Tribes work to preserve native language (fwd)

[Phil Cash Cash]

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.