Saving Oneidas' Language, One Long Word at a Time (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

July 18, 2005
Saving Oneidas' Language, One Long Word at a Time

By MICHELLE YORK
ONEIDA, N.Y. - In 1999, Marion Johns was near death.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/18/nyregion/18oneida.html

Advanced Alzheimer's disease had left her bedridden and erased many of
her memories. Still, one day, she turned to her daughter, Penny
Raymond, and crooned a few words that Penny did not understand.

Mrs. Raymond's sister, Shirley Mason, recognized them, though, and
translated: "My beautiful little baby."

Mrs. Johns had reverted back to an intricate, difficult American Indian
language she had learned as a child - Oneida. "She never spoke it to us
growing up," said Mrs. Raymond, 51.

Few of the 500 members of the Oneida Indian Nation who live on or near
this reservation about 30 miles east of Syracuse knew their language.
Among Mrs. Raymond's generation, the number of native speakers here was
all but nonexistent, and scarce also among Oneida tribes in Wisconsin
and Canada. The language was nearly lost.

That day, listening to her mother on her deathbed ignited a desire for
Mrs. Raymond to keep her language alive. "What's going to happen if we
start losing this part of our culture?" she asked. "It's like losing a
part of yourselves."

Six years later, Mrs. Raymond is not only fluent in Oneida, but she is
also passing it on. On a recent summer day, she and Geraldine Feeley
were working at their jobs as language teachers, coaxing a handful of
young students attending summer camp to count from 1 to 10 in Oneida.

The classes were the result of the most unusual and ambitious projects
ever undertaken by an American Indian tribe. The Oneida Indian Nation
contracted with the language experts at Berlitz to create an intensive
curriculum. Then the tribe paid eight people, Mrs. Raymond and Mrs.
Feeley among them, to study Oneida full time for eight months so they
could become fluent. Now, those eight students, who ranged from 26 to
63, have become language instructors and are teaching others,
especially the young. "Somebody had to do something to save it," said
Sheri Beglen, 45, an instructor.

The Oneida Nation has offered language classes since the 1980's. But
they were held once or twice a week, too infrequently to be of much
use. Then there was the difficulty of the language itself. "The words
were so long you had to take a breath to finish pronouncing it," said
Brian Patterson, a representative of the Bear Clan, one of three groups
that make up the Oneida tribe.

He remembered one moment when he stared at a block of words that formed
a largely useless phrase. "The interpretation was 'She wears a
wristwatch,' " he said. "At that moment, I got so frustrated because I
couldn't remember the last time I said that in English, let alone say
it in my language. Our elders were not teachers."

With no more than the limited financial resources the tribe possessed at
the time, the Oneida language might have died out. But in 1993, the
tribe opened its Turning Stone casino and resort near Oneida. Today it
is the largest employer in a three-county region and generates millions
in annual revenue. That allowed the Oneidas to pull themselves out of
poverty and invest in cultural projects - chief among them language
preservation.

>From the outset, the task was daunting. They had few materials to work
with. Oneida, like many American Indian languages, was primarily a
spoken language, not a written one. In 1939, a Yale anthropologist and
expert in American Indian languages, Floyd G. Lounsbury, gave Oneida
standardized grammar rules which were embraced by all Oneidas and
allowed the language to be written.

The tribe first needed to find experts.

"I was passing through one year and they were asking me if I knew any
fluent speaker who would work with them," said Ray George, 66, who
learned Oneida as his first language and lives on the Oneida Nation of
the Thames reservation in Ontario, Canada. "Jokingly, I said, 'If you
send me a good contract, maybe I'll consider it myself.' Two weeks
later I got a call."

Mr. George knew how to speak Oneida. A colleague from Ontario knew how
to write it. Together they worked with the local Oneidas to translate
English phrases into their native language. Then they provided that
information to Berlitz so it could develop a curriculum. "For us, it
was tough; we don't know Oneida," said Deniz Ghrewati, a Berlitz
director, who estimated that among 400 American Indian languages, half
are no longer in use.

Only one other American Indian tribe, the Lakota tribe, has enlisted the
help of Berlitz to preserve its language, but not with the same vigor as
the Oneidas, said Ms. Ghrewati. "They were desperate."

In the Oneida program, a few tears were shed during the intense
training, and one of the students quit. "There were days it was so
hard," Mrs. Raymond said. "At night I couldn't sleep cause my mind was
going over Oneida words. It was just pounded into our heads."

Ms. Ghrewati came to the Oneida reservation for a recent graduation
ceremony. "I was actually amazed," she said. "They were joking in
Oneida."

But the success of the language program will ultimately depend on how
well the teachers can spread Oneida among the tribe's youth. One
student in Mrs. Raymond's class, Jared Rose, 10, played a few language
games with a competitive streak. "It's really fun, actually, to learn
the language," he said. "My mom and dad, as soon as I walk in the door,
they surround me. They say, 'What have you learned today?' "

The time has long passed when Mrs. Raymond could converse with her
mother in their native language. Today, she has other goals, saying, "I
want to teach my grandchildren."