ELL: Language policies in USSR & North America

[Henry Kammler]

Dear ELLers,

I would call for a less ahistoric view on these issues. Language policies
in the Soviet Far East and in North America evolved over time:
administrations changed, ideologies changed, paradigms changed. Said
policies in the end persued assimilatory and paternalistic goals but the
measures that were taken to achieve them differed regionally and in time.

USSR: After the Stalin era, when the alleged "class enemies" among the
northern peoples ("shamen", other traditional authorities) had after severe
repression "diappeared", the northern languages were reintroduced into
primary schooling. In Leningrade there was a teachers' school where
minority language teachers received training. Cyrillic alphabets were
developed for all the languages and indigenous writers using their native
tongues were officially promoted, as long as they stuck to the rigid system
of censorship and following the predescribed current of "socialist realism"
- so that each of the Northern peoples had at least one "national
writer/poet"(probably the best known among these is the Chukchee Andrej
Ritchëu). The large distances and the semi-sedentary lifeways of the
reindeer herders were used as an excuse for the rigid and inhumane boarding
school system (likewise in Canada). From the late 1950s on the situation
was one of marked hipocrisy: on the one hand promotion of folkloristic
artists and writers, on the other hand the colonialistic attitudes of
school teachers, supervisors and CP functionaries.

Canada: In an anti-constitutional setting "Indian residential schools" were
run by the churches (thus mingling church and state affairs). In the early
20th century many missionaries still made efforts to learn their "wards'"
languages. After 1920 everything changed when Indian schooling became
compulsory, the buildings were crammed with pupils, underfinanced (most of
the former students recall to have worked all the time and to have received
next to no schooling) and run in a military style (only after 1948 it
became a requirement for the personnel and "teachers" to have a pedagogical
training!). Anything native, especially the language, was prohibited. (At
that time BTW, Indians were not allowed to use the same decks on BC ferries
or to use the same entrances in cinemas.) In the 1960s the system gradually
opened and the pupils were sent to public schools while staying in the
boarding facilities, not with their families. (A new form of alienating
native children from their communities then was to forcibly adopt them away
into non-native families.) In the 1970s the system was phased out, some of
the schools taken over by the bands. Only then it was possible to
re-introduce native languages into the schools, mostly with very little
support from governmental institutions. When in the late 80s the
governments slowly began to take an interest in promoting language
revitalization programs it was too late for most of the languages. Written
literature in native languages -- apart from texts taken down by linguists
and school primers -- seemingly only exists in Inuktitut and Cree/Ojibwa.
Literacy in the native language might be encountered elsewhere, like among
the Mohawk of Kahnawake but I'm not sure.

In the US it was essentially the same but all developments one or two
decades earlier (first boarding schools in the 1870s, first native-run
schools in the 1960s, first government aids for language preservation in
the 1970s). Native language literacy beyond academic texts and schoolbooks
exists among the Navaho, Cherokee and probably Lakota, as far as I know.

Thanks for your attention
Henry

----
Endangered-Languages-L Forum: endangered-languages-l at cleo.murdoch.edu.au
Web pages http://cleo.murdoch.edu.au/lists/endangered-languages-l/
Subscribe/unsubscribe and other commands: majordomo at cleo.murdoch.edu.au
----