Keeping tribal languages alive (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

Keeping tribal languages alive

Saturday, July 28, 2007 10:02 PM PDT
By DOMINIKA MASLIKOWSKI
The Daily News
http://www.mohavedailynews.com/articles/2007/07/29/news/top_story/top1.txt

[photo inset - JEFF MANGUM/The Daily News LANGUAGE LESSON: Joe Scerato
teaches a class about the Mojave language in Needles.]

NEEDLES - In a small modular home surrounded by a dirt parking lot, Joe
Scerato works to preserve an endangered language spoken for centuries by
the Mojave Indians. His crowded office at Aha Macav Cultural Preservation
is filled with pottery wheels, beads and fabric used to sew ribbon dresses.
Currently, he's the department's director and its sole Mojave language
instructor.

When he was growing up, Scerato's foster parents spoke Mojave exclusively in
their home. It was all he heard on the reservation - the language was a part
of the tribe's culture, something that preserved their identity and made
them unique.

But now - over the course of Scerato's lifetime - Mojave has gone from a
familiar sound that was often heard to a dying language spoken mostly by a
few tribal elders. It's rarely taught to children. And as the years pass
and more elders die off, the language risks being wiped out completely.

“Now you can go to a person's house and you don't even hear one word, unless
it's an elder,” Scerato said. “Things became more accessible and there's
people moving away and coming back (who) are not being a part of the
language.”

Scerato estimates up to 60 members of the Fort Mojave Indian Tribe
understand Mojave fluently and about 20 percent of the Tribe speak it at
some level, but the fluent speakers don't always practice the language and
sometimes reply in English when they're addressed in Mojave.

“I would hope that some of the older people that understand it would start
speaking it because a lot of those people are grandparents,” Scerato said.
“We're getting further and further away from the language itself.”

The cultural preservation department offers three classes a day in basic
Mojave for children age 5-16 during its summer program. But although
language classes have been offered for the past five years, there are fewer
available now than before. Since instructor Betty Barrackman's recent death
there are no more evening classes and classroom space in the modular home
is limited.

In his language classes for children, Scerato has students working out of
coloring books with the Mojave word and its English translation written
below pictures of foods or animals. He listens to their pronunciation and,
once the students learn enough words, he uses their vocabulary to build
sentences. They take the copied booklets home to practice.

“We try to help them with some of the history of the tribe so when they go
somewhere they have a knowledge of their culture and the reservation so
they know who they are,” he said. “It's our identity.”

He says younger children grasp the language much faster, while teens or
adults are often embarrassed when they can't say a word. The biggest
challenge is the rolling Spanish R sound that's hard to pronounce for
someone who hasn't taken Spanish in school or grown up speaking Mojave.

Because the language is passed down orally and has no alphabet, Mojave words
are written phonetically using the English alphabet. Some words for items
the Mojave people didn't have, like apples, are based on how elders
pronounced the English word (appuleh), while others, like orange, are named
after how the fruit sounds when it's eaten (scho 'cow.)

It's not known how old the language is or how many words it contains,
Scerato said, because it once had three different dialects when the Mojave
Indians lived scattered along the Colorado River in the 1920s and '30s. The
dialects merged when the Mojave people began living in one concentrated area
on the reservation. Now, Scerato says he can go to Peach Springs, Yuma or
different rancheros in California, and the dialects are similar enough to
Mojave for him to understand.

A linguist once developed a dictionary of the language in the 1990s, but
Scerato said the book is questionable because some dialects have different
versions of the same word. But the dictionary does have merits, Scerato
said, because it lists words for things like wood chips or insect types
that were common in older times but have passed out of modern vocabulary.
It's reading the forgotten words of his ancestors that gives Scerato a
sense of the past and connection with history.

“You get almost a feel of what it was like,” he said.

Preserving the language hasn't been easy for the tribe. Other tribes like
the Hualapais, who live north of Kingman near the Grand Canyon National
Park, have preserved their language because they've had the advantage of
being isolated. There are no nearby towns and there's little need for
interaction with those outside the tribe. But the Mojave Indians live near
Bullhead City, Laughlin and in Needles. Scerato said their daily needs
don't center around tribal lands and the language is slowly disappearing.

“It's like we're losing a part of our history and our tradition,” he said.
“Once you lose the language, you're assimilated into the general
population. You don't have uniqueness anymore and you're speaking English
or Spanish like everybody else.”

Yet Scerato remains hopeful. He's encouraged by compliments he's received
from parents who send their children to his language classes. One said
their child carries his coloring book with Mojave words everywhere and
practices them all the time.

“(Parents) are glad their kids are coming,” he said. “They wish they had
those classes growing up because their parents didn't speak Mojave in their
home.”

KEEPING LANGUAGES ALIVE

Scerato isn't alone in his efforts to preserve an American Indian language -
he's joined by grass-roots organizations, university departments and
language institutes who also fight to keep indigenous languages alive and
protect cultural identity.

The Yuman Language Family Summit is an annual gathering that brings
representatives together from Colorado River Indian Tribes to discuss ways
of preserving their languages. There are discussions on programs that pair
Mojave children with tribal teachers and ways to create an environment for
language immersion.

“We have to have the language used every day and spoken so people can pick
it up,” said Lucille Watahomigie, summit participant and director of
education for the Hualapai Tribe. “It doesn't have to be taught. It can be
acquired just by being in the environment where the language is used.”

At the University of Arizona, the American Indian Language Development
Institute works to train language teachers on how to use immersion and
modern technology to encourage younger people to learn their language. This
year, the institute hopes to focus on grant-writing for indigenous
populations and skills in documenting languages for preservation.

The university and the Colorado River Indian Tribe have a collaborative
grant to document both Mojave and Chemehuevi, both considered extremely
endangered, and to train tribal members in linguistics, data collection and
archiving.

Susan Penfield, the principal investigator on the grant, says dying American
Indian languages are part of a larger world language crisis where by best
estimates the planet loses one language every two weeks.

And when a language is lost, she said, so are the warehouses of knowledge
that are carried in its expressions, words and phrases.

Linguists estimate there were once between 750 to 1,000 indigenous languages
spoken in what's now the United States, says Philip Klasky, professor of
American Indian Studies at San Francisco State University. Today, about 50
of those languages remain and 80 percent are no longer taught.

“We all, as human beings, interpret the world around us through language and
each language does this in a unique way. Losing even one language does not
just impact the speakers of that language but hurts all of us and destroys
- particularly in the case of native languages where there is no written
record - huge volumes of knowledge and systems of cognition,” Penfield
said. “Imagine how much information is included in a set of encyclopedias
and realize that every language holds at least 10 times that much
knowledge.”

Klasky said Native American languages are a rich library of information on
stewardship of the environment, animals and the medicinal purposes of
plants. They're also carriers of a tribe's identity that hold
untranslatable concepts and words with no equivalents in the English
language.

“When you lose a language you lose all this incredible knowledge,” Klasky
said. “Who knows how many medicines exist in these languages that we may
lose?”

Klasky has been working with the Mojave Indians for the past 17 years and
continues to aid the tribe in preserving their sacred songs, which he says
are essential in passing down language.

As director of the Storyscape Project, Klasky aims to protect ancestral
lands and preserve and revitalize endangered stories and songs.

In 2000, Klasky helped Llewellyn and Betty Barrackman, late elders of the
Fort Mojave Indian Tribe, to transfer reel-to-reel tapes made in the 1970s
to digital format. Now the stories, songs and languages of the tribe are
preserved in University of California archives at Berkeley and Davis.

A year later Klasky recorded Llewellyn Barrackman as he translated Mojave
creation songs into English.

The creation songs - a 525-song cycle - include practical maps used by the
Mojaves to cross the desert, stories of the death of God Mutavilya and
journeys of legendary figures. In the recordings, Barrackman first
describes the song in Mojave, sings it in proto-Mojave (a language older
than the spoken version) and then it is translated into English.

“You can make that comparison, you can see the roots of words and understand
the words being spoken,” Klasky said. “For many indigenous languages, where
there are fewer and fewer speakers left, these tapes are invaluable.”

THE NEXT GENERATION

Watahomigie says out of 2,000 Hualapai tribal members, about 60 percent
understand the Hualapai language and 30 percent speak it fluently. But
younger members hardly speak it anymore, and they're the ones Watahomigie
targets to keep the language alive.

The Hualapais, along with two other tribes who speak similar languages,
recently offered a five-day language camp in the Hualapai mountains
attended by nearly 80 children from beginners to fluent speakers.

There was no English spoken - or at least as little as possible - in an
attempt to immerse the students in the language and get them to pick it up
through listening to their elders and teachers.

“The language is a gift that was given to us. We feel that when you have a
gift you don't disrespect it and leave it laying around. You take care of
it,” Watahomigie said. “A lot of our youth who don't have their culture are
lost. They don't know who they are, they don't know their past or their
history or their lineage. We feel the most important aspect of a person is
their identity because when they have that they have the self-respect.”

The camp offers crafts in the afternoons and evening activities like pow
wows and traditional dances. Tribal elders stay in cabins while children
camp out in traditional tents.

There are daily language lessons before lunch and talking circles where each
person says what they're thankful for. In the mornings, the children are
woken up before dawn and follow their elders along dirt trails to greet the
sunrise from the mountain tops.

“(Our tribal council is) looking for healing, looking for ways to combat our
drugs and alcoholism,” Watahomigie said. “This is one of the most important
things that they want us to preserve - the language and culture.”