AZ, $22,288 GILA RIVER INDIAN COMMUNITY, AZ, $284,335 PRIBILOF SCHOOL DISTRICT, AK, $360,888 SAN PASQUAL VALLEY UNIFIED SCHOOL DISTRICT, CA, $369,644 MESCALERO APACHE SCHOOL, NM, $300,500 CONFEDERATED TRIBES OF GRAND RONDE, OR, $199,455 FLANDREAU INDIAN SCHOOL, SD, $365,239 TOTAL $2,550,638 SLATE FOR NEW AWARDS -- CFDA 84.299B PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT APPLICANT STATE FY 2003 CROSS CULTURAL EDUCATION CENTER, INC., OK, $445,548 UNITED TRIBES TECHNICAL COLLEGE, ND, $372,754 UNIVERSITY OF OREGON, OR, $264,070 TOHONO O'ODHAM COMMUNITY COLLEGE, AZ, $499,303 UNIVERSITY OF UTAH, UT, $498,397 HOPI TRIBE, AZ, $442,391 TOTAL $2,522,463 Message distributed to American Indian Disability Technical Assistance Center list at the request of Julie Clay, by: Diana Spas, Information Coordinator Research and Training Center on Disability in Rural Communities The University of Montana Rural Institute: A Center for Excellence in Disability Research, Education and Services 52 Corbin Hall Missoula, MT 59812-7056 (888)268-2743 (406) 243-5760 (my office) (406) 243-2349 fax http://rtc.ruralinstitute.umt.edu http://aidtac.ruralinstitute.umt.edu -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- X-Sieve: CMU Sieve 2.2 Resent-Date: Wed, 1 Oct 2003 08:42:15 -0600 From: "Diana Spas" To: "AIDTAC Distribution List" Subject: Indian Education Grants Announced Date: Wed, 1 Oct 2003 08:45:23 -0600 X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2800.1158 Sender: owner-aidtac at ruralinstitute.umt.edu Resent-From: aidtac at ruralinstitute.umt.edu Resent-Cc: recipient list not shown: ; X-Virus-Scanned: by amavisd-new at email.arizona.edu X-Spam-Status: No, hits=2.7 required=7.0 tests=HOT_NASTY, HTML_10_20, HTML_MESSAGE, US_DOLLARS_3 X-Spam-Level: xx FOR RELEASE September 30, 2003 Contacts: Elaine Quesinberry (202) 401-1576 U.S. Department of Education Office of Public Affairs, News Branch 400 Maryland Ave., S.W. Washington, D.C. 20202 NEARLY $105 MILLION IN INDIAN EDUCATION GRANTS ANNOUNCED Indian tribes, schools and state and local agencies that serve Indian children will share nearly $105 million in grants to improve education opportunities for nearly half a million Indian students, U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige said today. "The U.S. Department of Education recognizes and reaffirms the special relationship of the federal government to American Indians and their sovereign tribal nations, and we renew our commitment to educational excellence and opportunity for American Indian and Alaska Native children," Secretary Paige said. "President Bush believes every child should have access to a high-quality education, and that American Indian children are no exception." On behalf of Secretary Paige, Office of Indian Education Director Vicki Vasques made the announcement during a meeting of tribal college presidents sponsored by the White House Initiative for Tribal Colleges and Universities. Today's grant announcement includes $5 million in competitive grants for professional development, college preparation, and early childhood education, and nearly $100 million in formula grants to help 1,200 local education agencies improve the education opportunities for approximately 470,000 Indian students. Activities funded by the grants may include services to students from preschool to high school in areas such as family-based preschool; partnerships between schools and universities to assist and encourage students in transitioning from high school to college; enrichment programs to increase Indian children's achievement in one or more core academic subjects; programs to increase the rate of secondary school graduation; programs that preserve and teach the native language and culture; and programs to increase the number of new, highly qualified Indian individuals in professions that serve Indian people. Individuals who receive training under the Professional Development Program are required to perform work that is related to the training received and that benefits Indian people, or else they are required to repay all or a prorated part of the assistance received. President Bush created the White House Initiative on Tribal Colleges and Universities in July 2002 to ensure that the nation's 34 Tribal Colleges and Universities are more fully recognized and have full access to federal programs that benefit other postsecondary institutions. Tribal colleges and universities serve more than 30,000 full-time and part-time students and offer vocational certificate programs and associate, bachelor's and master's degrees. These institutions are often the only postsecondary institutions in some of our nation's poorest rural areas and serve a variety of people, including young adults, senior citizens, American Indians and non-American Indians. President Bush's 2004 budget proposal includes a 5 percent increase for tribal colleges and universities, bringing the total requested amount to $19 million. The president has proposed funding increases for these programs for the past two fiscal years. More information about the White House Initiative on Tribal Colleges and Universities is available at http://www.ed.gov/about/inits/list/whtc/edlite-index.html. More information about Indian education grants is available from the Office of Indian Education at http://www.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ous/oie/contacts.html. # # # New Indian Education Discretionary Grants for 2003 SLATE FOR NEW AWARDS -- CFDA 84.299A DEMONSTRATION GRANTS FOR INDIAN CHILDREN APPLICANT STATE FY 2003 PINE RIDGE SCHOOL, SD, $267,211 NATIVE AMERICAN YOUTH ASSOCIATION, OR, $381,078 SHONTO PREP TECHNOLOGY HIGH SCHOOL, AZ, $22,288 GILA RIVER INDIAN COMMUNITY, AZ, $284,335 PRIBILOF SCHOOL DISTRICT, AK, $360,888 SAN PASQUAL VALLEY UNIFIED SCHOOL DISTRICT, CA, $369,644 MESCALERO APACHE SCHOOL, NM, $300,500 CONFEDERATED TRIBES OF GRAND RONDE, OR, $199,455 FLANDREAU INDIAN SCHOOL, SD, $365,239 TOTAL $2,550,638 SLATE FOR NEW AWARDS -- CFDA 84.299B PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT APPLICANT STATE FY 2003 CROSS CULTURAL EDUCATION CENTER, INC., OK, $445,548 UNITED TRIBES TECHNICAL COLLEGE, ND, $372,754 UNIVERSITY OF OREGON, OR, $264,070 TOHONO O'ODHAM COMMUNITY COLLEGE, AZ, $499,303 UNIVERSITY OF UTAH, UT, $498,397 HOPI TRIBE, AZ, $442,391 TOTAL $2,522,463 Message distributed to American Indian Disability Technical Assistance Center list at the request of Julie Clay, by: Diana Spas, Information Coordinator Research and Training Center on Disability in Rural Communities The University of Montana Rural Institute: A Center for Excellence in Disability Research, Education and Services 52 Corbin Hall Missoula, MT 59812-7056 (888)268-2743 (406) 243-5760 (my office) (406) 243-2349 fax http://rtc.ruralinstitute.umt.edu http://aidtac.ruralinstitute.umt.edu -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From dzo at BISHARAT.NET Tue Oct 7 20:42:52 2003 From: dzo at BISHARAT.NET (Don Osborn) Date: Tue, 7 Oct 2003 22:42:52 +0200 Subject: Native Language Email (article) Message-ID: Greetings! I am new to this list and am looking over some off the archives. Hope it's okay to comment on some older postings. Matthew Ward's comments are very interesting. I've personally noticed the evolution of e-mail and the internet in Chinese over the last decade or so (my wife is Chinese). In the case of Africa and African languages things are moving also, though the sociolinguistic terrain varies and has some differences from much of Asia (the higher prominence of former colonial languages being one, less of a written tradition, non-use of maternal languages in instruction, and in the case of some less-spoken languages, lack of standard orthography). One wonders about the potential for more multimedia uses of ICT, including more creative use of audio, as the lines between technologies become more blurred. >From a technical point of view, there are no particular problems for text e-mail for languages using basically the same Latin alphabet as West European languages. For the many languages using modified letters and those using non-Latin scripts the technical hurdles are no more insurmountable than those faced in Asia. Oddly it sometimes seems that the orthographies with extended Latin orthographies have more issues, because there may only be a few characters outside the European character set - one can get by with substitute measures, more or less, and if you use the extended characters, still some browsers and many e-mail readers mess them up. Just recently on the Unicode-Afrique list, someone actually wondered about creating an ISO-8859 for the Latin transcription of Tamazight (not likely to happen, and a backwards step from implementation of Unicode if it did). Re the MailAfrica.net e-mail system that Phil Cash Cash brought to the list's attention, there has also been another one out there for a while at http://www.africast.com . Haven't checked to see if the two are intercompatible. Don Don Osborn, Ph.D. dzo at bisharat.net *Bisharat! A language, technology & development initiative *Bisharat! Initiative langues - technologie - d?veloppement http://www.bisharat.net Date: Wed, 13 Nov 2002 10:52:11 -0700 From: Matthew Ward Subject: Re: Native Language Email (article) Good article, thanks. I lived in Asia in the 1990's and the early part of this decade, and I witnessed an amazing revolution in terms of native language use of e-mail and Internet. In Thailand in the early 90's, for example, e-mail use was restricted to an elite who could communicate in English, as then-current technology could not handle the Thai writing system. Technological advances not only caused most people to switch to Thai, they also brought in the majority of Thais who do not speak English. Today, the idea of writing e-mail in English to other native speakers of Thai would seem quaint indeed to most Thai teenagers, who have already grown up with technology which allows them to use their native language online with ease. People who are fluent in English may use it to communicate with native speakers of other languages, but native speakers of Thai now use almost exclusively Thai to communicate among themselves. This revolution has also occurred in Japan and Taiwan, the other two Asian countries that I have lived in. Now, with the need to write e-mail in English already a thing of the past, the new trend has been towards e-mail programs which allow minority languages and dialects to be used, which lessens the dependance on national Asian languages like Standard Japanese, Standard Thai, and Mandarin Chinese. Last year, my Japanese wife and I were riding a train in Japan, and she was transfixed by a huge advertisement for a program which would allow her to write her native dialect, Kansai Japanese, online. The advertisement showed what would happen if you input Kansai Japanese into a standard program (the computer would "misread" the phonetic input) vs. what would happen if you used the program advertised (the program would correctly interpret the phonetic input). It is my experience that if you create technology which allows people to easily use their native languages online, they will do it, just as people prefer to use all other technologies in their native languages. The only real challenge is creating the technology and making it available to everyone. Matthew Ward Phil Cash Cash wrote: >Dear ILAT members, > >Many of you might find this recent news interesting where e-mail is used >for African languages such as Swahili, Kikuyu, Luaya, Luo, Yoruba, Hausa >and Igbo. Below is a link to the article, "Kenyan Company Creates Native >Language Email Services." > >http://www.time.com/time/interactive/stories/technology/inside_africa.html > >Enjoy! Note the multimedia links as well. > >Phil Cash Cash (cayuse/nez perce) >ILAT, UofA > > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From dzo at BISHARAT.NET Tue Oct 7 20:44:12 2003 From: dzo at BISHARAT.NET (Don Osborn) Date: Tue, 7 Oct 2003 22:44:12 +0200 Subject: Microsoft translates software into African languages (fwd) Message-ID: FYI, there is also an opensource translation effort for South African languages at http://translate.org.za that has been ongoing for a while. (It's good to have both.) Don Osborn Bisharat.net Date: Sat, 27 Sep 2003 20:33:18 -0700 From: Phil CashCash Subject: Microsoft translates software into African languages (fwd) Microsoft translates software into African languages http://www.sundaytimes.co.za/2003/09/28/business/technology/tech10.asp A software tool that will help computer programs to be translated into six African languages has been developed by Microsoft. Zulu and Afrikaans programs are ready for demonstration after three months of work by six members of Microsoft's technical team. The other languages in development are Setswana, Xhosa, Swahili and Sepedi. The software makes it easier for people speaking indigenous languages to get to grips with technology. [ . . . ] -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Wed Oct 8 06:49:54 2003 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (Phil CashCash) Date: Tue, 7 Oct 2003 23:49:54 -0700 Subject: Winnebagos mourn Whitewater (fwd) Message-ID: Winnebagos mourn Whitewater By Michele Linck, Journal staff writer http://www.siouxcityjournal.com/articles/2003/10/08/news/regional/27dfd9853bca379186256db900197c50.txt WINNEBAGO, Neb. -- The Winnebago Tribe is mourning the death of a beloved elder today, but also remembering the legacy he left for them to carry on. Stanford Whitewater Sr., 90, died Sunday at his home in Winnebago, which he shared with his wife of 66 years, Marie Wolf Whitewater. After earning his living as a farmer and working for the Burlington Northern Railroad, Whitewater dedicated his final years to teaching and preserving Ho-Chunk, the tribe's native language, and its culture. It was a passion that had always been close to his heart, three of his daughters recalled Tuesday. They are among 11 children born to the Whitewaters. Nine survive. They spoke at the Blackhawk Community Center here, where their father's body lay in state, attended by five generations of the family and many members of the community who had come to pay respects. "The older kids grew up speaking Ho-Chunk," Thelma Whitewater remembered. "I guess we weren't into learning it when he wanted to teach it," said daughter Gloria Sheridan. "He always tried to teach us. Like a lot of people, we didn't care about it until it was almost gone. We aren't the only ones. They say there are only 20 people left who speak it." Marie Whitewater, 84, noted that both Stanford and herself had gone to government-run Indian schools where they were forced to learn and speak English and were punished for "talking Indian." Perhaps that explained his dedication for preserving his native tongue. Whitewater taught Ho-Chunk any place he could, but more formally at Little Priest Tribal College for more than 10 years, until his health failed. In the last few years, he held class in his home three times a week, with students gathered at the kitchen table. "He had one student who came back to learn the language," Sheridan said. "In four years, he turned her into a fluent speaker. He's gone now, but she's going to carry it on." That student was Elaine Rice. Like Whitewater, Rice became a Ho-Chunk instructor at the tribal college. She has recently left to be an instructor in a new language and culture program, the Winnebago Renaissance Project. Just two years old, it has a staff of 17, including two VISTA volunteers. Rice said she feels the same urgency as Whitewater to preserve Ho-Chunk. "He kept the language alive in the academic community," said Rice, who had studied under Whitewater since 1995. "He was one of the few who was willing to teach it in a formal setting." Along with teaching youngsters the language, the project is building on the 2,700 audio tapes of Ho-Chunk words and lessons recorded by Whitewater while teaching at Little Priest. "He never gave up," Sheridan said. "He said it was real important, that everything we do has to do with our language." His family remembers a 'simple man' Marie Whitewater remembered her husband as a man of peace and a spiritual leader in the community. He woke daily before dawn and went outside the house to pray, in the tradition way. The last time he was able to walk, he went outside for prayer and built a ceremonial fire. Even on his sickbed, people came to him for spiritual guidance, Thelma Whitewater said. The daughters recalled Whitewater's love of the land and acute observations of the natural world. Even after he no longer farmed, he kept a garden. Until a year ago he would still drive his tractor. And until a few years ago, he would go get the mail and run back up the driveway. Even a year ago, he was still doing traditional dancing at powwows. Sheridan remembered her father as such a good storyteller, that a friend dropping by his house on a brief errand once found he was still there five hours later. Naturally he stayed for dinner. Another time, she said, Morman missionaries dropped by. Whitewater, who spear-fished for carp, told them he was going fishing, but they could come along and talk to him. Pretty soon, they were all standing in deep water, white shirts and all. Stanford Whitewater was also a musician. He played saxophone, drums and harmonica. One time during the big band era he and his band were performing in North Sioux City while Lawrence Welk was also in town, they said. Whitewater was 'Eagle Man' The caption beneath a photo of Whitewater displayed near his casket among some awards and flowers, reads "Caxsep-ga." It is his name in Ho-Chunk and means "Eagle Man." Beside it is the honorary degree of Doctorate of Humane Letters, bestowed upon him by Little Priest Tribal College during the tribe's annual powwow in July. The community now refers to him as Dr. Whitewater. The college had named a scholarship after him in March. Whitewater was named 1996 Elder of the Year by the National Indian Education Association, an award presented to him in a ceremony in Rapid City, S.D. Whitewater was the father of 11 children, grandfather to 50, great-grandfather to 99 and great-great-grandfather to seven, with five more great-great grandbabies expected to be born soon. In the traditional way, the family planned to stay up all night Tuesday, playing "moccasin games" and remembering Whitewater. Then, the daughters will perform a ritual, putting new clothes on their mother and combing her hair, a sign she is a "free woman." Whitewater's funeral will be Thursday. From mward at LUNA.CC.NM.US Wed Oct 8 21:27:07 2003 From: mward at LUNA.CC.NM.US (Matthew Ward) Date: Wed, 8 Oct 2003 15:27:07 -0600 Subject: Native Language Email (article) Message-ID: Welcome, Don Below is an expanded account of my personal observations about language and technology in Asia. It repeats some of the same information as before, but if you didn't read my first post, or if you are interested in finding out more, you might find it interesting: When I was living in Asia in the 1990's, computer technology relating to Asian languages was evolving with remarkable speed. In the early 90's, it was extremely inconvenient to use non-Latin Asian writing systems over the Internet, hence the small number of speakers of those languages who used the Internet tended to use English, other European languages, or romanized versions of their own languages. Now, in 2003, the situation has completely changed--the idea of not using one's native language on the Internet has already become incredibly quaint. Go to an Internet cafe in Taiwan or Thailand (two of the countries that I have lived in) and you will see young natives of those countries writing to each other exclusively in their native languages. Indeed, this has become a necessity, because while, for example, the small minority of Thai businessmen who used the Internet to communicate with each other in the early 90's could write English well enough to communicate, now that even tiny rural villages in Thailand have Internet cafes, the large majority of Thais would not be able to communicate well in English even if they did not now have the technology that allows them to communicate in Thai. It has been a kind of circular revolution: the technology has allowed people to use the Internet in their own languages, which in turn has brought huge numbers of new users and new native-language content, which in turn has spurred more technological development. My wife is an interesting example: she is Japanese, but was living in Guatemala for a short time in the 90's. By that time, Japanese-language e-mail was well established in Japan, but it was not a feature you could count on having on computers outside of Japan. Her e-mail messages to other Japanese people during that time were mainly romanized Japanese (which is not particularly easy to read), with some English and Spanish words mixed in. As soon as the technology allowed her to write in Japanese, she immediately switched to the Japanese writing system. Japanese-language software, also allowed her, by the way, to have a very wide access to Japanese language media, even while she was not living in Japan. A couple of years ago, we were living in Osaka, Japan. One evening, we were going home on the train, and she suddenly got very excited, and pointed out a large advertisement. In fact, most of the people in the car seemed to be discussing that advertisement. It was for software for her native dialect, the Kansai dialect, which is quite different from standard Japanese. It showed two examples of phonetically inputing the Kansai dialect into a word processor. The first was using normal software, which would result in the program misreading variant Kansai-dialect grammatical particles as Chinese-character vocabulary items. Correcting this would require time-consuming manual input which would discourage the writer from using the dialect on a personal computer at all. The second example showed the same phonetic input using the new Kansai-dialect software, which would correctly "read" the variant grammatical particles, resulting in a much quicker and more easy writing experience; one which certainly encourages Kansai-dialect speakers to write e-mail in their own dialect, rather than in Standard Japanese. Now, in Japan, as in most of the rest of the world, the minority languages and dialects are losing ground to the "standard," dominant native language--in effect, standard Japanese is swallowing other Japanese dialects, as well as other traditional languages like Ainu and Okinawan. The Kansai dialect is bucking this trend, however--in my experience, it is the dialect that the vast majority of Kansai children speak at home--there is no question that it is the dialect that my wife will speak to our future children. Part of this stems from the reality that Kansai people have made it very cleare that they want the media and technology to be available to them in their own dialect. As in the case of the software program I mention above, the demand is creating a supply, which in turn reinforces the continuing viability of the dialect. Another good example of this is in Hong Kong--although the software for most minority (non-Mandarin) Chinese languages has not yet been sufficiently developed, Chinese language software for speakers of Cantonese (which includes a fairly large number of characters which are used in Cantonese but not in Mandarin) is very widely available and widely used. The Chinese language software I have on my computer at home, for example, includes Cantonese characters. Although I personally have no understanding of Cantonese, the software I downloaded for Mandarin Chinese included software for Cantonese characters as well. With this state of affairs, you can imagine that Cantonese speakers have a much easier time writing in their own dialects than do speakers of other non-Mandarin Chinese languages, and that this contributes to the very healthy state of the Cantonese language. Obviously, most indigenous people find themselves in a much more difficult situation than do the Kansai Japanese or Kong Kong Chinese, the latter which enjoy great economic power and large regions with millions of native speakers of local dialect or language. Still, there is no question in my mind that developing software for all languages has tremendous benefits. It is certainly a huge incentive to people to use their own native languages on computers, online and in e-mail. Since there seems to be a wide degree of agreement that in order for languages to continue to be viable in the long-term, they need to be able to be used in all contexts, making the computer technology available to speakers of all languages is one of the most important things that needs to be accomplished. With that in mind, I have to say this: given the tremendous complexity of the Chinese and Japanese writing systems, if those two languages can be made fully operational on computers and online (as, indeed, they have) then the technical aspects of writing indigenous languages (which are, worldwide, mostly written in some form of the Latin alphabet) cannot really be a huge obstacle. Don Osborn wrote: > Greetings! I am new to this list and am looking over some off the > archives. > Hope it's okay to comment on some older postings. > > Matthew Ward's comments are very interesting. I've personally noticed the > evolution of e-mail and the internet in Chinese over the last decade or so > (my wife is Chinese). In the case of Africa and African languages things > are moving also, though the sociolinguistic terrain varies and has some > differences from much of Asia (the higher prominence of former colonial > languages being one, less of a written tradition, non-use of maternal > languages in instruction, and in the case of some less-spoken languages, > lack of standard orthography). One wonders about the potential for more > multimedia uses of ICT, including more creative use of audio, as the lines > between technologies become more blurred. > > From a technical point of view, there are no particular problems for text > e-mail for languages using basically the same Latin alphabet as West > European languages. For the many languages using modified letters and > those > using non-Latin scripts the technical hurdles are no more insurmountable > than those faced in Asia. Oddly it sometimes seems that the orthographies > with extended Latin orthographies have more issues, because there may only > be a few characters outside the European character set - one can get > by with > substitute measures, more or less, and if you use the extended characters, > still some browsers and many e-mail readers mess them up. Just > recently on > the Unicode-Afrique list, someone actually wondered about creating an > ISO-8859 for the Latin transcription of Tamazight (not likely to > happen, and > a backwards step from implementation of Unicode if it did). > > Re the MailAfrica.net e-mail system that Phil Cash Cash brought to the > list's attention, there has also been another one out there for a while at > http://www.africast.com . Haven't checked to see if the two are > intercompatible. > > Don > > Don Osborn, Ph.D. dzo at bisharat.net > *Bisharat! A language, technology & development initiative > *Bisharat! Initiative langues - technologie - d?veloppement > http://www.bisharat.net > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Thu Oct 9 16:49:42 2003 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (Phil CashCash) Date: Thu, 9 Oct 2003 09:49:42 -0700 Subject: Revised Language Act fails to impress (fwd) Message-ID: Revised Language Act fails to impress WebPosted Oct 8 2003 09:13 AM CDT YELLOWKNIFE http://north.cbc.ca/regional/servlet/EmailStory?filename=oct08nwtlanguag08102003®ion=North The N.W.T.'s Official Languages Act is about to undergo a major revision. The new Act is almost exactly what a special review committee recommended earlier this year. But the changes come at the eleventh hour, only after the chair of that committee blasted the government for the bill it initially proposed. Tu Nedhe MLA Steve Nitah accused the government of foot-dragging for the late notice given of a public hearing held Tuesday night on revisions to the Act. "By the time we agreed on a bill for first and second reading, for public hearings that happened we had less than 48 hours to notify the public," he says. The revised act proposes two new boards: one to revitalize aboriginal languages, and another to allow each language group a say about the delivery of government services in different official languages. That's one more board than the review committee proposed. People who deliver language programming at the community level say that's duplication and a waste of money. Sabet Biscaye works to help preserve and promote the Chipewyan language. "If money becomes available, we'd certainly like to use it at the community level to continue with our programming," he says. "Just because they're going to use existing money doesn't mean it couldn't be diverted back to the communities." Inuktitut to remain on list At the public hearing there was also discussion of dropping one of the 11 official languages. The Inuvialuit requested that Inuktitut be deleted from the act. They don't want to share Inuit-specific language funding with the few Inuktitut-speaking people who live in the Northwest Territories. The legislative committee reviewing the bill rejected the call. From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Fri Oct 10 17:06:45 2003 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (Phil CashCash) Date: Fri, 10 Oct 2003 10:06:45 -0700 Subject: Inuktitut fluency overstated, watchdog says (fwd) Message-ID: October 10, 2003 Inuktitut fluency overstated, watchdog says Statistics Canada survey could mislead decision-makers: Eva Aariak PATRICIA D'SOUZA http://www.nunatsiaq.com/news/nunavut/31010_06.html The overwhelming strength of the Inuktitut language reported in Statistics Canada's Aboriginal Peoples Survey last month does not reflect the reality in Nunavut, the territory's language watchdog says. Statistics Canada researchers collected data from about 9,000 Inuit in 53 communities in the Canadian Arctic, including 4,500 Nunavummiut. Of those, 90 per cent of adults and children reported being able to speak or understand an aboriginal language. About 89 per cent of adults and 70 per cent of children said they could speak it relatively or very well. But in an interview last week, Nunavut Language Commissioner Eva Aariak said the numbers sound surprisingly high for a language that has been in steady decline for the past 50 years. The 2001 Nunavut Household Survey reported that three-quarters of the territory's population identified Inuktitut or Inuinnaqtun as the first language learned at home. That's a more accurate reflection of the current state of the language, Aariak said. And the most recent census, which included Inuit respondents in southern Canada, found that 82 per cent spoke and understood enough Inuktitut to carry on a conversation. Karen Kelly-Scott, an Statistics Canada analyst on the Aboriginal Peoples Survey, said the word "understand" may account for the high numbers. Many more people can understand at least part of their mother tongue than actually speak it. But the danger of the Aboriginal Peoples Survey's high numbers, Aariak said, is that they could threaten future support for programs aimed at strengthening the Inuktitut language in Nunavut. "It's great to have figures at that level at this point, but on the other hand, I hope that it will not portray to the decision-makers that, hey, the Inuktitut language is surviving well so we don't have to worry about it," Aariak said. "It's not like that." However, Statistics Canada researchers did not evaluate language proficiency as they collected their data, so the numbers do not indicate the true strength of Inuktitut in the Canadian North. What they do indicate is the individual perceptions of a sample group of Inuit who were asked to rate their ability to speak or understand Inuktitut. And what that shows, Aariak said, is an overwhelmingly strong desire to speak and understand Inuktitut, regardless of actual ability. "There is that desire by the young people to learn their language, especially since the creation of Nunavut. There is this enhanced sense of expectation that, hey, now that we have our own territory, our culture and language will be more present and more readily available for me to learn," she said. The problem is that the language has not actually been more readily available to learn. The desire to learn Inuktitut among Inuit youth has not been paired with the tools of instruction, a reality that the Aboriginal Peoples Survey does not accurately reflect. "The increasing number of people who are not learning [Inuktitut] is evident among the youth especially," Aariak said. "Perhaps the reason it's surviving is that there's enough [instructional] spaces to date that are keeping it alive, but still, our government has stated that Inuktitut will be the working language of government by the year 2020." But the resources aren't available to help Inuit who are functional but not fluent in Inuktitut improve their language skills. "We have young civil servants now who are recruited after Grade 12 and post secondary who are not very comfortable in their written and comprehension levels in Inuktitut. And in our schools, the [Inuktitut] language of instruction only goes up as far as Grade 3 or 4 and not much beyond that," she said. "There is a high expectation from the younger generation that these kinds of programs will be available to them, but they're not readily available to them yet." But if they were, Aariak said, the Inuktitut levels in Nunavut would soar. "Fifty years ago in our environment, the majority of people in Nunavut were unilingual Inuktitut-speaking people. And the decrease in the numbers of speakers, the rapid decrease, is kind of scary within that short period of time," she said. "We learned our English language skills from school only. It wasn't taught at home.... I think it's very well understood that speaking the Inuktitut language at home is most desirable, but in today's society, we also have to supplement it from outside the home. "What you're learning at home is mostly spoken word in Inuktitut. And that has to be enhanced by teaching Inuktitut in terms of proper speaking, reading and writing. And that is in the hands of our education system today." Survey participants in the four Canadian Arctic regions were asked, "Who helps children learn an aboriginal language?" [see original for statistics] From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Fri Oct 10 21:35:25 2003 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (Phil CashCash) Date: Fri, 10 Oct 2003 14:35:25 -0700 Subject: Keeping a voice alive (fwd) Message-ID: Keeping a voice alive Squamish Nation puts together CD-ROM to teach its language ? By Todd Lawson Reporter http://www.squamishchief.com/madison%5CWQuestion.nsf/SClocal/84FBCC402C1DBF7A88256DBB006371DF?OpenDocument ? In the early 19th century, the Squamish Valley was populated with 16,000 First Nations peoples who lived with a deep respect and understanding of the land and spirits around them. Through a culture of tradition and celebration, the natives forged a strong bond between each other as time passed. To communicate with members from other tribes and strengthen this connection, the natives developed a rich language called Skomish Snachem ? a language that has nearly been wiped out from a once-thriving culture. When the Europeans came to settle in the valley in the early 1800s, they brought with them diseases that had never before been experienced by the natives ? not to mention a steadfast desire to eradicate Native culture altogether. Traditional longhouses, a meeting ground for ceremonies and rituals, were burnt to the ground. Potlatch gatherings were disallowed and speaking in their native tongue was strictly forbidden. Those who were caught speaking Skomish Snachem were beaten and whipped by church and government officials. As a result of disease and constant abuse, a proud and healthy society was, in a matter of years, decimated to just 320 survivors. The remaining populace, represented by 16 different tribes, formed the Squamish Nation in 1923 and struggled to keep their way of life in a white man?s world. Along with the language, a culture began to die. Today however, fuelled by the desire to keep the traditional language from becoming extinct, a group of Squamish First Nations locals have collaborated on a history-making learning tool to prevent this tragedy from happening. Spearheaded by Shirley Lewis, a language and culture worker at Totem Hall, a unique Squamish Nation Education CD-ROM has been produced to teach the Skomish Snachem language to anyone willing to learn. ?When I first started working for the education department, I saw the need to revitalize our traditional language,? said Lewis. ?We need to save part of our culture. The language is almost extinct and if we don?t do something now it will be gone.? Her vision was shared by Totem Hall Education Director Joy Joseph McCullough, and together they started the intensive project after receiving funding from the First Peoples Heritage and Language Culture Council. Lewis quickly came to realize, producing an accurate, user-friendly learning device is not an easy task. She decided to get some help, and began by enlisting the expertise of local photography/media expert Dave Humphreys as project manager, who would oversee the many different multi-media aspects involved. Humphreys became involved in the project as a result of attending First Nations gatherings ? drum circles, sweat lodges and fire-walking ceremonies, at every opportunity possible. ?When they approached me with the idea, I was definitely interested because it was something completely new,? said Humphreys, who was responsible for everything from conceptional ideas to working with ?super-talented? local software developer Peter Wellnhofer, to organizing native art, photography, graphic design and printing and packaging. ?I learned to take things one step at a time,? said Humphreys. ?There were so many different aspects involved?it was a huge project. It was an honour to work with the Squamish First Nations and help them build something that they?re proud of. The storytelling was amazing, and for them to share their legends with me was really honourable?they?re very kind-hearted people.? The CD-ROM features strong visuals and a bold, easy-to-follow layout geared towards anyone with even the most basic computer skills. By simply clicking the mouse on any English word you would like to learn in Skomish Snachem, an image appears followed by the voice of any one of the three Squamish Nation elders who provide the translated word in the ancestral language. The CD-ROM teaches aspects of human relations, Indian implements, nature?s environment, nature?s elements, body parts, emotions, dwelling, clothing, domestic animals, wild animals, sea animals, reptiles, insects, birds, numbers and colours. The project would not have been possible without the voices and knowledge behind the words. Addie Kermeen and Alex Williams, Squamish First Nations elders fluent in Skomish Snachem, along with Alice Harry, are the only remaining natives who speak the language in the Squamish Valley. Besides lending their voices to provide proper pronunciation of all language covered in the instructional CD, the elders shared a vast amount of tradition and culture, which gave the project a completely authentic feel. Growing up speaking English as a child, Alice Harry was taught the native language as a little girl at the old Totem Hall by the late Dominic Charlie. Along with her father Ernie Harry and the late Chief Alvie Andrews, they began to develop what she now calls ?our Bible? ? a detailed categorization of all words in Skomish Snachem. ?I thank the Creator for blessing me with this gift,? she says of her language, ?but as we say, it is not a gift unless we share it.? On the opposite side of the spectrum, Addie Kermeen spoke Skomish Snachem from birth, and didn?t learn any English until the age of 12. Because she didn?t attend the feared residential schools where the language was beaten out of all native children, she was able to teach her children and grandchildren the traditional and cultural ways of her people. ?I didn?t go through the punishment because I stayed at home, so I was able to pass on the language to my kids,? said Kermeen, born on the Seachim Reserve in 1936. Alex Williams was also born on the Seachim Reserve, and started his first job at the age of 13 in the booming logging industry. He struggled to connect with the white man as he never spoke a word of English, but was forced to learn quickly. ?I had to learn ? [the logging workers] had a lot of fun with me because I couldn?t speak properly but I did it,? said Williams. At the time, Williams and many other Squamish Nation natives were caught between a white man?s world and a native world, they didn?t know where they belonged ? their culture was becoming lost. This was the main reason he was more than happy to lend his voice to the project. ?We?d like to see the younger generations come back to their language. The trouble is they?re not interested. So if we can teach them some of their history and traditions?it?ll keep them out of trouble.? Currently, the CD-ROM is being taught by First Nations support workers in all schools in the Howe Sound School District where native students are enrolled, as well as in nursery schools and day cares. According to Lewis, a future vision for the education department is to have an immersion school for children from Kindergarten to Grade 5 that will focus primarily on studying the language. ?The project is aimed towards First Nations youth who are willing to become part of the process to bring back the language and culture?they both go hand in hand. The kids are all learning on computers now so we had to get something in front of them. We?ve never had a tool like this before.? Although the traditional way of learning Skomish Snachem involves passing it down from the elders to the youth, the First Nations society has chosen to embrace technology in a bid to save the language. ?We?re using technology to help us to get the community to learn the language. It?s not the traditional method but it?s a great way to get people to learn. We?re very fortunate to be able to hold onto it and pass it down ? it?s our way of life.? From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Mon Oct 13 16:36:22 2003 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (Phil CashCash) Date: Mon, 13 Oct 2003 09:36:22 -0700 Subject: Experts speak out to save Midwestern tribal tongues (fwd) Message-ID: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0310120457oct12,1,6043008.story?coll=chi-newsnationworld-hed Experts speak out to save Midwestern tribal tongues By Tom Nugent Special to the Tribune October 12, 2003 EAST LANSING, Mich. -- Drop by professor Helen Roy's Native American linguistics class at Michigan State University on a typical afternoon and you'll probably find her drilling a dozen students on difficult-to-pronounce words such as bmijigoe. The word, loosely translated, means a dress in the Ojibwe language once spoken by Native Americans across the Midwest. But teaching grammar and pronunciation to university students is only part of 55-year-old Roy's educational mission. As a Native American, she is engaged in a passionate struggle to save her tribal language, a Michigan version of the Algonquin-family language, Ojibwe, from vanishing within the next few decades. Like Ojibwe, more than 30 Native American languages in the Midwest are threatened with extinction during the next 20 to 30 years, according to linguistics researchers. Increasingly, American Indian parents are insisting that their children concentrate on English to get good jobs, those experts say. Meanwhile, some Midwestern tribal leaders warn that only a handful of their elderly members still are able to speak the native tongue fluently and that when they die, the traditional language will vanish along with them. For Roy and many other Native American language teachers, the prospect of "losing our language" is a potential tragedy. "I'm teaching a language, but I'm also teaching a way of life," Roy said. "If we lose the [Ojibwe] language, the danger is that we'll also lose the culture to which it belongs. I don't think anyone one wants that to happen, and that's why we work so hard in class every day." But teachers such as Roy face an uphill battle, said Wayne State University linguistics expert Anthony Aristar, who is directing efforts to build a nationwide, $2 million database aimed in part at preserving dying languages. Aristar and other researchers say that at least half of America's 200 remaining native languages will vanish within the next century. More than words disappear "Losing a language is a major setback for everyone, because along with the language, you will also lose all of the poems, the stories, the songs," Aristar said. "And those things are of immense importance to all of us as human beings. "On the other hand, we have to accept the fact that many families choose to have their children learn the language of the mainstream culture, so they can land good jobs and gain economic power." Aristar predicts that perhaps as many as 500 of the world's approximately 6,500 languages will become extinct in the next few decades. He said the chances for preserving the 30 or so Native American tribal languages still spoken in the Midwest are "not very good, if you look at the history involved." "I think the Native American languages that will survive are probably those in the West--Navajo, for example--where the local Indian tribes were not nearly as injured and fragmented as those around the Great Lakes. "Unfortunately, I think it will be very difficult for [Midwestern] languages such as Potawatomi and Ojibwe to survive beyond the next few decades," he added. Regardless of the long odds against them, however, many Native American language researchers and teachers are not giving up the fight. "I spend a lot of time working with tribal elders and doing my best to tape and preserve their language," said Monica Macaulay, a University of Wisconsin linguistics professor who has spent six years compiling a dictionary of the Menominee language spoken by the 8,800-member Menominee Nation in Wisconsin. "We have collected more than 11,000 words for this bilingual dictionary," said Macaulay, "and that's important because there are only about 40 elderly members of the tribe who can still speak the language fluently. I'm trying to document as much of the language as I can, so I drive out there [to the Menominee reservation] every month and tape and tape and tape!" Roland Marmon, a North Dakota Turtle Mountain Ojibwa who teaches at White Earth Tribal and Community College in Mahnomen, Minn., said it is important for Native Americans to study their languages to preserve their cultural identity. `Sense of empowerment' "Many of our students find that studying Ojibwe is a good way to get in closer touch with their own culture," Marmon said. "For students who feel like they've lost their Native American roots, learning the original language can bring a new sense of empowerment and identity." George Cornell, director of the Native American Institute and a professor of linguistics at Michigan State, said there are "important historical reasons to study languages," regardless of their future viability. "All you have to do is ask, `Why study Latin?'--a language that's been dead for a thousand years--and then you realize how much these Native American languages have to teach us," said Cornell, a Native American. To illustrate how language can "open a window" on culture, he cited an incident several years ago when he asked a tribal member in Ontario, Canada, to define the word aki. The Ojibwe word usually is translated as the Earth. "The elder thought about it for a while," Cornell explained, "and then he looked at me and said, `Aki means that which is sacred!'" Copyright ? 2003, Chicago Tribune From Jon.Reyhner at NAU.EDU Mon Oct 13 21:10:48 2003 From: Jon.Reyhner at NAU.EDU (Jon Reyhner) Date: Mon, 13 Oct 2003 14:10:48 -0700 Subject: Eleventh Annual Stabilizing Indigenous Languages Conference Message-ID: The Eleventh Annual Stabilizing Indigenous Languages Conference will be held at the University of California at Berkeley on June 11-15, 2004. More information will follow in early spring regarding registration and a call for papers. Also, Nurturing Native Languages with papers from the 8th, 9th, and 10th Stabilizing Indigenous Languages conferences is now available on-line at http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~jar/NNL/ Nurturing Native Languages includes two articles related to technology: Sustaining Indigenous Languages in Cyberspace by Courtney B. Cazden and Saving a Language with Computers, Tape Recorders, and Radio by Ruth Bennett Jon Reyhner http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~jar/ From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Fri Oct 17 16:23:53 2003 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (Phil CashCash) Date: Fri, 17 Oct 2003 09:23:53 -0700 Subject: Language, culture focus of Indian event (fwd) Message-ID: Language, culture focus of Indian event BEE STAFF REPORTS American Indian culture and language are the focus of the third annual Native California People's Fall Gathering, set for Saturday at San Luis Reservoir State Recreation Area. The Mutsun Language Foundation sponsors the event in conjunction with the state Parks and Recreation Department. The public is invited. The foundation aims to revive the Mutsun (pronounced moot-soon) language of the Amah-Mutsun Indians who lived in the Central California coastal region and inland to what is now Interstate 5. Organizers of the fall gathering said the event will feature dancing and storytelling, arts and crafts, the making of necklaces with abalone and other shells, and a talk on traditional herbs and medicines. Also planned are demonstrations of basket making, fire making and soap root brush making. The program also lists tule boat races and traditional games. Food booths will serve hamburgers and Indian tacos, organizers said. The gathering is scheduled from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. at the San Luis Creek picnic grounds. The recreation area is off Highway 152 west of the junction of Highway 33, west of Los Banos and south of Santa Nella. Organizers noted a $4 park day-use fee per car, and advised people to bring lawn chairs, hats and sunscreen, and blankets for the evening. Posted on 10/17/03 08:50:14 http://www.modbee.com/local/story/7604586p-8512431c.html From andrekar at NCIDC.ORG Fri Oct 17 23:45:22 2003 From: andrekar at NCIDC.ORG (Andre Cramblit) Date: Fri, 17 Oct 2003 16:45:22 -0700 Subject: Inter-Tribal (Announcement) Message-ID: Please consider donating time or money to help celebrate all Elders in our Community!! The Northern California Indian Development Council is pleased to host the 22nd annual Elders Dinner and Inter-Tribal Gathering. The Gathering is an annual event established to HONOR ALL ELDERS OF THE NORTHWESTERN CALIFORNIA REGION, and also in keeping with the spirit of THANKSGIVING and NATIONAL AMERICAN INDIAN HERITAGE MONTH. This years event will include traditional Indian dance demonstrations, Inter-Tribal dancing, Indian card games, authentic Indian Arts and Crafts exhibits and sales, and the Dinner. The Dinner will be served from 12 Noon to 5 p.m. on Saturday and includes salmon baked on sticks the traditional Indian way, and turkey with all the trimmings. There is no charge for entrance to the Gathering and the main gates open at 10 AM. The dinner is free to all Elders (Age 55 & Over). For those under 55 a $6.00 donation for dinner tickets is requested. This event is sponsored by The Northern California Indian Development Council but relies on the assistance of community partners and volunteers to help make the day a success. Donations are needed to support this effort. If you would like to volunteer please contact Anna House at (707) 445-8451 To download a full color copy of this years poster please go to: http://www.ncidc.org/nwit.htm From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Mon Oct 20 04:44:42 2003 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (Phil CashCash) Date: Sun, 19 Oct 2003 21:44:42 -0700 Subject: Linguist helps preserve Vanuatu languages (fwd) Message-ID: Massey News 20 October, 2003 Linguist helps preserve Vanuatu languages http://masseynews.massey.ac.nz/2003/masseynews/oct/oct20/stories/24-18-03.html As an anthropological linguist, Dr Martin Paviour-Smith immerses himself in a language and its people. A linguist?s work towards language preservation is a misunderstood mission, he says. Dr Paviour-Smith is part of a Marsden-funded three-person team which will collect and study languages in the Vanuatu islands, working with the people to develop their own systems of conservation. ?Vanuatu has the highest number of languages per person in the world ? 110 among 180,000 people at the last count. Very few of the dialects have more than 1000 speakers, and consequentially, there are a high proportion of struggling or endangered languages.? With Professor Terry Crowley from Waikato University and Dr Liz Pearce from Victoria University, Dr Paviour-Smith, from the School of Language Studies, will travel to the island of Malakula for three months each year for the next three years. Professor Crowley will focus on moribund languages (with fewer than 20 speakers), Dr Pearce on the Unua dialect and Dr Paviour-Smith on the closely-related Aulua dialect. He has lived for several months previously in the Aulua village for the first stage of his project developing an orthography (writing system) that he hopes will one day be used in the island?s schools. Missionaries first set an orthography in the 1880s, which was later swamped when the Vanuatu government legislated the use of English or French in schools. Dr Paviour-Smith says the gradual introduction of international languages has been responsible for a shift in the importance people place on languages and the number of people who use the vernacular. ?Traditionally people knew more than one language so they could communicate between villages but now the prevalence of French and English and the Creole language Bislama means most young people are more confident speaking Bislama than Aulua.? He explains that, depending on which year a child started school, they may learn in either English or French, so siblings are not necessarily schooled in the same language. ?But because children leave school around age 11, they are not proficient in English, French or Aulua.? When he returns to Malakula, and the village of Aulua, Dr Paviour-Smith will help the people compile a dictionary while continuing with the orthography. ?There was great interest in my getting a dictionary together, but the real value lies in these people taking control of their situation, setting a precedent for other villages.? Staying in Aulua (population 500) is crucial to his task; being with the community for up to three months at a time will enable him to collect a comprehensive set of language rules and patterns beyond grammar. ?Social factors, such as they way children are taught language and stories, are integral to linguistic research. In Aulua, children are prompted by their families to call out to other families, in the dark at night before the village settles down for the night. Other children will call back with the appropriate response prompted by their families and so learn this particular oral tradition.? He says traditions such as story-telling, which is particularly strong among the Aulua islanders, are vital when learning and documenting a language. ?It is really important to collect big pieces of language like stories, to see how words are put together. In Aulua when someone has finished telling a story to a group they say ?kusve kusve?, or ?thanks for listening and I hope you enjoyed it? all in one. The group will then yell ?kusve kusve? back.? Dr Paviour-Smith is currently working on a collection of Kastom (fables and histories) in the language and recently lectured Massey staff and students on Kastom narrative features. He has documented a recurrent theme within stories in which women, or a female animal in a fable, burn their own houses to the ground. ?This is basically a trick used by the character to return to her own family ? when a woman in Aulua marries, she leaves her home and family to live in her husband?s village. To burn her house is to reject her obligations and duties, it is a statement.? He will collect more stories and Kastom over the next few years. From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Mon Oct 20 17:36:44 2003 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (Phil CashCash) Date: Mon, 20 Oct 2003 10:36:44 -0700 Subject: NSF Funding Opportunities (fwd) Message-ID: NSF Funding Opportunities http://www.nsf.gov/home/programs/recent.cfm Universal Access - nsf03612 (Posted: Sep 30 2003) http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2003/nsf03612/nsf03612.htm Human Language and Communication - nsf03613 (Posted: Sep 29 2003) http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2003/nsf03613/nsf03613.htm Digital Society and Technologies - nsf03611 (Posted: Sep 29 2003) http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2003/nsf03611/nsf03611.htm Human-Computer Interaction - nsf03610 (Posted: Sep 29 2003) http://www.nsf.gov/pubsys/ods/getpub.cfm?ods_key=nsf03610 Deadline: ?Most of these have a Jan 2004 deadline. ? From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Tue Oct 21 07:30:34 2003 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (Phil CashCash) Date: Tue, 21 Oct 2003 00:30:34 -0700 Subject: Campers learn about their tribal language (fwd) Message-ID: Campers learn about their tribal language They also created a CD that will allow the tribes to share what the youths learned with other young people. By Jessica Delos Reyes of the Union-Bulletin Monday, October 20, 2003 http://www.union-bulletin.com/main.asp?SectionID=1&SubSectionID=1&ArticleID=18813 MISSION - "We're to always teach our children, so they will know our Indian ways." "Taa minwa na sapskiwata naami miyanishma Kupa shugwata naami tananawit." The program opens with this song and images of children in regalia projected onto a screen. Children point at their images and giggle as they snack on pizza and cake. Few are aware they created a tool for future generations to learn the Imatalam (Umatilla) language, one spoken by only about 17 people. Nine of the original 12 elementary school campers of the Flash Story Camp were honored during a reception Friday at the Tamastslikt Cultural Institute. The campers devoted three hours a day, Monday through Thursday this summer to learning their language. With Flash software, they also produced "Coyote Chef," a program with language games and each camper's rendition of the story of "Spilyay Kuukithla," as told to them by instructor Thomas Morning Owl. Spilyay (Coyote) tricks the Squirrel people into cooking themselves for his meal. Flash is an interactive multimedia program campers used to mix animation and sound. The program was made possible through a $20,000 grant from First Nations Development in collaboration with Tamastslikt's Language Enhancement Program and Education Department, and the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation. The Flash Story Camp was modeled after the elementary school language program by the Tulalip tribe in Marysville, Wash. Students there used technology to learn the Lushootseed language from instructor David Cort. Prior to Tamastslikt's camp, Cort conducted a one-week Flash training for instructors. "Students of this age are capable of picking up a second language very readily," Cort said in a news release. "It's their nature to understand technology in a heartbeat." Mildred Quaempts, language coordinator for Tamastslikt and one of the camp instructors, said most of the students had never really been exposed to their native language. She estimated 50 people still speak the three languages of the Confederated Tribes: Imatalam (Umatilla), Walla Walla and Nez Perce, spoken by Cayuse native speakers. Camp instructor Tessie Williams said the CDs will be distributed to area tribal governments and schools. From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Wed Oct 22 19:09:07 2003 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (Phil CashCash) Date: Wed, 22 Oct 2003 12:09:07 -0700 Subject: Proud time for Mohawk grandmothers (fwd) Message-ID: Proud time for Mohawk grandmothers PEGGY CURRAN The Gazette Wednesday, October 22, 2003 http://www.canada.com/montreal/montrealgazette/columnists/story.asp?id=C92FA476-1024-450C-AA94-282BC6E83993 As a little girl growing up in the 1950s, Tiorensawes Zachary loved to listen to her mother talking to her grandmother and great-uncle in their native Mohawk. But when they spoke to her, Tiorensawes answered in English, the new language she was learning from the nuns at school in Kahnawake. "My grandmother barely spoke more than a few words of English," said Zachary, 53. "She was always disappointed that I couldn't speak to her in our own language." A generation later, Karahkw?nhawe Goodleaf, 22, learned Mohawk at the immersion school in Kahnawake. For conversation outside the classroom, she had to visit her great-grandmother. Her parents had never learned the language. It's a proud week for grandmothers. Zachary, Goodleaf and 15 other students from Kahnawake are to receive Certificates in Aboriginal Education at McGill University's fall convocation tomorrow. It's the first time the program, launched in 1993 in conjunction with the Cree School Board, has been offered in Mohawk. Last week, 23 Mi'kmaq students in Wagmatook, N.S., collected diplomas after completing a two-year program offered in Cape Breton through McGill's Office of First Nations and Inuit Education. Donna Lee Smith, director of the McGill program, said those who enroll know the native language, but must brush up oral and written skills before they can teach. It's hoped many will get a bachelor's of education. Most have found work as language assistants in neighbourhood schools in their communities. In doing so, they are helping to prop up indigenous languages, at risk from English, what Mark Abley, author of Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages, calls "the Wal-Mart of languages." Of the dozens of languages once spoken by Canada's aboriginal peoples, only Cree, Inuktitut and Ojibway are still relatively healthy. "All the others are at risk or have disappeared," Smith said. Among the endangered ones, Mohawk is in a better position than most. "There's so much passion behind the effort to have it stabilized. And there are Mohawk-speaking elders still young and energetic enough to take on the job of teaching the language to others. Elders like Dorothy (Karihw?nhawe) Lazore, who started teaching Mohawk at Howard S. Billings High School in Ch?teauguay more than 30 years ago. When Kahnawake introduced an immersion program for elementary school in 1981, Lazore was recruited to teach Grade 1 - and eventually became the school's principal. An Akwesasne Mohawk who speaks six languages, Lazore was an obvious choice when Eddie Cross, director of education services in Kahnawake, asked McGill to offer the program on the South Shore reserve. Lazore and Konwaronhi?:wi Deer spent last year teaching McGill students at the United Church hall in Kahnawake. Now they're working on a curriculum to help Mohawk-language teachers explain grammar, legends and even traditional speech patterns. Cross said the program met a desperate need to replace teachers who were rapidly approaching retirement age. But with only about 5 per cent of adults in Kahnawake fluent in the language, the community is looking to bolster use of Mohawk beyond the classroom - through radio and TV broadcasts, the Internet and adult language lessons. Smith said aboriginal education programs have "a ripple effect" as students speak to their children, parents and pupils. Like Cross, however, she favours other initiatives to get people to speak indigenous languages on a daily basis. Yet after half a century of listening, Zachary finds she can't speak her language enough. She's proud to say she can read and write Mohawk, even prouder to be able to chat with her aunt in the mother tongue she was once too shy to speak. "Oh my gosh, it's who we are." pcurran at thegazette.canwest.com ??Copyright?2003?Montreal Gazette From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Wed Oct 22 19:17:08 2003 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (Phil CashCash) Date: Wed, 22 Oct 2003 12:17:08 -0700 Subject: 13 year old Tibetan boy able to tell world's longest epic (fwd) Message-ID: 13 year old Tibetan boy able to tell world's longest epic www.chinaview.cn 2003-10-22 16:40:05 http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2003-10/22/content_1137240.htm LHASA, Oct. 22 (Xinhuanet) -- Allegedly having had a dream, a 13-year-old Tibetan boy has since been able to tell Tibetans' most respected story about a legendary hero -- King Gesser, which is also the longest epic in the world. This has aroused enormous interest among experts to explain the boy's mysterious capability. The boy, named Sitar Doje in the Tibetan language, is a fifth-grade student at a local elementary school in Shading Town, Banbar County in Qamdo Prefecture. He said he fell asleep one day when hewas 11 years old, and woke up miraculously able to tell the story of King Gesser. Now the boy can talk and sing about the story for six consecutive hours. The 10-million-word Tibetan epic portraying legendary hero King Gesser has more than 200 parts that have been passed down from generation to generation as oral works of folk art. According to Tibetan tradition, people who learned to tell the epic story through dreaming are addressed as "God-taught Master." In Tibet, many epic-tellers since ancient times claimed that they had learned to tell the story in dreams. Cering Puncog, vice director of the Ethnic Institute of the Tibetan Academy of Social Sciences, said there have been many excellent talkers of the King Gesser story in Qamdo Prefecture. Hesaid Sitar Doje became a capable talker probably because he had listened to old talkers' presentations many times, thought of themvery often in his mind and dreams, and finally recited the epic asa "natural" talker. The Cultural Bureau of Qamdo Prefecture has dispatched staff to check the boy's ability and video tape a live performance of the boy. Cering Puncog said the most interesting point is that the boy was an educated person who has almost finished his elementary schooling, receiving a modern education. So he is far different from old story talkers most of whom were illiterate. Among the 40 best talkers publicly acknowledged in Tibet, only four can read. For example, Samzhub, a 82-year-old Tibetan folk story-teller, is regarded as the master of talking and singing Gesser. Although unable to read a single word, the old man can tell 65 parts of the epic, totaling more than 20 million words. The Tibetan edition of a five-part King Gesser, compiled according to Samzhub's telling about the long story, was published in 2001. China has about 140 Gesser story-telling masters. They are mainly from three ethnic groups that had some close relation with the legendary King in their ancient culture: Tibetans, Mongolians or Tu ethnic people. These masters are all now cherished as "national treasures." According to Cering, far fewer people can talk and sing Gesser's story, and most living talkers are in their late years. The 13-year-old boy who can talk and sing about the epic indicates that the valuable oral heritage has young successors and can survive inmodern times. To save the epic, the country has published the Academic Works Collection of Gesserology, edited by Zhao Bingli, a research fellow at the Academy of Social Sciences of Qinghai Province. There are two different views about the time of the creation ofthe epic: one says that the epic was produced in the period from the beginning of the Christian era to the 6th century, based on the story of a real tribal chief who tamed forces of evil such as ghosts and goblins, and safeguarded a stable environment for people. Some hold that the epic emerged between the 11th and 13th centuries, when Tibetans hoped for a hero to appear and unify separated Tibet. The Chinese government set up a special organization to save and catalogue the epic in 1979, and listed the research work as a major research program in every Five-Year Plan. Currently, Tibet has collected nearly 300 hand-written or woodcut copies of the epic. More than 3 million copies of the Tibetan version of the epic have been printed. The epic has been translated into Chinese, English, Japanese, French and other foreign languages. From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Thu Oct 23 16:31:40 2003 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (Phil CashCash) Date: Thu, 23 Oct 2003 09:31:40 -0700 Subject: CULTURE: UNESCO Unified over Diversity (fwd) Message-ID: CULTURE: UNESCO Unified over Diversity Julio Godoy http://www.ipsnews.net/interna.asp?idnews=20767 UNESCO director-general Ko?chiro Matsuura will go ahead with preparing a binding convention to defend cultural diversity despite initial U.S. opposition. PARIS, Oct 23 (IPS) - This mandatory set of rules would give all countries the right to set policy to preserve and promote national production of cultural goods such as films, music recordings, and books, the international group agreed at a conference. Matsuura has two years to prepare a draft. He will do so after consulting international organisations ruling on international trade such as the World Trade Organisation, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, and the World Intellectual Property Organisation. A compulsory convention to protect cultural diversity is a long cherished project at UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation). UNESCO members had unanimously adopted a non-binding resolution over this in 2001. That declaration described cultural diversity as a ?common heritage of humanity? and considered its safeguarding a concrete and ethical imperative, inseparable from respect for human dignity. The convention became controversial after the United States rejoined UNESCO this year and announced at first that it would reject a binding convention. The United States returned to UNESCO last month after quitting the organisation in 1984. Members agreed to draft a binding convention at the 32nd UNESCO conference held in Paris Sep. 29 to Oct. 17. This conference brings members together every two years. With the return of the United States and East Timor joining, UNESCO now has 190 members. A record 3,580 delegates, including five heads of state and close to 300 ministers attended the conference in Paris. A mandatory convention to preserve cultural diversity was widely supported at the discussions. ?The world needs a convention to give every state the right to adopt or maintain the necessary public policies to preserve and develop its cultural and linguistic patrimony,? French President Chirac said in a speech ahead of the conference. ?Such a convention would support the uniqueness of cultural creation.? Chirac rejected the U.S. argument that a binding convention would restrain free circulation of cultural goods. ?Freedom flourishes within laws and rules, and gets strangled in anarchy,? he said. Several diplomats privately criticised U.S. opposition to the convention.. ?In the eyes of the U.S. government, culture is just another merchandise, and therefore there cannot be a cultural policy,? a Latin American diplomat told IPS earlier. Another diplomat said: ?It's obvious that the big film studios in Hollywood are behind this U.S. attitude.? Delegates, including the U.S. delegates, finally approved a resolution that ?cultural diversity, as regards the protection of the diversity of cultural contents and artistic expressions shall be the subject of an international convention.? The resolution calls on the director-general to submit a first draft convention to the next general conference in 2005. At this session delegates adopted several conventions on protection of cultural heritage, on human genetic data, and against doping in sport. UNESCO adopted the International Convention on the Preservation of the Intangible Cultural Heritage as a complement to the 1972 Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage, which concerns monuments and natural sites. This new convention aims to preserve oral traditions and expressions, including languages as vehicles of cultural heritage, as well as the performing arts, social practices, rituals and festive events, knowledge and practices concerning nature and the universe, and traditional craftsmanship. The convention needs to be approved by at least 30 states to take effect.. It provides for the drawing up of national inventories of cultural property, and the establishment of an Intergovernmental Committee for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage. The convention proposes in addition the creation of two lists: a Representative List of the Intangible Heritage of Humanity and a List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding. The first list has been drawn up partially after the last conference listed 19 Masterpieces of Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity. These include the Garifuna language, dance and music practised by communities of African origin in Belize, Honduras, and Nicaragua, the Oruro carnival in Bolivia, the Chinese Kunqu opera, Georgian polyphonic singing, the Indian Kutiyattam Sanskrit theatre, the Japanese Nogaku theatre, and the Sicilian opera puppet theatre. The conference also adopted a Declaration Concerning the Intentional Destruction of Cultural Heritage. This declaration recalls ?the tragic destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan? and expresses ?serious concern about the growing number of acts of intentional destruction of cultural heritage.? The declaration says countries should ?take all appropriate measures to prevent, avoid, stop and suppress acts of intentional destruction of cultural heritage, wherever such heritage is located.? The International Declaration on Human Genetic Data approved at the conference lays down ethical principles that should govern collection, processing, storage and use of genetic data. These principles include confidentiality and free consent. ?The privacy of an individual participating in a study using human genetic data, proteomic data or biological samples should be protected and the data should be treated as confidential,? the declaration says. UNESCO is also preparing to take on doping in sport. The conference approved a proposal made by a round table of ministers and senior officials in Paris in January this year to prepare an international convention against doping in sport. (END/2003) From andrekar at NCIDC.ORG Mon Oct 27 17:24:57 2003 From: andrekar at NCIDC.ORG (Andre Cramblit) Date: Mon, 27 Oct 2003 09:24:57 -0800 Subject: Go MAC Go (language) Message-ID: Two tribal school teachers" reach out to the world http://www.apple.com/ca/education/profiles/firstvoices/ English-speaking people can scarcely imagine losing their language, but many people around the world are facing this disturbing prospect. As transportation and telecommunication technologies make the world smaller, they also reinforce the dominance of a few modern language groups. Regional languages spoken by relatively small population groups, including Aboriginal peoples, risk extinction within a few generations as young people leave them behind. From sburke at CPAN.ORG Mon Oct 27 23:01:03 2003 From: sburke at CPAN.ORG (Sean M. Burke) Date: Mon, 27 Oct 2003 14:01:03 -0900 Subject: Go MAC Go (language) In-Reply-To: <3F9D54E9.344246A3@ncidc.org> Message-ID: At 08:24 AM 2003-10-27, Andre Cramblit wrote: >Two tribal school teachers" reach out to the world >http://www.apple.com/ca/education/profiles/firstvoices/ Which says: >What exactly is FirstVoices? It's an easy-to-use, secure, cost-effective >web-based tool that enables any language group to develop its own >authentic and authoritative archiving and language reference resource from >within its own community. Regrettably, it's also junk. You're better off using, well, absolutely anything else. -- Sean M. Burke http://search.cpan.org/~sburke/ From sdp at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Tue Oct 28 20:25:21 2003 From: sdp at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (Sue Penfield) Date: Tue, 28 Oct 2003 13:25:21 -0700 Subject: Fw: Conf. on documentation of endangered languages (Germany) Message-ID: Everyone, This might be of interest to some of you.... _________________________________________________________________ A World of Many Voices: Interfaces in Language Documentation Date: Mon, 27 Oct 2003 11:50:35 +0000 From: gippert Subject: A World of Many Voices: Interfaces in Language Documentation A World of Many Voices: Interfaces in Language Documentation Short Title: DOBES-Conference Date: 04-Sep-2004 - 05-Sep-2004 Location: Frankfurt / Main, Germany Contact: Jost Gippert Contact Email: gippert at em.uni-frankfurt.de Meeting URL: http://titus.fkidg1.uni-frankfurt.de/curric/dobes/conf1cir.htm Linguistic Sub-field: Typology, Language Description, General Linguistics, Computational Linguistics, Anthropological Linguistics Call Deadline: 01-Feb-2004 Meeting Description: International conference on language documentation as an interdisciplinary research area (Linguistics, Anthropology, Speech Communities, and Technology), organised within the DOBES (Documentation of Endangered Languages) Programme of the Volkswagen Foundation. A WORLD OF MANY VOICES Interfaces in Language Documentation: Linguistics, Anthropology, Speech Communities, and Technology University of Frankfurt / Main 4th - 5th of September, 2004 First Circular The DOBES (Documentation of Endangered Languages) Programme will organise a conference on language documentation as an interdisciplinary research area, pending funding from the Volkswagen Foundation. The conference will take place in conjunction with a summer school on the documentation of endangered languages at the same venue (Frankfurt, Sep. 1-11th 2004). The organising team consists of Arienne Dwyer, Jost Gippert, Raquel Guirardello, David Harrison, Ulrike Mosel, Peter Wittenburg (DOBES members), and Marcel Erdal, Bernd Nothofer, and Rainer Vo?en (local committee). CALL FOR PAPERS The conference will bring together experts in the field of language documentation and also representatives of endangered speech communities, and focuses on two themes: - the impact of language documentation techniques and technologies on linguistic methodologies and theories, such as new insights from research on (a) text corpora, (b) spontaneous spoken language, (c) non-verbal communication, and (d) the joint research of linguists and anthropologists; - the impact of active cooperation between speech communities and outside researchers on methods and goals and on power relationships between participants: (a) conflicts and compromises between the goals of the linguists and the speech community; (b) innovative cooperative methodology; (c) the linguists' contribution to language maintenance and revitalisation. Researchers who are members of endangered-language communities are particularly encouraged to submit abstracts. Accepted papers will be allocated 20 minutes for presentation plus 10 minutes for discussion. To allow for in-depth discussion, conference sessions will be plenary, and the conference will conclude with a roundtable discussion. The organisers intend to publish the conference papers in printed form. The DEADLINE for abstracts is the 1st of February, 2004. Please send your one-page abstract (in any format) to Jost Gippert (gippert at em.uni-frankfurt.de) _________________________________________________________________ From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Wed Oct 29 04:32:49 2003 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (Phil CashCash) Date: Tue, 28 Oct 2003 21:32:49 -0700 Subject: Hit by disease, deforestation and war, Colombia's last nomadic tribe faces extinction (fwd) Message-ID: Hit by disease, deforestation and war, Colombia's last nomadic tribe faces extinction 2003/10/29 BARRANCON, Colombia, AP http://www.chinapost.com.tw/detail.asp?onNews=1&GRP=A&id=21099 For thousands of years, the Nukak-Maku Indians roamed the jungles of southeast Colombia, hunting game with blow guns and gathering berries, as oblivious to the modern world as it was to them. Then one day in 1988, the two worlds collided when a group of Nukak men ventured into a town carved out of the jungle. Townspeople stared in disbelief at the naked Nukak as the Indians _ astonished, too _ stared back. That first encounter was peaceful, with the Nukak men feeling so trusting that they brought out their women and children who had been waiting in the bush. But the aftershocks of that meeting are now devastating the Nukak. Cut down by diseases brought by settlers, lured by the conveniences of the modern world and caught in the crossfire of Colombia's civil war, the tribe is being driven along a path to extinction that more than 100 other Indian tribes across the Amazon region have walked before. What is happening to the Nukak is especially worrisome; it is Colombia's last nomadic tribe. At least 1,200 Nukak roamed the jungles in groups of about 30 when that first hesitant contact was made in the town of Calamar, according to missionaries' estimates. Just 15 years later, their number has plunged to about 380, the Health Ministry says. "At this rate, in a very short time there will be no more Nukak," said Humberto Ruiz, an anthropologist who has studied the tribe. "They will be a vague memory." The Nukak are a branch of the Maku family of nomadic Indians who have journeyed the northwest Amazon River basin of current-day Colombia, Peru and Brazil for thousands of years. The branches the Maku are tied together by language. Since the first contact with settlers, influenza has obliterated most of the Nukak, which had no resistance to the disease. Deforestation has cut their food supply and led to malnutrition. Anthropologists believe there are only a few dozen Nukak still living deep in the jungle, relatively untouched by civilization. Added to the pressures on the tribe, leftist rebels and outlawed right-wing militias have been battling in the Indian's homelands for control of coca, the base ingredient of cocaine, which flourishes naturally in the region and provides the warring groups with huge revenues. No Nukak has been reported killed, but the clashes have terrified the Indians and caused some to flee ancestral grounds. A Nukak clan of 10 families fled its camp, near a settlers' village on the edge of their reservation, in January because of the fighting. "We were afraid, afraid of the explosions," said Yeuna, the clan's leader who goes by only one name. The clan is now idled at a makeshift camp in a jungle clearing near the village of Barrancon, a half-hour boat ride upriver from San Jose del Guaviare, the provincial capital of Guaviare state. Aid workers have been bringing rice, lentils and yucca every 15 days to the camp, where colorful hammocks swing from trees whose dense leaves filter the sun's burning rays. The aid has led to stomach ailments because of the change from the Indians' traditional fare, but moreover it is increasing their dependence on others. Which points to the irony of helping nomadic tribes: while it may be well-meaning, it can lead to their destruction by eroding native ways. Hugo Quijano, one of the workers, acknowledged the aid is "interfering with Nukak culture" but said it is needed because Yeuna's clan lacks the wide areas needed to hunt and fish. "We are trying to limit our contact with them as much as possible, but the conditions of the area they are in make that difficult," Quijano said. The United Nations estimates there are more than 300 indigenous tribes in the Amazon basin, but only about 60 remain in isolation, in Brazil and Peru. Symbolizing what is happening across the Amazon region, Yeuna's clan is gradually trading nomadic ways for a more sedentary existence: They are learning Spanish, wearing T-shirts and baseball caps and drinking Coca-Cola. Still, Yeuna's clan maintains many traditions. The women keep their eyebrows plucked and their hair very short. The men, who are lean and practically hairless, sometimes leave the camp to fish or to hunt monkeys. The Indians also maintain strong ecological practices. As nomads, they plant seeds before abandoning a camp, and raise baby monkeys whose mothers have been hunted and eaten, even going so far as to breast-feed them. When they are grown, the Indians release the monkeys into the wild, symbolically replenishing the natural supply. During a recent visit by a reporter, Nukak children _ ignoring a radio in the camp _ became mesmerized by a woman of the clan as she broke into song in the Nukak's native language. More than half of the 40 Indians in the camp are children, and they all speak Nukak. There are no elders. They have all died. The oldest known living Nukak is estimated to be in her early 40's. Ruiz said the Nukak used to live into their 60s, but contact with diseases appears to have shortened their life span. While everyone agrees that first contact with the modern world has forever changed the Nukak, there is little consensus on how to preserve their culture while still allowing those who want to integrate into modern society to do so. "One cannot force a group to conserve itself, like an artifact in a museum," Ruiz noted. Assimilation appears to be unstoppable, in any case. Nukak clans _ like Yeuna's _ are drifting closer to towns and cities, where the settlers' lifestyle is seen as being easier and more attractive than living hand-to-mouth in the remote jungle. The Indians are still susceptible to the flu, but access to health care means it is less likely to turn into pneumonia and kill them. Once they leave the old ways behind, it's hard to go back. Manuel Garcia grew up with his Nukak clan, but after both his parents died when he was 8 years old, he was adopted by a settler in San Jose del Guaviare. After turning 18, he reconnected with a group of Nukak. "I tried to live with them in the jungle, but I only lasted six months. I had to leave. I just didn't have the same toughness that they did," said Garcia, who is now a health worker and is helping Yeuna's clan. Yeuna, sitting in a hammock and surrounded by his five children and his pregnant wife, insisted that he eventually wants to lead the clan to their ancestral lands. "We want to go back," Yeuna said in broken Spanish. "But we are waiting for them to stop fighting." There is no sign, however, that the Colombian Army _ which is stretched thin as it battles the rebels across the nation _ will be able to oust the outlawed warring factions from Yeuna's homeland anytime soon. In the meantime, the clan continues to wait, and adapt to life in the 21st century. From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Wed Oct 29 04:42:48 2003 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (Phil CashCash) Date: Tue, 28 Oct 2003 21:42:48 -0700 Subject: Indigenous Language Institute debuts community-based handbooks (fwd) Message-ID: [ilat list manager note: although this article is from September 2003, it seemed appropriate to post since it mentions some beneficial and important information. pcc] ~~~ Indian Country Today (Lakota Times)?9/3/2003?V.23; N.12?B1 Indigenous Language Institute debuts community-based handbooks Author Woodard, Stephanie SANTA FE, N.M. - The Indigenous Language Institute (ILI), an 11-year-old nonprofit, is getting ready to send to the printer a set of 18- to 32-page how-to handbooks for tribal language instruction. Topics in the 10-volume series include doing an initial community language survey, teacher training, and evaluating an existing curriculum. Funding for the project came from the Ford Foundation, the Educational Foundation of America, and the John B. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. "The handbooks will be available by November 2003," said ILI's Executive Director, Inee Yang Slaughter. "They're designed for ease of use. You can pull out the one you need, rather than deal with a bulky book." The series is self-contained and can be put to use immediately - a boon to those without time to travel to training sessions. Dr. Ofelia Zepeda, a Tohono O'odham professor of linguistics at the University of Arizona, noted that the information in the booklets is not language-specific and can work in a variety of communities. "In the past, some tribes have had programs, but the approaches were not necessarily adaptable to other tribes. Or perhaps there was no way to disseminate materials that had been created," said Zepeda. "In other cases, a community may have heard about a program somewhere else, but couldn't get information on it. Accessibility has been a problem." Zepeda, a board member of ILI, formulated the project in collaboration with Dr. Akiro Yamamoto, a professor of anthropology and linguistics at the University of Kansas. To execute the concept - which included collecting up-to-date information from tribes around the country - ILI then called in Dr. Tessie Naranjo, a sociologist from Santa Clara Pueblo whose Ph.D. is from the University of New Mexico, Sheilah Nicholas, a Hopi doctoral candidate in American Indian Studies at the University of Arizona, and Dr. Mary Linn, curator of Native American languages for the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History at the University of Oklahoma and a professor in the school's anthropology department. According to Dr. Michael Krauss of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, only 175 languages remain of some 300 extant at the onset of European colonization; of the surviving ones, just 20 are widely spoken by children. The most oft-cited cause for the decline is the Native-language eradication policy of the boarding schools to which many Indian children were sent during the 19th and 20th centuries. The situation in the Western Hemisphere is part of a global trend, observed Dr. Douglas Whalen, president of the Endangered Language Fund, a nonprofit at Yale University that funds community - and university-based projects worldwide, including research on Paiute and Creek. The large regional languages - English, Spanish, Swahili, Chinese, and others - are overwhelming the smaller languages, said Whalen. Sometimes, even minority languages are swallowing up other small ones. It's a complex picture," he added. "But lately there has been a lot more activity and awareness of the small languages at the grassroots level." Slaughter has watched that happening in the United States. "In the past few years, we have seen a tremendous increase in the number of tribal language programs," she said. "It's a credit to the young people who are learning their languages," said Ernie Stevens, a member of the Oneida Tribe of Wisconsin and Chairman of the National Indian Gaming Association, which has just sent out an appeal to member tribes to support ILI. "These children are stepping up to their responsibilities. The damage the government did is just now being reversed." The handbook series joins other ILI programs, including symposia, training seminars, a resource directory, community honoring events, and an annual Youth Language Fair that recognizes children for songs, prayers, readings, and other presentations that use their heritage languages. The organization's Web site contains such information as lists of funding organizations and experts, a paper on intellectual property issues, and a bibliography. The creation of a Language Materials Development Center is under way, thanks to a recent $100,000 grant from The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. In addition to producing teaching materials, the center will offer training and networking opportunities for language practitioners and teachers. To develop a secure financial base, ILI has launched a $5-million endowment campaign, with Cherokee actor Wes Studi as honorary chairperson. The handbook project commenced with evaluations of tribal needs and existing curricula. Starting in 1999, Naranjo, Linn, Nicholas and others toured 54 communities from coast to coast and from the Arctic to the Sonoran Desert. In each locale, they learned how many people at what ages understood or spoke the language, and at what level. They also looked at how it was taught: for example, in a classroom or in a mentor-student relationship, with immersion instruction or in combination with English. Naranjo described a visit to the Pechangas, in southern California. "They have an incredible program at their Head Start," she said. "While a teacher instructs the children in English, a linguist, who's a non-tribal member, repeats everything in their Luiseno language. The kids pick it up subliminally, which you can see when they're working independently. I liked that a whole lot." The elementary school at Cochiti Pueblo, in New Mexico, had an immersion-style approach, according to Slaughter, who accompanied the evaluators on some of the trips. "As soon as the children cross the threshold of the language classroom, they hear only Keres," she recounted. "The main instructor, a Keres speaker from the community who has had teacher training, leads activities like acting out a traditional story or responding to flash cards. Two assistants, one a young adult and the other an elder, reinforce the lessons through repetition. The children are always addressed and respond in full sentences, so they learn the entire structure of the language." According to Naranjo, the ILI handbooks, as she and her fellow evaluators have written them, strive to help each group decide what will work best for its situation. "We heard their voices, their descriptions of what works and what doesn't. Now, we're trying to give them back what they really want. And we make it easy for them," she said. "That's the ingeniousness of this concept as Ofelia Zepeda and Akiro Yamamoto devised it." For more on the series or other ILI programs, contact the organization at 560 Montezuma Avenue, Suite 202, Santa Fe, NM 87501; (505) 820-0311; www.indigenous-language.org. From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Wed Oct 29 16:40:03 2003 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (Phil CashCash) Date: Wed, 29 Oct 2003 09:40:03 -0700 Subject: ILAT anniversary! Message-ID: dear ILAT subscribers, this week marks the one year anniversary (Oct 2002-Oct 2003) of ILAT! the Indigenous Languages and Technology discussion list originally came into being as an idea to generate insights and ideas on the potential interface between technology, language, and indigenous communities. efforts at the University of Arizona?s Learning Technology Center (ltc) provided the initial inspiration for this endeavor. one of the more immediate outcomes was the creation of a short technology course at AILDI (American Indian Language Development Institute) this past summer. you can view the course webpage at: http://www.u.arizona.edu/~cashcash/aildi/LRC430.html. also, an ILAT technology page is in the works: http://projects.ltc.arizona.edu/gates/ilat2003.html eh?e qeciy?ewyew...many thanks to all of you for joining and participating in ILAT! please continue with your introductions, discussions, and support for indigenous languages. phil cash cash (cayuse/nez perce) UofA, ILAT list manager phd student in anthropology and linguistics ~~~ ILAT List Description: Indigenous Languages and Technology discussion list is an open forum for community language specialists, linguists, scholars, and students to discuss issues relating to the uses of technology in language revitalization efforts. ILAT Statistics: 146 subscribers ILAT Subscribers by Country: Bolivia=1 Canada=1 Fiji=1 Italy=1 USA=138 ILAT Web Page: http://www.u.arizona.edu/~cashcash/ILAT.html ILAT News and Postings: novessl http://cultura.gencat.es/llengcat/noves/noticies/ilat.htm Foundation for Endangered Languages http://www.ogmios.org/209.htm MSN http://groups.msn.com/BayAreaIndianCalendar/resources.msnw?action=get_message&mview=0&ID_Message=1129&LastModified=4675395672608226085 From CRANEM at MAIL.ECU.EDU Wed Oct 29 16:55:09 2003 From: CRANEM at MAIL.ECU.EDU (Bizzaro, Resa Crane) Date: Wed, 29 Oct 2003 11:55:09 -0500 Subject: ILAT anniversary! Message-ID: Hi, everyone. Thanks, Phil, for making the ILAT list work. I'm sure it takes quite a bit of monitoring and adding/subtracting to make the list functional. Thanks for everything you do. Thanks to everyone else for some very stimulating discussions and ideas. Resa Resa Crane Bizzaro English Department East Carolina University Greenville, NC 27858 (252) 328-1395 - Office (252) 328-4889 - Fax -----Original Message----- From: Phil CashCash [mailto:cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU] Sent: Wednesday, October 29, 2003 11:40 AM To: ILAT at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU Subject: ILAT anniversary! dear ILAT subscribers, this week marks the one year anniversary (Oct 2002-Oct 2003) of ILAT! the Indigenous Languages and Technology discussion list originally came into being as an idea to generate insights and ideas on the potential interface between technology, language, and indigenous communities. efforts at the University of Arizona's Learning Technology Center (ltc) provided the initial inspiration for this endeavor. one of the more immediate outcomes was the creation of a short technology course at AILDI (American Indian Language Development Institute) this past summer. you can view the course webpage at: http://www.u.arizona.edu/~cashcash/aildi/LRC430.html. also, an ILAT technology page is in the works: http://projects.ltc.arizona.edu/gates/ilat2003.html eh?e qeciy?ewyew...many thanks to all of you for joining and participating in ILAT! please continue with your introductions, discussions, and support for indigenous languages. phil cash cash (cayuse/nez perce) UofA, ILAT list manager phd student in anthropology and linguistics ~~~ ILAT List Description: Indigenous Languages and Technology discussion list is an open forum for community language specialists, linguists, scholars, and students to discuss issues relating to the uses of technology in language revitalization efforts. ILAT Statistics: 146 subscribers ILAT Subscribers by Country: Bolivia=1 Canada=1 Fiji=1 Italy=1 USA=138 ILAT Web Page: http://www.u.arizona.edu/~cashcash/ILAT.html ILAT News and Postings: novessl http://cultura.gencat.es/llengcat/noves/noticies/ilat.htm Foundation for Endangered Languages http://www.ogmios.org/209.htm MSN http://groups.msn.com/BayAreaIndianCalendar/resources.msnw?action=get_messag e&mview=0&ID_Message=1129&LastModified=4675395672608226085 From pasxapu at DAKOTACOM.NET Wed Oct 29 19:01:10 2003 From: pasxapu at DAKOTACOM.NET (phil cash cash) Date: Wed, 29 Oct 2003 12:01:10 -0700 Subject: First Voices (was Re: Go MAC Go (language)) In-Reply-To: <6.0.0.22.1.20031027135854.02608810@mailstore.pobox.com> Message-ID: nobody seems tempted by this...so here it goes, gee Sean, what do you mean when you say First Voices is "junk"? phil cash cash ps: i'm not sure but it seems we have First Voices people here on the list. On Monday, October 27, 2003, at 04:01 PM, Sean M. Burke wrote: > At 08:24 AM 2003-10-27, Andre Cramblit wrote: >> Two tribal school teachers" reach out to the world >> http://www.apple.com/ca/education/profiles/firstvoices/ > > Which says: > >> What exactly is FirstVoices? It's an easy-to-use, secure, >> cost-effective >> web-based tool that enables any language group to develop its own >> authentic and authoritative archiving and language reference resource >> from >> within its own community. > > Regrettably, it's also junk. You're better off using, well, absolutely > anything else. > > -- > Sean M. Burke http://search.cpan.org/~sburke/ > From fnkrs at UAF.EDU Wed Oct 29 20:01:57 2003 From: fnkrs at UAF.EDU (Hishinlai') Date: Wed, 29 Oct 2003 11:01:57 -0900 Subject: ILAT anniversary! Message-ID: Phil, I'd also like to thank you for this site. I've read some great insights regarding all types of issue besides technology. Mahsi' choo (a big thank you). Hishinlai' ps I think the upcoming conference in Frankfurt, Germany will be a great opportunity to share about language documentation. >===== Original Message From Indigenous Languages and Technology ===== >Hi, everyone. Thanks, Phil, for making the ILAT list work. I'm sure it >takes quite a bit of monitoring and adding/subtracting to make the list >functional. Thanks for everything you do. > >Thanks to everyone else for some very stimulating discussions and ideas. > >Resa > >Resa Crane Bizzaro >English Department >East Carolina University >Greenville, NC 27858 >(252) 328-1395 - Office >(252) 328-4889 - Fax > > >-----Original Message----- >From: Phil CashCash [mailto:cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU] >Sent: Wednesday, October 29, 2003 11:40 AM >To: ILAT at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU >Subject: ILAT anniversary! > > >dear ILAT subscribers, > >this week marks the one year anniversary (Oct 2002-Oct 2003) of ILAT! >the Indigenous Languages and Technology discussion list originally came into >being as an idea to generate insights and ideas on the potential interface >between technology, language, and indigenous communities. > >efforts at the University of Arizona's Learning Technology Center (ltc) >provided the initial inspiration for this endeavor. one of the more >immediate outcomes was the creation of a short technology course at AILDI >(American Indian Language Development Institute) this past summer. you can >view the course webpage at: > >http://www.u.arizona.edu/~cashcash/aildi/LRC430.html. > >also, an ILAT technology page is in the works: > >http://projects.ltc.arizona.edu/gates/ilat2003.html > >eh?e qeciy?ewyew...many thanks to all of you for joining and participating >in ILAT! please continue with your introductions, discussions, and support >for indigenous languages. > >phil cash cash (cayuse/nez perce) >UofA, ILAT list manager >phd student in anthropology and linguistics > >~~~ > >ILAT List Description: > >Indigenous Languages and Technology discussion list is an open forum for >community language specialists, linguists, scholars, and students to discuss >issues relating to the uses of technology in language revitalization >efforts. > >ILAT Statistics: > >146 subscribers > >ILAT Subscribers by Country: > >Bolivia=1 >Canada=1 >Fiji=1 >Italy=1 >USA=138 > >ILAT Web Page: > >http://www.u.arizona.edu/~cashcash/ILAT.html > >ILAT News and Postings: > >novessl http://cultura.gencat.es/llengcat/noves/noticies/ilat.htm > >Foundation for Endangered Languages http://www.ogmios.org/209.htm > >MSN >http://groups.msn.com/BayAreaIndianCalendar/resources.msnw?action=get_messag >e&mview=0&ID_Message=1129&LastModified=4675395672608226085 <><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> Hishinlai' "Kathy R. Sikorski", Gwich'in Instructor University of Alaska Fairbanks Alaska Native Language Center P. O. Box 757680 Fairbanks, AK 99775-7680 P (907) 474-7875 F (907) 474-7876 E fnkrs at uaf.edu ANLC-L at www.uaf.edu/anlc/ Hah! Nakhweet'ihthan t'ihch'yaa! From gforger at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Wed Oct 29 20:11:37 2003 From: gforger at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (Garry Forger) Date: Wed, 29 Oct 2003 13:11:37 -0700 Subject: ILAT anniversary! Message-ID: I agree that this is a great list. Can't believe its a year since it started, where has the time gone. Its obvious from the postings and traffic that this list is filling a great need, and is long overdue in existing. Way to go Phil. -- Garry J. Forger, MLS Technology Coordinator The University of Arizona Learning Technologies Center 1077 N. Highland Ave Tucson, AZ 85721-0073 gforger at u.arizona.edu http://www.ltc.arizona.edu/ Phone 520-626-7761 Fax 520-626-8220 From dzo at BISHARAT.NET Thu Oct 30 04:19:58 2003 From: dzo at BISHARAT.NET (Don Osborn) Date: Thu, 30 Oct 2003 05:19:58 +0100 Subject: ILAT anniversary! Message-ID: Congratulations on the first anniversary of ILAT! Although I just recently joined, it is easy to see that it serves a vital role. And as one who manages several specialized fora on aspects of African languages and technology, I recognize the effort that goes into building and maintaining such a list. Sannu da aiki, fo nda goy, aan e tiyabu, i ni ce - as they would say in several of the languages of the Sahel - good work! Don Don Osborn, Ph.D. dzo at bisharat.net *Bisharat! A language, technology & development initiative *Bisharat! Initiative langues - technologie - d??veloppement http://www.bisharat.net ----- Original Message ----- From: "Phil CashCash" To: Sent: Wednesday, October 29, 2003 5:40 PM Subject: ILAT anniversary! dear ILAT subscribers, this week marks the one year anniversary (Oct 2002-Oct 2003) of ILAT! the Indigenous Languages and Technology discussion list originally came into being as an idea to generate insights and ideas on the potential interface between technology, language, and indigenous communities. efforts at the University of Arizona?~Rs Learning Technology Center (ltc) provided the initial inspiration for this endeavor. one of the more immediate outcomes was the creation of a short technology course at AILDI (American Indian Language Development Institute) this past summer. you can view the course webpage at: http://www.u.arizona.edu/~cashcash/aildi/LRC430.html. also, an ILAT technology page is in the works: http://projects.ltc.arizona.edu/gates/ilat2003.html eh??e qeciy??ewyew...many thanks to all of you for joining and participating in ILAT! please continue with your introductions, discussions, and support for indigenous languages. phil cash cash (cayuse/nez perce) UofA, ILAT list manager phd student in anthropology and linguistics ~~~ ILAT List Description: Indigenous Languages and Technology discussion list is an open forum for community language specialists, linguists, scholars, and students to discuss issues relating to the uses of technology in language revitalization efforts. ILAT Statistics: 146 subscribers ILAT Subscribers by Country: Bolivia=1 Canada=1 Fiji=1 Italy=1 USA=138 ILAT Web Page: http://www.u.arizona.edu/~cashcash/ILAT.html ILAT News and Postings: novessl http://cultura.gencat.es/llengcat/noves/noticies/ilat.htm Foundation for Endangered Languages http://www.ogmios.org/209.htm MSN http://groups.msn.com/BayAreaIndianCalendar/resources.msnw?action=get_message&mview=0&ID_Message=1129&LastModified=4675395672608226085 From andrekar at NCIDC.ORG Fri Oct 31 16:32:59 2003 From: andrekar at NCIDC.ORG (Andre Cramblit) Date: Fri, 31 Oct 2003 08:32:59 -0800 Subject: Resolution Message-ID: You may be interested to learn of the following resolution passed at the Annual General meeting of Foundation for Endangered Languages, at Broome, West Australia, on 23 September 2003. To: David Navenburg, Director Population Census Development Australian Bureau of Statistics Locked Bag 10 Belconnen ACT 2616 Australia Recognising ? that the Australian bureau of statistics has improved the language question in the census over the past two decades; and ? that the collection of accurate language data is valuable in monitoring the health of Australia?s language heritage; This forum opposes the suggestion that the language question be dropped from the Australian Bureau of Statistics Census questions, especially with relation to Australia?s indigenous languages. Furthermore, this forum proposes that future questions relating to language in the census must take into consideration the following three categories, noting that they are already included in the Canadian census: a) a person?s first language or languages b) a person?s home language or languages c) a person?s competence in other language or languages. -- Andr? Cramblit: andre.p.cramblit.86 at alum.dartmouth.org Operations Director Northern California Indian Development Council NCIDC (http://www.ncidc.org) is a non-profit that meets the development needs of American Indians and operates an art gallery featuring the art of California tribes (http://www.americanindianonline.com) COMMUNICATION IS THE KEY TO THE FUTURE OF AMERICAN INDIANS/NATIVE AMERICANS/ALASKAN NATIVES & HAWAIIAN ISLANDERS. For news of interest to Natives subscribe send an email to: IndigenousNewsNetwork-subscribe at topica.com or go to: http://www.topica.com/lists/IndigenousNewsNetwork/subscribe/?location=listinfo From andrekar at NCIDC.ORG Fri Oct 31 16:33:31 2003 From: andrekar at NCIDC.ORG (Andre Cramblit) Date: Fri, 31 Oct 2003 08:33:31 -0800 Subject: 2nd Resolution Message-ID: You may be interested to learn of the following resolution passed at the Annual General meeting of Foundation for Endangered Languages, at Broome, West Australia, on 23 September 2003. (The theme of the conference, during which the AGM took place, was Maintaining the Links: Language, Identity and the Land.) To: Commonwealth Heads of Government Secretariat Commonwealth Policy Studies Unit Commonwealth Association for Indigenous Peoples? (CAIP) Whereas: ? Thousands of world languages are at risk of dying out; ? Geographic place names are an important record and expression of people?s knowledge, heritage and culture; ? Geographic place names may carry valuable ecological, environmental, spiritual, moral and cultural meanings; ? The process of European and other colonisation of indigenous peoples? territories has led to the removal or distortion of geographic place names; ? The practice of various Commonwealth governments is notably uneven with regard to restitution of indigenous place names; ? There is a Commonwealth Association of Indigenous Peoples which has called for greater awareness and dialogue in the Commonwealth on the issue of indigenous peoples? rights and empowerment; ? 2004 is the final year of the United Nations Decade on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples; Be it resolved that: The Foundation for Endangered Languages calls on Commonwealth Governments and the Commonwealth Secretariat to take appropriate actions to promote the use of orthographically correct and properly documented place names, particularly those in endangered languages and the languages of indigenous and tribal peoples. From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Fri Oct 31 18:24:53 2003 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (Phil CashCash) Date: Fri, 31 Oct 2003 11:24:53 -0700 Subject: Yaqui youth celebrating their culture, byte by byte (fwd) Message-ID: Yaqui youth celebrating their culture, byte by byte By JOYESHA CHESNICK Tucson Citizen 10/31/2003 http://www.azdailysun.com/non_sec/nav_includes/story.cfm?storyID=75939 TUCSON (AP) -- The legends, songs and history of the Pascua Yaqui Tribe are finding a new high-tech life in the hands of the tribe's young people. The first Intel Computer Clubhouse in southern Arizona opened on the reservation in October giving children ages 10 to 18 the opportunity to learn how to use audiovisual equipment and other electronics to preserve the culture of the tribe. The Intel Computer Clubhouse Network uses technology to allow young people to explore their interests and become confident learners. "If you want to play games, you have to design them. If you want to be on the Internet, you have to design a Web page," Clubhouse assistant coordinator Felipe Flores said. Students might not realize it now, but they are learning important interpersonal and leadership skills, Flores said. One Yaqui senior, Rita Coronado, put four days of training to good use, animating a digital photograph of a Yaqui dancer and setting her work to traditional music. "It's possibly the world's first Pascua Yaqui music video," said Debora Norris, spokeswoman for the tribe. The program is open to kids from the reservation and the larger Tucson community. "It's fabulous," Norris said. "It gives kids a new way to look at culture and make it their own." Club members work individually and in teams on short films of one another and other projects. "They're going to be making these videos and computer games instead of buying them," Norris said. "It's interesting watching them watch themselves on television, and their friends and parents. It's not something, coming from here, that they're used to seeing. They love it." Yaqui ninth-grader Chris Herber, the 3-D graphics expert in the lab, spends a majority of his time in the lab teaching other students how to create images in the Bryce 5 visual arts program. "I'm the only one that knows it," Chris said. Adding, that while he is still in the process of learning the computer program's intricacies, he quickly picked up the basics by his third day. "There are a lot of things you can do here. Learn new stuff, meet new people." The entire Yaqui community will be able to take advantage of the clubhouse's equipment during school hours for a project aimed at preserving the written and oral Yaqui dialect. "Very few people are fluent in the Yaqui language, so that's the priority right now," Norris said. "We haven't been able to address it up to this point through the traditional school system, so this makes the best of a bad situation." The Pascua Yaqui Intel Computer Clubhouse is one of 60 worldwide and five in Arizona. Four are in the Phoenix area, said Jeanne Forbis, spokeswoman for Intel Corp. Nancy Mager, grant administrator for the Pascua Yaqui Tribe, said the clubhouse is funded for three years by a $50,000 grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and a $10,000 grant from Intel Corp. Various companies donated more than $300,000 worth of software and computer hardware, she said. "Intel launches the program with the idea being the tribe will make it sustainable," she said. "After three years, we'll remain in the Intel network, which provides training and support. And the kids will be part of the network through the Intel science fair and things like that." Alex Manuel, a Yaqui fifth grader, said he's lucky to have the latest technology and computers available to him five days a week at the Clubhouse. "It's fun," Alex said. "I'm just trying to figure out how to do things myself. From mikinakn at SHAW.CA Fri Oct 31 18:55:50 2003 From: mikinakn at SHAW.CA (Rolland Nadjiwon) Date: Fri, 31 Oct 2003 13:55:50 -0500 Subject: Yaqui youth celebrating their culture, byte by byte (fwd) Message-ID: Phil...do you know if that is New Pasqua or Old Pasqua? ---- wahjeh rolland nadjiwon ----- Original Message ----- From: "Phil CashCash" To: Sent: Friday, October 31, 2003 1:24 PM Subject: Yaqui youth celebrating their culture, byte by byte (fwd) > Yaqui youth celebrating their culture, byte by byte > > By JOYESHA CHESNICK > Tucson Citizen > 10/31/2003 > http://www.azdailysun.com/non_sec/nav_includes/story.cfm?storyID=75939 > > TUCSON (AP) -- The legends, songs and history of the Pascua Yaqui Tribe > are finding a new high-tech life in the hands of the tribe's young > people. From cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU Fri Oct 31 20:06:16 2003 From: cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU (Phil CashCash) Date: Fri, 31 Oct 2003 13:06:16 -0700 Subject: Yaqui youth celebrating their culture, byte by byte (fwd) In-Reply-To: <000d01c39fe0$9a6aff60$23394c18@su.shawcable.net> Message-ID: hi rolland, sorry i don't know where it is located, but i do know there is an old and new pascua yaqui. later, phil > ----- Message from mikinakn at SHAW.CA --------- > Date: Fri, 31 Oct 2003 13:55:50 -0500 > From: Rolland Nadjiwon > Reply-To: Indigenous Languages and Technology > Subject: Re: Yaqui youth celebrating their culture, byte by byte (fwd) > To: ILAT at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU > > Phil...do you know if that is New Pasqua or Old Pasqua? > > ---- > wahjeh > rolland nadjiwon > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Phil CashCash" > To: > Sent: Friday, October 31, 2003 1:24 PM > Subject: Yaqui youth celebrating their culture, byte by byte (fwd) > > > > Yaqui youth celebrating their culture, byte by byte > > > > By JOYESHA CHESNICK > > Tucson Citizen > > 10/31/2003 > > > http://www.azdailysun.com/non_sec/nav_includes/story.cfm?storyID=75939 > > > > TUCSON (AP) -- The legends, songs and history of the Pascua Yaqui > Tribe > > are finding a new high-tech life in the hands of the tribe's young > > people. > > > ----- End message from mikinakn at SHAW.CA ----- From andrekar at NCIDC.ORG Fri Oct 31 22:07:52 2003 From: andrekar at NCIDC.ORG (Andre Cramblit) Date: Fri, 31 Oct 2003 14:07:52 -0800 Subject: Website Message-ID: Native Languages: Legacy and Lifeline http://www.in-forum.com/specials/DyingTongues/ Timeline http://www.in-forum.com/specials/DyingTongues/timeline/timeline.html This eclectic and innovative website will be of interest to those involved in safeguarding indigenous languages as well as traditional culture in general. Three Native American tribes -- the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara, jointly known as the Three Affiliated Tribes -- are making strong efforts to save their languages and culture from extinction, thereby enhancing the prospects for other efforts to improve local well being. Multimedia offerings on the website include historical pieces, oral recollections, interviews, photo essays, graphic data presentations, and vocabulary lessons. -- Andr? Cramblit: andre.p.cramblit.86 at alum.dartmouth.org Operations Director Northern California Indian Development Council NCIDC (http://www.ncidc.org) is a non-profit that meets the development needs of American Indians and operates an art gallery featuring the art of California tribes (http://www.americanindianonline.com) COMMUNICATION IS THE KEY TO THE FUTURE OF AMERICAN INDIANS/NATIVE AMERICANS/ALASKAN NATIVES & HAWAIIAN ISLANDERS. For news of interest to Natives subscribe send an email to: IndigenousNewsNetwork-subscribe at topica.com or go to: http://www.topica.com/lists/IndigenousNewsNetwork/subscribe/?location=listinfo From Rrlapier at AOL.COM Fri Oct 31 23:56:58 2003 From: Rrlapier at AOL.COM (Rr Lapier) Date: Fri, 31 Oct 2003 18:56:58 EST Subject: Smithsonian Message-ID: Piegan Institute is in the Fall issue of the Big Sky Journal and the November issue of the Smithsonian Magazine. A little regional and national exposure for Native languages. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian/issues03/nov03/poi.html Rosalyn LaPier Piegan Institute www.pieganinstitute.org -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: