Native Americans work to revitalize California=?UTF-8?Q?=E2=80=99s_?=i ndigenous languages (fwd link)

[Phillip E Cash Cash]

Native Americans work to revitalize California’s indigenous languages
By: Casey Capachi <http://oaklandnorth.net/author/casey-capachi/> | July
23, 2012 – 8:46 am
US

California was once home to over 300 Native American dialects and as many
as 90 languages, making it the most linguistically diverse state in the US.
Today, only about half of those languages are still with us, according to
the Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival, or AICLS.

“Many of the California tribes were really negatively impacted with the
Gold Rush and tribes were devastated and a lot of the languages have been
lost,” said Janeen Antoine, who teaches a language class at the Intertribal
Friendship House in Oakland. She teaches Lakota, which is spoken in South
Dakota where she is from. “There’s a very strong effort within the
California peoples to revive their languages.”

L. Frank Manriquez was a part of the California language revitalization
movement, which began about 20 years ago, after many people noticed
languages were disappearing with the eldest generation of fluent
speakers. “We’ve been studied enough, now we have to learn,” said Manriquez
who belongs to several Southern California tribes. “Sure there are
scientists who are going to go deeper and deeper and find that vowel for
us, but there’s enough out there for us natives to actually make language
from.”

For over two decades, Manriquez has been visiting the archives at the
Phoebe A. Heart Museum of Anthropology, which holds the largest collection
of California Native American artifacts in the world, matching artifacts
with language. She says it is common for many to become overwhelmed by the
loss that these archives signify, but for her, she feels inspired to find
each artifact’s meaning in her ancestors’ culture. She says she will look
to neighboring tribes’ language if it something is no longer available in
her own.

“It’s the most concrete tie to language that there is — these things, all
of these pieces. Artifacts, they hold the language just as if they were a
person holding the language,” said Manriquez. “It’s up to me then to work
hard and get that language out of them.”

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http://oaklandnorth.net/2012/07/23/native-americans-work-to-revitalize-californias-indigenous-languages/
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