Squamish Speakers Keep Language Alive (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

Squamish Speakers Keep Language Alive

By sarah efron
Publish Date: 17-Feb-2005
http://www.straight.com/content.cfm?id=8103

[photo inset - Kathy Joseph's class of three-year-olds at Capilano
Littlest Ones school. Rebecca Blissett photo]

Phone Peter Jacobs at home and you might hear this recorded greeting:
"chexw ma ha7lh?". Caught off guard by Jacobs's friendly salutation in
the Squamish aboriginal language, some callers hang up or leave a
confused message. However, others attempt to respond with a phrase or
two in Squamish, a tongue referred to by its speakers as Swú7mesh
Sníchim.

Jacobs's message is just one small part of an ambitious plan to
revitalize the language. The 40-year-old linguist, who works at the
Squamish Nation education department, is helping create an immersion
program that will rescue Squamish from the brink of extinction and
transform it back into a living language. According to Jacobs, it's a
real race: the community of 3,300 people has only 15 or so fluent
speakers left, many who are in their 60s and 70s.

British Columbia is known for its extraordinary linguistic
diversity--it's home to about half of Canada's 50 aboriginal languages.
However, in the first 50 or so years of the past century, government
and religious officials tried to exterminate Native languages through
the residential-school system, separating children from their parents
and forbidding students to speak their mother tongues. Surrounded by
English, parents often decided it was better not to teach their young
children Native languages so they could integrate better into
mainstream society. Today, all of B.C.'s aboriginal languages are
considered endangered.

In 1988, Peter Jacobs was taking an introductory linguistics course at a
Fraser Valley school. One of the assignments was to learn a few phrases
in a language he didn't know, so he recorded his grandmother speaking
Squamish. Jacobs became aware of how few speakers were left, and he
decided to devote his master's thesis to the language. His did his
fieldwork by spending days with his relatives. "They got a kick out of
my questions," he recalls during an interview at a kindergarten on the
Capilano Reserve in North Vancouver. "They hadn't been speaking the
language regularly. I was finding words from old linguistics textbooks
that they hadn't heard for a while." But Jacobs learned from his elders
too, and today he speaks the language "fairly well". He notes that
Squamish--which was traditionally spoken from the Lower Mainland up to
Howe Sound and the Squamish Valley--is more than just a collection of
words: it contains the views and beliefs of his culture. "If you speak
English all the time, it starts to change your view of the world," he
says. "It influences your way of thinking."

At the Capilano Littlest Ones kindergarten-preschool on the reserve,
three-year-olds are learning to communicate in Squamish. "I tell them
it's our very own language," says teacher Kathy Joseph, who learned to
speak Squamish from her mother as a child. The classroom's walls are
covered with posters of the English alphabet and the words for colours
in Squamish. Very few learning materials exist in the language, so
Joseph translates stories from English or tells Native legends. This
morning she reads the story "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" from an
English-language book, throwing in Squamish vocabulary here and there.
Over the next few months, Joseph will keep reading the book to her
charges, gradually shifting completely into Squamish. She asks the
children to go home and teach their parents some of the language, and
at parent-teacher interviews, she often hears that moms and dads are
learning vocabulary from their kids.

Four elementary schools and one high school in North Vancouver also
offer Squamish-language classes. However, Deborah Jacobs, the director
of the Squamish education department, says more drastic action is
necessary ensure that the language gets passed on to future
generations. (She's Peter Jacobs's cousin, and in the Squamish kinship
system they are considered siblings.) Deborah is spearheading the
development of a school on the Capilano reserve that will offer full
immersion to students up to Grade 7. She hopes that the project--which
is being partially funded by the Department of Indian and Northern
Affairs Canada--will be built within the next three years.

The curriculum will be more than just a translation of the mainstream
school system. "It's the creation of something entirely new," Deborah
says at the kindergarten. "Our program is based on four pillars: home,
government, family, and history. In comparison to western curriculum,
it's a much more holistic way to teach a child. As we create this
program, it's raising questions for us about what we value collectively
and what our beliefs are."

At the new school, young children will take all of their classes in
Squamish, although in the later grades they may learn math and science
in English. The idea is to educate kids to be fluent in the language
and have a strong sense of aboriginal identity and to produce graduates
who can ease into advanced education and employment.

Perhaps the biggest challenge is not for the children of the Squamish
Nation but for their educators, many of whom still have a shaky grasp
of the language. Even Deborah Jacobs describes herself as a "baby
speaker". Before the immersion process can start, the teachers
themselves must become students. Simon Fraser University is working
with the Squamish Nation to design a training program that gives
Squamish skills to accredited teachers and teaching skills to speakers
of the language. Then it will be up to the children to achieve Peter
and Deborah Jacobs's dream of creating a true community of Squamish
speakers.