Keeping languages alive (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

SANTA ROSA

Keeping languages alive
Students learn the words of their American Indian ancestors

- Vanessa Hua, Chronicle Staff Writer Monday, September 26, 2005
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2005/ 
09/26/BAGK4EU0TT1.DTL

At the headquarters of the Graton Rancheria in a sprawling Santa Rosa  
business park, linguist Richard Applegate held up a stuffed dog and  
asked in Coastal Miwok:

"What is being held? Who is holding the dog? What is the dog doing?"

"You guys are doing really good," Applegate said as his students  
responded with flowing, melodic words, the language spoken by their  
grandparents but lost to them until now.

His lessons are based in part on tapes that Sarah Ballard, the last  
fluent speaker of Coastal Miwok, recorded four years before she died in  
1978 at age 96.

"Don't get too proud of us yet," said Carolyn Peri-McNulte, 61, of  
Benicia, a granddaughter of Ballard.

The students are among a growing number of American Indians across  
California reviving their languages and cultures in a race against time  
as the last few native speakers of many of the languages are now  
elderly. The students see Applegate's class as an important first step  
toward reclaiming their cultural identity, much as Hawaiians have  
strengthened their culture with publicly funded language classes, and  
Israel solidified its national identity by reviving Hebrew.

Peri-McNulte asked the word for "gift," which wasn't in the dictionary  
her grandmother's recordings contributed to. Perhaps together they  
could figure it out, Applegate said, working from the root of the verb  
"to give."

"No one would know if we were wrong," she said with a rueful chuckle.

Having learned Italian, her father's family's language, Peri-McNulte,  
who wore a black T-shirt that read "Homeland Security, Fighting  
Terrorism since 1492" over a photo of American Indian warriors, said  
she wants to give equal attention to Coastal Miwok.

The class revives what was lost, said Penny Lopez, who lives in nearby  
Windsor.

"We need it back, for our future," Lopez said. Her daughter, Ursula, 8,  
also in the class, corrects her when she's wrong and likes to sing  
songs in Coastal Miwok.

"It's fun to say the words," said Ursula, who had a ponytail sprouting  
from the top of her head.

The two dozen students taking the class one Saturday afternoon each  
month range from Ursula to a man wearing a traditional abalone-shell  
necklace to a woman with a walker.

California's Indians spoke 115 language and dialect groups in 1770. Of  
those, only 50 languages remain, each with only a few speakers, and  
tribe members are working to sustain 25 others. "What I hear the most  
is from tribal people is that we're losing our culture. Most of us are  
not full blood anymore. We don't have something that shows who we are,  
and language is a big part of it," said Leanne Hinton, a linguistics  
professor at UC Berkeley and a founding member of Vallejo's Advocates  
for Indigenous California Language Survival, a nonprofit that pairs  
fluent speakers with willing learners.

After more than a century of forced assimilation starting in the late  
1800s, during which Indian children were sent to boarding schools and  
often punished for speaking their native tongue, many Indians lost  
interest in passing on their language and traditions. But in response  
to various English-only movements across the United States, Indians  
supported legislation, passed in 1990, requiring the federal government  
fund efforts to preserve native languages. Since then, tribes have  
tapped gambling money and public and private funding for language  
programs. The Pechanga Band in Southern California, for instance,  
incorporates Luiseo into daily lessons in preschool through first-grade  
classes.

In Santa Rosa, once a core group of people learns to speak Coastal  
Miwok, tribal leaders hope to start language classes for children. One  
tribe member in Applegate's class, Tim Molino of Berkeley, in addition  
to studying Coastal Miwok takes individual lessons in Kashaya. It was  
the language of his paternal grandmother, who was half Kashaya and half  
Coastal Miwok.

Hoping to reconnect with his culture after his parents died, he studied  
Kashaya word lists he found in an archive at UC Berkeley and teamed  
with his father's cousin, Anita Silva, in 2001.

They immerse themselves in the language for several hours each week,  
making small talk about daily life -- passing on vocabulary in context.  
For example, he studies with her at mealtimes because it involves lots  
of opportunities for short questions and answers.

"It's overwhelming," Molino, 46, said of speaking Kashaya. "I feel at  
home."

Molino is finishing a bachelor's degree in linguistics at UC Berkeley  
and eventually wants to help other American Indians regain their  
language. He and Silva have begun teaching a monthly Kashaya class at  
Lytton Rancheria, and he has also provided Stewarts Point Rancheria  
with language materials.

Silva, 74, of Santa Rosa still collects acorns each fall to make  
traditional bread and fries seaweed, just as she learned as a child on  
remote Stewarts Point. She feels some urgency in teaching Indians who  
want to regain a sense of their culture.

"Every generation will lose something. I taught my kids, 'Know who you  
are.' But if we don't work with people like Tim, we are going to lose  
it entirely," said Silva, a short, soft woman full of sassy laughter.

E-mail Vanessa Hua at vahua at sfchronicle.com.

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