Study of ancient local languages seeing revival in North County (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

Study of ancient local languages seeing revival in North County

By: BRUCE KAUFFMAN - Staff Writer
http://www.nctimes.com/articles/2004/07/25/special_reports/science_technology/19_48_107_24_04.txt

SAN MARCOS ---- Palomar College teacher Linda Locklear became a student
again this summer, enrolling in a class in Luiseno, a language
indigenous to San Diego County and believed to be the first spoken
here.

It's the second summer she's studied the language in a formal Palomar
course, a course the 30-year veteran American Indian studies professor
lobbied for years to get in the regular curriculum for credit. A
unanimous vote of the Palomar board of trustees in December 2001 put
Luiseno, a language spoken in North County for centuries before
Europeans arrived, into the catalogue.

Now the movement is building to develop an entire new generation of
people who speak this ancient language of several North County and
Southwest Riverside County tribes, including the Rincon, La Jolla,
Pechanga, Pauma and Pala. Luiseno, educators said in interviews this
week, is spoken now by a sparse few and needs to be nurtured.

And along with offerings this academic year that will advance the skills
of those who took introductory Luiseno, the college for the first time
this August begins a formal, for-credit course in Cupeno. It is among
90 to 100 pre-European languages native to Southern California, and the
language spoken by a tribe known as the Cupeno who were forced in 1903
to leave its land in Warner Hot Springs and resettle at the Pala
Reservation.

Both Luiseno and Cupeno are now to count toward meeting the requirement
in both the California State University and the University of
California systems that students learn a foreign language in order to
graduate, said Steven Crouthamel, the chair of the American Indian
studies department at Palomar.

At Cal State San Marcos, senior Shalene Molina is getting university
credit for her study of Luiseno. She will have taken three ever-more
advanced classes at Palomar by the time her undergraduate course work
is done at the end of the fall 2004 semester.

A human development major who lives on the La Jolla Indian Reservation,
Molina, who describes herself as Luiseno, Cupeno and Diegueno, said
Luiseno should survive to serve as a living expression of American
Indian culture.

"I just don't want the language to be lost," she said by phone from the
reservation Friday. "It's important to carry it on."

Molina is one of 425 students who have studied Luiseno and Cupeno in 16
non-credit and for-credit classes at Palomar since 2002, college
officials said. Trial runs of the courses go back to the mid-1970s. By
2005, said professor Locklear, a plan to add Kumeyaay, the language of
Los Coyotes, may be realized.

Said Locklear, who took the course with her 6-year-old grandson,
Narsall, "I can count to five (in Luiseno), I know my colors, and I can
tell a story."

The story is one that linguist Eric Elliott, the sole Luiseno teacher at
Palomar, aims to have his students passing on in the original from
generation to generation. In English, it would be called "Mr. and Mrs.
Tiger and the Frog."

The story, as Elliott related it in an interview Thursday, involves a
boastful frog who is caught alone with Mrs. Tiger by her husband. The
male tiger examines the frog's every tale and finds them to be full of
falsehoods, including the frog's claim to have been a decorated soldier
who can beat anybody up.

"Do anything to me," the frog pleads with Mr. Tiger after being
thoroughly unmasked, "but don't kick me into the pond."

And that's exactly what Mr. Tiger does, as the frog swims off and
survives because of the wiliness of his plea.

It's about the eternal battle between truth and falsehood, said Elliott,
and a worthy vessel to carry the intricate Luiseno language and instill
its sounds and words in children.

Elliott, 43, a part-time professor at the college and a married father
of three who says he's very aware that he's a white man, taught the
course for the first time in 2002 "live" at the Palomar Education
Center on the Pauma Reservation. But after he was named to a full-time
teaching post at the Pechanga Reservation, the Chula Vista resident
turned to the World Wide Web and online classes as a way to solve the
grueling problem of his commute.

In 2003 and earlier this year, students heard Elliott teach the language
spoken via audio stream after they linked to their electronic classroom
from the college Web site at www.palomar.edu. For the fall semester,
online video of Elliott holding forth will be added. "This is pretty
revolutionary," Elliott said. "I don't know any place except Palomar
that's trying to get these courses out there, especially in Southern
California."

Elliot studied with the late Villiana Hyde, a native speaker of the
Rincon dialect of Luiseno who in "Yumayk, Yumayk" (translated as 'long,
long ago') wrote down the fairy tales and various histories that were
spoken and passed down through the generations. Her first book,
"Introduction to the Luiseno Language," was published in 1971.

Elliott expects to be working with a 19-year-old Palomar graduate and UC
Riverside Native American studies major named Paul Miranda this fall
semester as Palomar offers Cupeno online for the first time. Miranda,
who grew up on the Pala Reservation and calls it home, said he would be
the first Cupeno person to teach college-level Cupeno in the region.

Miranda says he will draw from a English-Cupeno dictionary, complete
with Cupeno legends, that has been in his family "a long time," a work
by the late Rocinda Nolasquez called "Mulu'wetam." It's all the more
important that the language be revived, Miranda said, because, along
with the other indigenous languages, it was suppressed.

"There was a story about one girl who spoke Cupeno in class and the nun
took her tongue and put it on a frozen pole and a piece of it chipped
off," Miranda said.

Palomar's Locklear, a sociologist and a Lumbee Indian from the southeast
part of North Carolina, said preserving languages such as Luiseno and
Cupeno is vital because the words reflect the special views of the
world held by those peoples.

"You can't pray the same way in English," she said. "The songs are not
the same, the world view is not the same. The language is really kind
of the heart of the culture and, without the language, your culture is
really deprived."

Contact staff writer Bruce Kauffman at (760) 761-4410 or
bkauffman at nctimes.com.