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<div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Arial" size="5" color="#494949" style="font: 16.0px Arial; color: #494949"><b>Rescuing Languages From Extinction</b></font><font face="Verdana" size="3" color="#333333" style="font: 12.0px Verdana; color: #333333"> </font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Verdana" size="4" color="#494949" style="font: 14.0px Verdana; color: #494949"><b><i>The Experience of the Hoopa Valley, Karuk, and Yurok Tribes</i></b></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Verdana" size="3" color="#333333" style="font: 12.0px Verdana; color: #333333">By Daniel Newberry</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Verdana; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); min-height: 15px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Verdana" size="3" color="#333333" style="font: 12.0px Verdana; color: #333333">Nine teenagers file in to Kay Inong’s seventh period class at Hoopa Valley High School to learn a subject not available at any other school in the world: Advanced Yurok language. In the next building, Danny Ammon teaches the Hupa* language and Phil Albers teaches Karuk. This school is the center of a renaissance in the preservation and restoration of the native languages of these three Northern California Klamath basin tribes. Less than a dozen native speakers in each of the tribes are still alive, some live several hours away from their homeland, and all are elderly. Though students and teachers alike feel a sense of cultural pride in their native language studies, in the background they hear a clock ticking.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Verdana; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); min-height: 15px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Verdana" size="3" color="#333333" style="font: 12.0px Verdana; color: #333333"><b>Language Loss</b></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Verdana; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); min-height: 15px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Verdana" size="3" color="#333333" style="font: 12.0px Verdana; color: #333333">According to a National Geographic report released last September, more than half of the estimated 7,000 languages spoken in the world today will likely be extinct by the year 2100, and languages are dying at the rate of one every two weeks. The Pacific Northwest, Oklahoma, the Amazon Basin, Siberia, and Australia were identified in that report as global hotspots of language extinction. Many languages die as the speakers die off. Other languages die as their words are replaced in the minds of their speakers with the language of a more dominant culture—like English or Portuguese or Russian.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Verdana; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); min-height: 15px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Verdana" size="3" color="#333333" style="font: 12.0px Verdana; color: #333333">In the United States, the federal government’s policy of forced assimilation in the first half of the twentieth century had a particularly devastating effect on the continuity of native languages. Children were forcibly separated from their families and sent to boarding schools where they were punished for speaking their own languages.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Verdana; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); min-height: 15px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Verdana" size="3" color="#333333" style="font: 12.0px Verdana; color: #333333">Many Hupa children were sent to a boarding school in Riverside, California, even though a similar institution operated on their own reservation. This arrangement was made apparently to prevent the children from staying in contact with their families. Verdena Parker, the most fluent of the remaining Hupa native speakers, was one of the exceptions. She went to the Hoopa Valley boarding school beginning at age six and was able to maintain regular contact with her family. At seventy-one years old, she is today the youngest of the native Hupa speakers. She credits this to being raised by her grandmother, who spoke only Hupa to her.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Verdana; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); min-height: 15px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Verdana" size="3" color="#333333" style="font: 12.0px Verdana; color: #333333">“When I went to the boarding school,” Parker said, “I didn’t know any English, so I just sat there and said nothing. The other kids and the teachers treated me like I was stupid, but I just didn’t understand them.” Even today, the pain and humiliation associated with speaking their native languages at boarding school inhibits some of the remaining native Karuk, Yurok, and Hupa speakers from passing on their languages to future generations.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Verdana; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); min-height: 15px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Verdana" size="3" color="#333333" style="font: 12.0px Verdana; color: #333333">Parker managed to survive that pain, and as an adult she continued to speak Hupa on a daily basis with her mother until the older woman died ten years ago. Today Parker regularly hosts University of California at Berkeley graduate students in her home near Roseburg, Oregon, where she records her native language and teaches the linguists the elements of Hupa grammar. She has also taken a young Hupa man under her wing as an apprentice.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Verdana; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); min-height: 15px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Verdana" size="3" color="#333333" style="font: 12.0px Verdana; color: #333333"><b>Origins of the Klamath Languages</b></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Verdana; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); min-height: 15px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Verdana" size="3" color="#333333" style="font: 12.0px Verdana; color: #333333">Historically, the population centers for the three tribes lay within sixty miles of each other, yet the languages are as different as English is from Russian. The Yurok language is part of the Algonquin family, one that includes languages spoken by many Midwestern and Northeastern tribes. Algonquin languages were spoken by the Wampanoag and Powhatan people, the first tribes encountered by seventeenth century European settlers in Plymouth and Jamestown.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Verdana; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); min-height: 15px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Verdana" size="3" color="#333333" style="font: 12.0px Verdana; color: #333333">The current theory as to the widespread locations of Algonquin languages, according to Andrew Garrett, linguistics professor at University of California at Berkeley, is that several thousand years ago, an Algonquin-speaking tribe that lived in the upper Snake and/or Columbia River basins split. Some went east, and others migrated west. Garrett, who has studied the Yurok language since 2000, has been compiling a comprehensive dictionary of the Yurok language and organizing and enhancing a collection of recordings of native speakers.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Verdana; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); min-height: 15px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Verdana" size="3" color="#333333" style="font: 12.0px Verdana; color: #333333">The Hupa language, by contrast, is a member of the Athabascan language family, which includes Navaho and Apache. Because the languages of many tribes in southern Oregon, British Columbia, the Yukon, and coastal Alaska are also Athabascan, Garrett believes the Hupa tribe likely arrived at its current location via a coastal route.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Verdana; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); min-height: 15px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Verdana" size="3" color="#333333" style="font: 12.0px Verdana; color: #333333">The origins of the Karuk language and tribe are the least understood of these three California Klamath tribes. Karuk is a member of the Hokan family, and does not have much in common with other languages in that family. According to Garrett, the Karuk language is one of the oldest languages in California, and is probably 5,000 years old or more in its current form.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Verdana; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); min-height: 15px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Verdana" size="3" color="#333333" style="font: 12.0px Verdana; color: #333333">What is unique about these three Klamath Basin cultures, and is well-known among linguists, said Garrett, is that while the three languages are different, the cultures share a tremendous number of similarities. Many tribal legends have the same plot, and many of the cultural and religious ceremonies are similar. It is as if the culture arose from the land, while the language arose from the people.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Verdana; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); min-height: 15px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Verdana" size="3" color="#333333" style="font: 12.0px Verdana; color: #333333">“If you had asked me five years ago if I thought the Yurok language would survive,” said Garrett, “I probably would have said no. Most languages [with so few native speakers] rarely survive. It all comes down to the efforts of a few dedicated individuals. Like Carol Lewis.”</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Verdana; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); min-height: 15px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Verdana" size="3" color="#333333" style="font: 12.0px Verdana; color: #333333"><b>Finding Voices</b></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Verdana; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); min-height: 15px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Verdana" size="3" color="#333333" style="font: 12.0px Verdana; color: #333333">Carol Lewis has the energy of three people, and most of her energy is directed toward her work as Education Director for the Yurok Tribe. It’s hard not to get excited just listening to her talk. “When we started the Tribal Language Program eleven years ago,” Lewis said, “the language was at the lowest of the six Stages of Language Health: obsolescence. Our goal is to get to stage one: thriving and flourishing.”</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Verdana; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); min-height: 15px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Verdana" size="3" color="#333333" style="font: 12.0px Verdana; color: #333333">Lewis grew up hearing Yurok spoken at home, especially by her grandmother, mother, and aunt. After her grandmother died, her family circle stopped speaking Yurok. So when the tribe received a grant eleven years ago to construct a long-range language restoration plan, Lewis jumped at the chance to work as program coordinator. Since then she has served the Tribal Language Program in a number of capacities, including K-3 classroom teacher.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Verdana; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); min-height: 15px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Verdana" size="3" color="#333333" style="font: 12.0px Verdana; color: #333333">In addition to public school offerings, Yurok language instruction is available to preschoolers in a Head Start program, and to adults in community education programs in five locations from Eureka to Crescent City. College credit will soon be available in the Yurok language at Humboldt State University. In cooperation with UC Berkeley, the tribe maintains an interactive language website, which includes a dictionary with more than 6,000 entries, and an online searchable database of recordings by native speakers. And to simulate an immersion environment, “We even held a three week institute for teachers last summer to help improve both language and teaching skills,” she added.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Verdana; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); min-height: 15px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Verdana" size="3" color="#333333" style="font: 12.0px Verdana; color: #333333">Interest in reviving the Hupa language began about the same time, though independently of the Yurok programs. Jimmy Jackson and Calvin Carpenter, two native speakers in their eighties, began teaching Hupa language classes to adults and recording conversations for posterity. Salish Jackson, Jimmy’s grandson, then in his twenties, began learning the language from the elders, and eventually joined them in teaching others. A fast learner, he continued to teach after the two elders passed on. Salish, a young man with a big smile who dresses meticulously, is today the curator of the Hupa tribal museum. He works the Hupa language into many of the museum’s exhibits.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Verdana; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); min-height: 15px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Verdana" size="3" color="#333333" style="font: 12.0px Verdana; color: #333333">“You can harm students if you try to teach before you’re fluent,” said Jackson. To increase his language skills, he is currently apprenticing with native speaker Verdena Parker. He still teaches occasionally in the adult language program, but that program leader today is native speaker Billy Carpenter, younger brother of program co-founder Calvin Carpenter.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Verdana; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); min-height: 15px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Verdana" size="3" color="#333333" style="font: 12.0px Verdana; color: #333333">On Wednesday nights, Billy Carpenter sets up shop for whoever shows up in a spacious, low-ceilinged room in a prefab building on the Hoopa Valley reservation. In his day job he’s the Sergeant-At-Arms for the Tribal Council. He’s as comfortable telling traditional stories to his students as he is writing on the white board that hangs beneath the double row of the forty-two letters of the Hupa phonetic alphabet.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Verdana; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); min-height: 15px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Verdana" size="3" color="#333333" style="font: 12.0px Verdana; color: #333333">Dressed completely in dark blue, including a baseball cap with a white star, Carpenter makes ample use of humor as a teaching technique. When asked about the main differences between English and Hupa, he explained that in Hupa, nouns are derived from the behavior or quality of the thing it names. For example, he says, “The word for Arcata means ‘flat land.’ The word for Eureka means ‘where land floats around.’ Red is ‘looks like blood’ and coyote is ‘he’s out in the open.’” Then a big grin spreads across his face. “The word for fox means ‘he leaves his soft poop everywhere.‘“ He begins to laugh. “Once a white guy came here and asked us to give him an Indian name, he wanted an animal in the name. We said, ‘we’ll call you running fox.’ He never knew what it really meant.”</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Verdana; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); min-height: 15px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Verdana" size="3" color="#333333" style="font: 12.0px Verdana; color: #333333">The Karuk tribe’s 3,000+ members are more spread out geographically than that of the Yurok or Hupa people, who have a defined reservation, so the Karuks have enlisted modern technology to teach their native language. Last summer they inaugurated a pilot online language program in response to a deluge of requests for distance language learning by tribal members, according to Susan Gehr, Karuk Language Program Director. The twenty-five person limit filled early, and twelve people had to be placed on the waiting list. The course will be offered again in January. The online course includes listening to recordings of native speakers, matching pictures with vocabulary words, answering questions, and quizzes.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Verdana; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); min-height: 15px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Verdana" size="3" color="#333333" style="font: 12.0px Verdana; color: #333333">The Karuk tribal language program took shape in 1998, when it first received funding to hire a program coordinator. Before that language classes were taught on a volunteer basis for about six years. The tribe has since published a language dictionary, recorded native speakers, and has coordinated fifteen Master/Apprentice teams. This statewide program is funded by the state of California. The state pays a native speaker to spend time teaching the language to an apprentice, to reduce the financial hardship that comes with such a significant time commitment. It is intended as an immersion program, where the participants are expected to speak to each other only in the indigenous language for at least twenty hours per week. Gehr herself spent three years as an apprentice in this program.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Verdana; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); min-height: 15px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Verdana" size="3" color="#333333" style="font: 12.0px Verdana; color: #333333">As the adult education classes in all three tribes gained in popularity, demand grew for a program in the public school system. Sarah Supahan was hired as the Indian Education and Native Language director for the Klamath-Trinity Joint Unified School District. Though not a tribal member herself, her former husband and their two daughters are Karuk. She and her ex-husband taught their children basic Karuk from a young age.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Verdana; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); min-height: 15px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Verdana" size="3" color="#333333" style="font: 12.0px Verdana; color: #333333">District-wide, Supahan said, sixty-five high school students are today enrolled in classes for the three native languages, and four of the five elementary schools offer one or more native languages. The program has three goals:</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Verdana; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); min-height: 15px; "><br></div> <ul> <li style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><font face="Verdana" size="3" color="#333333" style="font: 12.0px Verdana; color: #333333">To learn and/or use Best Practices in language instruction.</font></li> </ul><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Verdana; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); min-height: 15px; "><br></div> <ul> <li style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><font face="Verdana" size="3" color="#333333" style="font: 12.0px Verdana; color: #333333">To assist students to progress beyond their instructor’s own language abilities.</font></li> </ul><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Verdana; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); min-height: 15px; "><br></div> <ul> <li style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><font face="Verdana" size="3" color="#333333" style="font: 12.0px Verdana; color: #333333">To assist in creating a process that enables Native Language teachers to obtain certification by the State of California.</font></li> </ul><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Verdana; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); min-height: 15px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Verdana" size="3" color="#333333" style="font: 12.0px Verdana; color: #333333">The State of California has been reluctant to certify native language teachers who are not already certified in a standard subject. Supahan has been advocating in Sacramento to allow tribes to certify their own teachers, a practice already adopted by many other states, including Oregon, Washington, and Montana.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Verdana; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); min-height: 15px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Verdana" size="3" color="#333333" style="font: 12.0px Verdana; color: #333333">In the elementary schools, students begin with simple games and songs, explained Jackie Martins, Hupa language teacher. Martins engages her students with Hupa Bingo, a game where the squares in the bingo cards are depictions of animals and other objects drawn by the students. The teacher calls out vocabulary words and the students race to win the bingo game. She has developed themed games, including animal bingo and weather bingo. Martins’ next project is to create a series of picture flash cards.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Verdana; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); min-height: 15px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Verdana" size="3" color="#333333" style="font: 12.0px Verdana; color: #333333">As the high school students unzip their backpacks and settle in to their desks, teacher Kay Inong begins belting out short Yurok phrases like a drill sergeant, but with a big smile on her face. The students answer her slowly, almost apologetically at first. After they’re warmed up, the phrases get longer. Kay begins most of her sentences with “Koo-sa‘-hey-ga-lem…“ This means “How do you say…”</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Verdana; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); min-height: 15px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Verdana" size="3" color="#333333" style="font: 12.0px Verdana; color: #333333">“Merk, Koo-sa‘-hey-ga-lem,” she asks, ”I will build a fire tonight because I am cold.“ Merk, the student to whom she directs the question, knits his brow, then the syllables tumble out of his mouth. He pauses halfway through and then finishes with a smile: Kuh-tee‘-ya-haw-up-at-wake-who-ah-nas-cha-wen‘ ah-ku-me-pee-kay-por-reg‘-esh. Kay claps her hands and whoops, and a classmate yells “Good job, Merk.” As the most advanced student in the class, he is often called upon to answer the hard questions, and the others learn from him.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Verdana; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); min-height: 15px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Verdana" size="3" color="#333333" style="font: 12.0px Verdana; color: #333333">Unlike many teenagers, the students in this class are all engaged and excited to be here. Several students in this school take two, and even all three, of the native languages offered at Hoopa Valley High School. Because of intermarriages in their families, many students have two or three of the tribes in their family trees and view their language studies as a source of cultural pride. The native language “is all my ancestors spoke,” a student answered in a January, 2005 survey about the language program, “I couldn’t communicate with them if I wanted to.” For another student, the class was “my gateway to the past.” For another, “I get little clues within the words to how the Hupa people lived their lives everyday.”</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Verdana; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); min-height: 15px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Verdana" size="3" color="#333333" style="font: 12.0px Verdana; color: #333333">Like the Yurok high school classes, the Hupa language is offered both at beginning and advanced levels. Danny Ammon teaches the Hupa language. A quiet, thoughtful teacher, he moves around his classroom with a casual confidence based on eighteen years of studying the language. He begins his classes with translations, and manages to fit a game into each class to make sure the students enjoy themselves—games like bingo and spin-the-bottle. His version of this age-old adolescent game has a different twist: whoever the bottle points to must answer the next question in the Hupa language.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Verdana; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); min-height: 15px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Verdana" size="3" color="#333333" style="font: 12.0px Verdana; color: #333333">Ammon apprenticed for three years with the late native speaker Calvin Carpenter in the state-funded Master/ Apprentice program. During those three years, Ammon ate his meals with his teacher and they spent many hours just hanging out and speaking Hupa. Carpenter often attended Ammon’s high school classes and helped teach the students.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Verdana; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); min-height: 15px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Verdana" size="3" color="#333333" style="font: 12.0px Verdana; color: #333333">Students learn the Karuk language from Phil Albers. With his short dark hair and trim muscular build, Albers could easily pass for a professional athlete. His goal is to provide students with language fundamentals, primarily conversation and vocabulary they can use in everyday life. For this reason, and because historically Karuk was not a written language, in Albers’ classes students learn speaking skills only, not reading or writing. He has received praise and criticism for this approach. All his exams are oral: he tests on both word/sentence recognition and on pronunciation.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Verdana; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); min-height: 15px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Verdana" size="3" color="#333333" style="font: 12.0px Verdana; color: #333333"><b>The Work of the Future</b></font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Verdana; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); min-height: 15px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Verdana" size="3" color="#333333" style="font: 12.0px Verdana; color: #333333">Like Hupa museum curator Salish Jackson, Phil Albers grew up with a native speaker for a grandfather. Albers’ grandfather is still alive, though because the elder lives more than one hundred miles away, they don’t see each other as much as they’d like. Albers got interested in learning and teaching Karuk as an undergraduate at Southern Oregon University. There he met his wife Elaina, also a Karuk tribal member. Elaina’s father and mother (school district language director Sarah Supahan) taught her from infancy what little Karuk they knew. Together the two college students supported each other in their language studies. They then began offering a beginning Karuk adult education class. “Elaina has a better vocabulary than I do, but my grammar skills are better,” Albers said. “We make a great team. Eight students came to our first weekly classes and we soon had to work hard just to stay ahead of our students.”</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Verdana; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); min-height: 15px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Verdana" size="3" color="#333333" style="font: 12.0px Verdana; color: #333333">Phil and Elaina have undertaken a new level of native language instruction that may be the only truly effective method of saving their tribe’s language. Since the birth of their four year-old son, they have spoken only Karuk to him in the home. The boy has now surpassed his parents in his Karuk language skills, and has become undoubtedly the first native Karuk speaker born in more than seventy years.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Verdana; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); min-height: 15px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Verdana" size="3" color="#333333" style="font: 12.0px Verdana; color: #333333">The child’s name is Machnátath, which means “little flash of light.” According to his father, he is named after a man from Karuk history who moved quickly, not so much physically as spiritually. Little Machnátath now has a two year-old brother. His parents hope that in a few years, the two boys will speak to each other in Karuk, enlarging their language support network. Until last year, the family lived next to Violet Super, one of the Tribe’s last native speakers, and their son had the opportunity to learn from her. For many years Super worked with linguists to pass on her knowledge of the Karuk language. Tragically, Super was killed a year ago in a house fire.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Verdana; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); min-height: 15px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Verdana" size="3" color="#333333" style="font: 12.0px Verdana; color: #333333">UC Berkeley Linguistics professor Andrew Garrett believes that the responsibility for continuing the native languages is not on the shoulders of the elders, regardless of their language abilities. “It’s the young adults who need to speak the language to their children, to provide a true immersion setting, said Garrett. “If the tribes can do this, they can succeed.” On this point, Garrett and the Albers family agree. But with so few native speakers remaining to teach the teachers, the schools and the tribal governments are racing against time.</font></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Verdana; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); min-height: 15px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Verdana" size="3" color="#333333" style="font: 12.0px Verdana; color: #333333">Fortunately, there is a growing enthusiasm, a hunger among tribal members to reconnect with their culture through language. Attendance is climbing in all native language classes. Many tribal members greet others in their native language, even if that is the only phrase they know. According to the old adage, “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” The experience of the Karuk, Hoopa Valley, and Yurok tribes, however, seems to be the reverse: when the teacher is ready, the students will appear. The biggest challenge now seems to be keeping up with demand, and that’s a challenge the tribes embrace.</font></div><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px"><font face="Verdana" size="3" color="#333333" style="font: 12.0px Verdana; color: #333333"> </font></p><p style="margin: 0.0px 0.0px 6.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px Verdana; color: #333333; min-height: 15.0px"><br></p><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><font face="Verdana" size="3" color="#333333" style="font: 12.0px Verdana; color: #333333">Daniel Newberry is a freelance writer who lives in the Applegate Valley. He may be reached at <a href="mailto:dnewberry@jeffnet.org"><font color="#3f126c" style="color: #3f126c">dnewberry@jeffnet.org</font></a>.</font></div> </body></html>