Arguing In Dakotah

[Andre Cramblit]

Tribes work to preserve native language

PETER HARRIMAN Associated Press

Posted on Sun, Jul. 20, 2003
http://www.aberdeennews.com/mld/aberdeennews/news/6346339.htm

LAKE ANDES, S.D. - Thirteen tiny graduates in red and blue caps and gowns
gather around a large white screen in the 4-H building here.

The 4- and 5-year-old students in the Yankton Sioux Tribe's language
immersion class of 2003 watch a videotape of themselves, made several days
earlier. On the tape, the kids eagerly shout out answers to questions.

"How do you say gold?"

"Mazaskazi."

"How do you say red?"

"Ska."

"How do you say spotted?"

"Gleshka."

Here is either the future of the tribe's language or a futile dream.

South Dakota tribes have embarked on a quest to reverse the rapid decline
of the Lakota, Nakota and Dakota dialects of their native language. Before
World War II, these were the vernacular on most reservations, the languages
tribal members learned at home before they learned English.

But a survey conducted by Oglala Lakota College in 1993-94, the latest data
that's available, shows what has happened at Pine Ridge Indian Reservation
and, by extension, to all tribal languages in the state.

Among the survey findings:

_ 90 percent of people 70 and older still spoke Lakota.

_ 80 percent between ages 60-70 still spoke the language.

_ Overall, an estimated 40 percent of Oglalas could still speak it.

_ 1 percent of people younger than 18 could speak their native tongue.

_ The average age of speakers was 35.

The goal at Pine Ridge and elsewhere is to make tribal languages commonly
spoken. Tribes hope to preserve language as vital instruments for conveying
the nuances of Indians' concepts of themselves and their relation to the
world. It's a goal that must be met before a critical mass of speakers ages
and dies.

But there is no set path toward language salvation, and efforts in the
state use widely different approaches that are often underfunded and
controversial.

The Oglalas at Pine Ridge are being assisted by the Indiana University
American Indian Studies Research Institute, which is acting as a
linguistics technical consultant, says Will Meya, who runs IU's Lakota
Language program.

A native language is vital to preserving a unique world view, he says.

"It is hard to appreciate, if you are monolingual, that there really is a
way of thinking, articulating and conceiving of ideas that is inherent in
another way of speaking," he says.

"Some linguists compare language to a biological species. Within the
grammar and vocabulary is sort of a genetic code that has evolved for
thousands of years and is unique."

The fundamental Lakota idea that everything is interrelated is conveyed in
the syntax of the Lakota language. European thought assumes an individual
stands separate from the world and makes value judgments about it. This is
seen in basic English syntax: subject, verb, object, "Jane sees the dog."

In Lakota, the syntax is object, subject, verb, "The dog Jane sees." There
is no subtle implication the dog exists only because Jane sees it.

"We have got to look at life on this planet as inherently more valuable if
we have those ideas available to us," Meya says.

The first Lakota immersion program began in 1997 at Loneman School on Pine
Ridge. Meya's assertion that language is integral to culture resonates with
Leonard Little Finger, the school's Lakota studies director.

"One of the most important areas of language is the spiritual side," Little
Finger says. "Our elders say our tongue was given to us by our creator so
we can speak with our creator."

Tribal languages were under attack in South Dakota from the time tribes
were conquered in the 1880s and forced to submit to government assimilation
policies.

Isolation, though, served as an effective antidote. Reservations far
removed from the dominant society were reservoirs of native speakers.
Despite consistent pressures at boarding schools and elsewhere to turn
Indians into imitation whites, native languages survived well on South
Dakota's reservations until the past 50 years.

"Before 1954, the identity to be Lakota was very strong," Meya says.

That all began to change when Indians who entered the wider world to fight
World War II began returning home.

"Lakotas resisted language change and remained true to their culture much
longer than many other tribes," he says. "When so many of the young Lakota
males went off to war, it changed so profoundly. They saw the rest of the
world for the first time and also realized the vastness of what was up
against them, the dominant society.

"The cash economy started on Pine Ridge. That's when so many things came
back from the outside world."

Little Finger, 65, is from Pine Ridge. Like many of his peers, he learned
Lakota as a first language. He illustrates the profound difficulty in
bridging the gap between aging fluent speakers and the children who
proponents hope will carry on their tongue.

"In my life, I grew up where everyone spoke the language. It was just as
natural as could be. I didn't have to read a book to learn my words. I
heard it and spoke it," he says. "I look now, and those people are few and
far between. We can still carry on a conversation, but I carry them on
primarily with people my own age. It is rare I speak with youth. I try to
say words in Lakota, and they look at me with saucer eyes."

Making native languages relevant to the 21st century is crucial if they are
to survive as living languages, says Meya, the Indiana linguist.

"We're battling English," he says. "We're competing against things like
satellite television and all the things the dominant English language has
to offer. We're competing just for students' attention. Part of the
strategy is to create as much material for them as possible to make it
relevant."

Jerome Kills Small, who has taught Indian languages at the University of
South Dakota for 13 years, does detect in them a necessary attribute of a
living language, the ability to create new words. Like every language, they
have bound morphemes, an arbitrary pairing of sound and meaning that is the
building material of words.

"If you can put syllables together you can create and describe a new noun.
If a first-language speaker heard it, they would know exactly what that
word is," Kills Small says.

Perhaps the simplest example of a bound morpheme in English is the sound
"s." Attached to the end of any noun, it signifies the plural.

Even as tribes race to create a new generation of speakers, their native
languages need gatekeepers to ensure tribal language morphemes and existing
words are used to make new words in the 21st century, rather than letting
English creep into the lexicon, Meya says.

"That's what the French do all the time. Everything is brought into French.
There are no Anglo words at all," he says.

There are two types of language-restoration programs on reservations. At
Yankton and Pine Ridge, the goal of immersion classes is to conduct them
almost totally in the native language. Cheyenne River's Good Child Program
- Cinci Wakpa Waste - seeks to teach Lakota and English together in grades
K-12.

Bilingual education was the favored method of Lakota language instruction,
according to a survey conducted among Cheyenne River parents in 1999 by
Marion Blue Arm.

"Parents always feel we are giving up English if we teach Lakota," she
says.

That's not the case.

"If you truly have immersion to the third grade, there are all these
studies that show English will come back anyway. They will learn that and
pick it up like nothing," says Blue Arm. "But people don't believe that.
They believe that if you are not teaching English intensely from the
beginning, the students will be at a disadvantage."

Rosie Roach, a former elementary school principal, is the administrator of
language programs in Cheyenne River schools. Immersion has run afoul of not
only leery parents but recalcitrant teachers, she says.

"We do get a small amount of resistance from parents. We get a lot of
resistance from teachers," she says of language immersion. "Most of the
teachers in our systems are non-Indians. Research shows our Native American
children can really progress if they have their language and culture. Yet
when we look at that as teachers, we don't do anything with it. We continue
to teach in the same way we've been teaching the past 50 years. That has to
change."

Cheyenne River has put an innovative twist on bilingual instruction. It has
started to pair fluent Lakota speakers in classrooms with certified
teachers. The idea is to bring both language proficiency and teaching
proficiency together. That level of professional support stands in stark
contrast to Lavena Cook, who teaches the Yankton's language immersion
classes at Lake Andes.

"I knew my language. But I don't know a thing about teaching. I did
everything in my life but teach children," says Cook, 54. She was working
as a postal clerk in Marty last year when officials with the
tribal-language immersion program prevailed upon her to take over the
class. "I said, `I'll try. I'll do it for six months, and if I'm not doing
a good job, you can let me go.'"

Whatever the state of language restoration, things are better than they
were, says Roach at Cheyenne River.

While interest in restoring native language is strong now, the opportunity
to do so is relatively short. Meya points to the aging native language
speakers. "We only have 20 years, if that, to use the speakers of today as
teachers to train a generation of speakers," he says.

Meya, Little Finger and Roach all say the federal government could play a
major role in providing funding for language teachers and producing native
language curricula. Meya talks about $5 million a year for 40 years for the
Pine Ridge project alone.

Sen. Tim Johnson of South Dakota is a co-sponsor of the 2003 amendment to
the 1990 Native American Languages Act. He also is the most prominent
official Meya solicits for federal aid.

The amendment he is co-sponsoring encourages the development of language
nests, organized language programs for children 7 years old and younger and
their families. It offers schools a chance to qualify as language-survival
schools to receive funding.

The catch is, there is virtually no funding in the current budget.

"We are trying to devise new, more effective ways to provide for Native
American language survival. This is one step in that direction," Johnson
says of the amendment. "There is not a lot of money to be had that is
focused exclusively on Lakota language preservation."

Meya points out the irony that what federal money is available tends to go
to the most threatened languages, rather than ones like Lakota, that have
enough speakers to have a chance of survival.

Johnson agrees: "A language like Lakota, that still has a significant
number of fluent speakers, has a better long-term chance at being preserved
in a meaningful way and not just as an academic subject but as a language
that is utilized in daily life."

But he adds that when it comes to fighting for funding, he must take into
account what the tribes want and need.

"Their funding requests tend to focus more on basic human needs, school
funding, nutrition, Indian Health Service, law enforcement, roads and
water," he says. "I know language preservation is important. But that's not
an area they have made central to their appropriations requests."

So there are people such as Cook, the nonteacher, with no help or
experience, trying to save the Yankton's Dakota by cobbling together her
version of immersion. The students probably heard more English than a
linguist would like to see in an immersion program, they learned more
vocabulary than sentence structure, and the class concluded with no exam,
no formal assessment of success.

But Cook recounts a telling little triumph, an example of language truly
restored. One day, she intervened as a pair of her tiny students were
squabbling over a toy.

They were arguing in Dakota.