[lg policy] Oregon: Tribe Revives Language on Verge of Extinction

Mon Aug 6 18:37:46 UTC 2012

Tribe Revives Language on Verge of Extinction
 Thomas Patterson for The New York Times

Bud Lane, a tribe member, has worked on the online Siletz Dee-ni Talking
Dictionary for nearly seven years. Stabilization of the language is the
goal now, but he hopes to create a pool of speakers so it will not go away.
 By KIRK JOHNSON<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/j/kirk_johnson/index.html>
Published:
August 3, 2012

SILETZ, Ore. — Local native languages teeter on the brink of oblivion all
over the world as the big linguistic sweepstakes winners like English,
Spanish or Mandarin ride a surging wave of global communications.
   Multimedia
 Sounds of Siletz

Bud Lane, one of the last Siletz speakers, recites several words and
explains their literal translations.

   - Eagle
   - play
      -
      - stop
      - mute
      -
      - max volume
   0:00
   - Otter
   - Table
   - Mountain and Stars
   - Waterfall

  [image: National Twitter Logo.] <https://twitter.com/#%21/nytnational>

  Enlarge This Image
   Thomas Patterson for The New York Times

The graveyard near the Siletz reservation tribal offices in western Oregon.
“Ahnkuttie tillikum” translated means “ancestor.”
  Enlarge This Image
   Thomas Patterson for The New York Times

Teepees on the reservation.

But the forces that are helping to flatten the landscape are also creating
new ways to save its hidden, cloistered corners, as in the unlikely
survival of Siletz Dee-ni. An American Indian language with only about five
speakers left — once dominant in this part of the West, then relegated to
near extinction — has, since earlier this year, been shouting back to the
world: Hey, we’re talking. (In Siletz that would be naa-ch’aa-ghit-’a.)

“We don’t know where it’s going to go,” said Bud Lane, a tribe member who
has been working on the online Siletz Dee-ni Talking
Dictionary<http://siletz.swarthmore.edu/?q=talking&fields=all&semantic_ids=>for
nearly seven years, and recorded almost all of its 10,000-odd audio
entries himself. In its first years the dictionary was password protected,
intended for tribe members.

Since February, however, when organizers began to publicize its existence,
Web hits have spiked from places where languages related to Siletz are
spoken, a broad area of the West on through Canada and into Alaska. That is
the heartland of the Athabascan family of languages, which also includes
Navajo. And there has been a flurry of interest from Web users in Italy,
Switzerland and Poland, where the dark, rainy woods of the Pacific
Northwest, at least in terms of language connections, might as well be the
moon.

“They told us our language was moribund and heading off a cliff,” said Mr.
Lane, 54, sitting in a storage room full of tribal basketry and other
artifacts here on the reservation, about three hours southwest of Portland,
Ore. He said he has no fantasies that Siletz will conquer the world, or
even the tribe. Stabilization for now is the goal, he said, “creating a
pool of speakers large enough that it won’t go away.”

But in the hurly-burly of modern communications, keeping a language alive
goes far beyond a simple count of how many people can conjugate its verbs.
Think Jen Johnson’s keypad thumbs. A graduate student in linguistics at
Georgetown University, Ms. Johnson, 21, stumbled onto Siletz while studying
linguistics at Swarthmore College, which has helped the tribe build its
dictionary. She fell in love with its cadences, and now texts in Siletz,
her fourth language of study, with a tribe member in Oregon.

Language experts who helped create the dictionary say the distinctiveness
of Siletz Dee-ni (pronounced SiLETZ day-KNEE), or Coastal Athabascan as it
is also called, comes in part from the unique way the language managed to
survive.

Most other language preservation projects have a base, however small, of
people who speak the language. The Ojibwe People’s
Dictionary<http://ojibwe.lib.umn.edu/>,
for example, which went online this year, focuses on one of the most widely
spoken native languages in Canada and the Upper Midwest.

The 12 other dictionaries financed in recent years by the Living Tongues
Institute <http://www.livingtongues.org/>, a nonprofit group, in
partnership with the National Geographic Society — which helped start the
Siletz dictionary project in 2005 and now uses it as a blueprint — are all
centered on languages still in use, however small or threatened their
populations of speakers may be. Matukar Panau, for instance, an Oceanic
language of Papua New Guinea, has about 600 speakers remaining, in two
small villages.

Siletz, by contrast, had become, by the time of the dictionary, almost an
artifact — preserved in song for certain native dances, but without a
single person living who had grown up with it as a first language.

There were people who had listened to the elders, like Mr. Lane, and there
were old recordings, made by anthropologists who came through the West in
the 1930s and 1960s, but not much else. Mr. Lane wants to incorporate some
of those scratchy recordings into future versions of the dictionary.

What can also bridge an ancient language’s roots to younger tribe members,
some new Siletz learners said, is that it can sound pretty cool.

“There are a couple of sounds that are nowhere in the English language,
like you’re going to spit, almost — kids seem much more open to that,” said
Sonya Moody-Jurado, who grew up hearing a few words from her mother — like
nose (mish), and dog (lin-ch’e’) — and has been attending with a grandson
Siletz classes taught by Mr. Lane.

“They’re trailblazers, showing the way for small languages to cross the
digital divide,” said K. David Harrison, an associate professor of
linguistics at Swarthmore who worked with the Siletz tribe and the other
partners to build the dictionary. Professor Harrison said he went to
Colombia recently, talking to indigenous tribes about preserving their
languages, but when the laptops opened up, the Siletz dictionary, with its
impressive size and search capabilities, was the focus. “It’s become a
model of how you do it,” he said.

When settlers were streaming west in the 1850s on the Oregon Trail and
displacing American Indians from desirable farmland, government Indian
policy created artificial conglomerates of tribes, jamming them into one
place even though the groups spoke different languages and in many
instances had little in common.

The Siletz people were among the largest bands that ended up here on this
spit of land jutting into the Pacific Ocean. By dint of their numbers,
their language prevailed over other tribes, and their dances, sung in
Siletz, became adopted by other tribes as their cultures faded.

“We’re the last standing,” Mr. Lane said.

But the threat of oblivion was constant. In the 1950s, the tiny tribe was
declared dead by the United States — a “termination” from the rolls, in the
jargon of the time. The Siletz clawed back — clinging to former reservation
lands and cultural anchors in songs and dances — and two decades later, in
the mid-1970s, became only the second tribe in the nation to go from
nonexistence to federally recognized status. The Confederated Tribes of
Siletz Indians <http://ctsi.nsn.us/> now have about 4,900 enrolled members
and a profitable casino in the nearby resort town of Lincoln City.

School was also once the enemy of tribal languages. Government boarding
schools, where generations of Indian children were sent, aimed to stamp out
native ways and tongues. Now, the language is taught through the sixth
grade at the public charter
school<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/c/charter_schools/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>in
Siletz, and the tribe aims to have a teaching program in place in the
next few years to meet Oregon’s high school language requirements, allowing
Siletz, in a place it originated, to be taught as a foreign language.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/04/us/siletz-language-with-few-voices-finds-modern-way-to-survive.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha23_20120804

-- 
=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+

 Harold F. Schiffman

Professor Emeritus of
 Dravidian Linguistics and Culture
Dept. of South Asia Studies
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305

Phone:  (215) 898-7475
Fax:  (215) 573-2138

Email:  haroldfs at gmail.com
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/

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