Language restoration a top priority at Mashantucket conference (fwd)

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Language restoration a top priority at Mashantucket conference 
© Indian Country Today April 05, 2006. 
All Rights Reserved Posted: April 05, 2006 
by: Gale Courey Toensing / Indian Country Today 
http://www.indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=1096412778
MASHANTUCKET, Conn. - Buffy Sainte-Marie, an entertainment icon both within and
outside Indian country, expressed the overarching theme of the recent
Mashantucket language conference - that language is not a part of a people's
culture; it is a people's culture.
Sainte-Marie, who was born at Piapot (Cree) Reserve in Saskatchewan and raised
in Maine and Massachusetts, was the keynote speaker on the second day of the
conference, which took place Feb. 22 - 24 at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and
Research Center. ''The Mashantucket Language Conference: Preservation and
Reclamation of Indigenous Languages'' was the third biennial event exploring
the academic and cultural uses of aboriginal languages.
More than 150 people from all over the United States and Canada attended the
conference where 30 presenters, including linguists, artists, students,
musicians, poets and storytellers, described their wide-ranging scholarly
research, language restoration projects, pedagogy and art.
Sainte-Marie spoke for more than an hour and a half to a captivated audience
about her work in language education, sometimes gliding across the auditorium
floor or punctuating a point by stamping her foot.
''Language and culture cannot be separated. Language is vital to understanding
our unique cultural perspectives. Language is a tool that is used to explore
and experience our cultures and the perspectives that are embedded in our
cultures,'' Sainte-Marie said.
Famous as an Academy Award-winning singer/songwriter, Sainte-Marie has a
teaching degree, a degree in oriental philosophy and a doctorate in fine arts
from the University of Massachusetts. In 1968, she founded the Nihewan
Foundation for American Indian Education and helped develop the Cradleboard
Teaching Project, an ever-evolving interactive multimedia CD-ROM teaching tool
that presents curricula, including aboriginal language, in culturally
meaningful ways for Indian children.
This new way of learning gets rid of the old stereotypes of ''dead text about
dead Indians,'' Sainte-Marie said.
''What we're looking for is effectiveness in revitalizing our languages, in
saving the cultures of our communities, and in building the self-esteem of
people in those communities and passing into the future generation the
yet-evolving wisdom and skills of Native American cultures,'' said
Sainte-Marie.
Toward the end of her presentation, an audience member asked for a song, and
Sainte-Marie obliged.
Using her microphone as a drum, she sang ''Relocation Blues,'' a plangent song
about the former government practice both in the United States and Canada of
removing children from their homes and placing them in boarding schools where
they were forbidden to speak their native languages.
Among the other presenters that day was Drew Haden Taylor, an award-winning
playwright, author, filmmaker and humorist who recently published his 17th
book, ''Me Funny,'' about Native humor. Hayden Taylor described himself as
half-Ojibway and half-Caucasian.
''That makes me an 'occasion' - either a special occasion or, at the very
least, a memorable occasion,'' Hayden Taylor said, cracking up the audience.
Hayden Taylor grew up on the Curve Lake Reserve in Ontario, where he would fall
asleep to the sound of family members talking and laughing under a tree in the
yard. Starting out as a writer, he noticed that most of the work by Native
writers was ''dark, angry, depressing, bleak and sad; and I began to think, is
this the kind of writing I have to do?''
Humor, he realized, was the ''shield and sense of sanity'' that allowed Native
people to survive 500 years of oppression.
''I wanted to explore the Native funny bone,'' Hayden Taylor said. Native
people like to tease a lot and Native humor is often self-deprecatory, he said,
but it doesn't reinvent the wheel. What makes Native people laugh also makes
non-Native people laugh, Hayden Taylor said.
Klewetua, aka Rodney Sayers, gave a presentation called ''Water Was Our
Highway,'' reflecting the rivers and ocean-based landscape of Ahswinnis, an
area now known as Port Alberni, British Columbia, where the Hupacasath First
Nation artist lives and works.
Sayers is a ''student of language'' who inherited his tribe's language program
by default - no one else applied for the job, he said. In addition to his work
in the language revitalization project, Sayers is a river guide with his
tribe's tours; and both the language and river work shape his production as an
artist, he said.
A PowerPoint presentation showed, among other things, an image of mountain
range that marked the easternmost boundary of the tribe's territory. The
mountain range is called ''Jagged Peaks Pointing Upwards,'' Sayers said.
''We have restored as many place-names of our territories as possible, and we
don't name places or things after living people or people at all because when
you move on you don't want things attached to you in this world,'' he
explained.
Many of the tribes' elders - who were fluent speakers and, therefore,
culture-keepers - have passed on, which makes the work difficult, Sayers said.
The language, called the Nuu Chah Nulth Barkely dialect, originated around the
activities of the tribe's ancestors, many of which centered on fishing and
river activities.
''A lot of those activities are gone or have few participants so the language
has become obscure and hard to apply to everyday life and difficult to
translate into English for learning purposes,'' Sayers said.
The language project has compiled a phonetic alphabet with some icons not
present in the English language and is about to publish its third language
book.
''Really, what we need to do is get people talking our language in our homes.
My mother was a fluent speaker with a huge amount of knowledge of our history,
but she never taught me. She went to residential schools as a child, so I'm not
sure if they took the spirit out of her, but she's gone now and I'll never
know,'' Sayers said.
'''The Water Was Our Highway' is the name of my presentation, but we've got to
get rid of the past tense. The water is our highway and it's the way we're
going to travel and it's a matter of understanding our language and applying
it, rather than just thinking of it as a thing that we have to achieve,''
Sayers said.
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