Fwd: California Tribe Tries to Save Its Language

[Andre Cramblit]

http://www.voanews.com/english/AmericanLife/2006-03-30-voa46.cfm

California Tribe Tries to Save Its Language
By Lonny Shavelson
Clear Lake, California
30 March 2006
Shavelson report (MP3) - Download 1.23 MB
Shavelson report (Real) - Download 815 k
Listen to Shavelson report (Real)

Nearly half of the more than 6,000 languages spoken in the world are  
in danger of extinction. And leading the world's epidemic of  
disappearing dialects is the U.S. state of California. This weekend,  
members of 40 tribes from around the state met with linguists to  
discuss the challenges of saving those endangered languages

More than half of the over one hundred native California tongues have  
disappeared. Many others have only a few, aging speakers. When this  
last fluent generation dies, languages spoken by Californians over  
centuries, will also die. At a recent gathering of some 200 Native  
Americans struggling to maintain their dialects, Robert Geary  
remembered driving in his car, listening to a tape of his long- 
deceased great uncle speaking the native Elém Pomo language. "I was  
so lost hearing my language that I was doing 80 [mph] and I didn't  
even know it. I got a [speeding] ticket, yeah, I got a ticket."


Loretta Kelsey, the last speaker of Elém Pomo
Geary decided he had to learn his ancestor's language and immediately  
ran into a pervasive problem for California's Native Americans.  
"There is only one speaker left," he explained. "Her name is Loretta  
Kelsey. With her also not having anyone to speak it to, the language  
is even getting lost with her."

At the shoreline of the Pomo reservation on Clear Lake, Loretta  
Kelsey parts some tule reeds, looks over the blue-green waters to  
where Mount Konocti reaches for the clouds, then turns toward Geary.  
It's not a struggle for her to bring back memories of the lake of her  
childhood; it is a struggle to tell Robert about it, in Pomo.


         Tule reeds
"Amah ko set. Kuchinwallit. Mecha wee hah ket kay." She pauses, and  
finally gives up. "Help me out, Robert." He thinks a moment. "She was  
saying something about eating tules." She nods. "Where we're at now  
is where I was raised. We'd go down to the water, we'd eat the tules."

The two have spent the last five years recovering the language. Now  
they teach it to others in their tribe. But it's been an agonizing  
process. Pomo was never written down, there are no dictionaries, no  
materials to teach the language. Geary and Kelsey are inventing those  
as they go. "Now we're just having to do it the way classrooms do  
it," she says.


Robert Geary teaches the Pomo language to members of his tribe
The wind blows off the shore of clear lake as 20 native Americans  
from 7 to 70 gather along a row of picnic tables, watching Robert  
write on an old grade-school blackboard. He points to the words as he  
says them, and the class responds. "Tichen, aweyah. Eee. Tzama, Tzama."

Elizabeth Jean, 68, spoke Pomo as a child. "We spoke very poor  
English when I went to school," she recalls. "We needed to go to the  
bathroom and we didn't know how to say it in English." Jean did learn  
English, and she lost her Pomo.

But with only one remaining Elém Pomo speaker, who herself struggles  
with the language, it may be beyond recovery.

Jocelyn Ahlers, an assistant professor of cultural linguistics at  
California State University in San Marcos, is here at the class.  
She's been studying the attempts to revive the Pomo language. "Most  
linguists would come to a situation like this and say, 'I'm sorry,  
there's nothing I can do, in terms of making this a vibrant speaking  
community again. It's over. I'm sorry.'"

In today's class, students struggle to learn greetings and names of  
foods. If the goal is to revive the language in daily life on this  
reservation, success may be far away, or impossible. But Professor  
Ahlers thinks the common bond of learning the language may be enough.  
"People tend to define linguistic community strictly as this place  
where everybody speaks the language all the time," she says, adding  
that it doesn't have to be that way. "I think your language community  
could be the people who share a desire to learn your language with  
you, people who say hi to you or pray with you."

At dusk, the class winds down and the students gather in the ritual  
roundhouse to dance and pray. "The center of it is a pole that's  
sticking up. It's kind of like our gateway to God," Geary explains.  
He says that even the limited Pomo now spoken on the reservation is  
of value, most of all, in prayers to the spirits. "It makes me feel  
that much more special to be able to talk to the creator in the  
language that he gave us. That's irreplaceable."


Loretta Kelsey stands at the shore, amid a tangled mass of tule  
reeds. When she hears the others speaking Pomo, she feels both  
ancient burden, and new possibility. "It seems like I haven't carried  
it on the way I should have. Which was wrong. Because it's not really  
dying. I refuse to say dying."


.:.

André Cramblit: andre.p.cramblit.86 at alum.dartmouth.org is the  
Operations Director Northern California Indian Development Council  
NCIDC (http://www.ncidc.org) is a non-profit that meets the  
development needs of American Indians

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