American Indian Youths Preserve the Past, One Word at a Time (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

American Indian Youths Preserve the Past, One Word at a Time

Pacific News Service, Youth News Feature,
Shadi Rahimi, May 11, 2005
http://news.ncmonline.com/news/view_article.html?article_id=36c877df78051f0526db4e11862e9386

Editor's Note: Though only a few elders of the Big Valley band of Pomo
Indians are still fluent in their language, young tribal members are
picking up words and phrases with the help of technology.

Eighteen-year-old Kristin Amparo, a tribal member of the Big Valley band
of Pomo Indians, lives with her parents and five siblings in a large
house on their reservation in Clear Lake, about three hours north of
San Francisco. She likes bouncing on a trampoline to slam-dunk a
basketball in her back yard, zooming past the creamy white Konocti
Vista Casino in a yellow all-terrain vehicle and, now, speaking
Bahtssal with her 14-year-old sister Felicia.

The flat and green Big Valley reservation sits two miles from tiny
downtown Lakeport on 153 acres encircling the banks of Clear Lake,
whose blue-green waters host international bass-fishing tournaments and
traditional Pomo tule boat races. On sunny days, kids fish for bluegill
and catfish from the dock near the tribe's Konocti Vista Casino.

Only a few elders of the Big Valley tribe are fluent in Bahtssal, a
tribal dialect that began to fade after settlers forced Northern
California Pomos off their lands. Today, Amparo and her sister are
among a small group of young people on the 470-member reservation who
are learning to speak the dialect as part of a newly formed language
program.

"We tell our mom stuff in Bahtssal, like, 'I have to go,'" says Amparo,
who had never heard the language spoken before she began studying it
under the new initiative. "It's really fun to learn."

According to tribal historians, the decline in fluency in Bahtssal dates
back to 1852, when the United States Senate refused to ratify a federal
treaty that had promised the Big Valley tribe 72 square miles of land
on the south side of Clear Lake. Settlers began claiming plots of land
the following year, making private property of the areas where Big
Valley ancestors had gathered food for more than 11,000 years. As
tribal members began working in fields and on ranches owned by
settlers, and their children began learning English in white schools,
Bahtssal began to fade.

James Bluewolf, who directs the language program, sees it as an exercise
not just in cultural preservation, but also in healing. "People are
still suffering from post-traumatic stress after being forced to give
up everything they had," he says. "But every culture comes to a point
where they are ready to make a change."

In Clear Lake, the epicenter of that change sits among piles of scrap
metal, wood and rusty cars, in a building that looks like it has
dropped from the sky. It is tiny and tidy, and painted a bright
swimming-pool blue. Inside this building, which houses the tribal
language program, young mothers watch their chubby-cheeked toddlers
play in a preschool class held by the nonprofit Lake County Tribal
Health Consortium.

In a cramped office past the play area, James Bluewolf smiles at the
children's squeals. A stocky, soft-spoken man who once ran a
landscaping business, Bluewolf has been using technology tribal
ancestors could not have imagined to preserve and promote the tribal
language. Bluewolf records hours of Bahtssal spoken by elders, which he
edits into half-hour audio segments that air on the community radio
station, and are available free on CD to tribal members. Bluewolf is
also writing a curriculum for a 15-week course in Bahtssal.

In a program Bluewolf directs, local teenagers perform skits that teach
words and phrases such as "Chiin the'a 'eh" ("How are you?") and
"Q'odii" ("Good"). Bluewolf videotapes the skits and makes them into
videos that are played on the Lake County television station, and made
available on DVD.

In the play area, Alisha Salguero, 21, rocks her 5-month-old daughter to
sleep while her 3-year-old son Brian plays. Brian has learned several
words in Bahtssal in the preschool class, where Bluewolf uses hand
puppets to teach the language.

"He's really picked it up," Salguero says with a smile. "I don't really
know it, so I think it's good for him to learn his language."

While traditional song, dance, and tule boat races have always been part
of the cultural life of Big Valley children, holding on to their tribal
language has been more difficult, says Marilyn Ellis, 21. "That's why
this language program is important," says Ellis, whose father, Ray, was
the spiritual leader of the tribe.

Before he died several years ago, Ray Ellis revived the tribe's "Big
Time" spiritual celebration. The gathering, held every September on the
grassy banks of Clear Lake, includes prayer, dancing and singing -- and
now, perhaps, the sound of children trying out their ancestral tongue.

"Our language is part of us," says Ellis, who does not speak the tribal
dialect herself, but whose daughters can now name their cat and dog in
Bahtssal. "If we don't know it, we're pretty much dead."

PNS contributor Shadi Rahimi, 24, is the co-founder and an editor of
Seventh Native American Generation (SNAG) magazine, and an associate
editor of YO! Youth Outlook, www.youthoutlook.org.