Preserving a culture

[Andre Cramblit]

 http://www.argusleader.com/specialsections/2003/woundedknee/Sundayarticle3.shtml
The Legacy of Wounded Knee

Educator works to preserve Lakota language and, in essence, a culture Jon
Walker  Argus Leader

published: 3/16/2003

MANDERSON - Wilmer Mesteth carries a treasure he'd like to share with as
many people as possible on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.

The treasure is the Lakota language, a soft, smooth tongue that unlocks the
heart and history of Mesteth's people, and in his view keeps alive the hope
of their enduring identity.

"The language is the basis of our culture," he says        Wilmer Mesteth
stands in an arbor where he holds night dances at his home west of Pine
Ridge. Mesteth is an arts, language and culture instructor at Oglala Lakota
College and a Lakota spiritual leader.   from his classroom at the Oglala
Lakota College in Manderson. "If we don't have a language, we don't have a
culture. It's very important the language survives because our whole
culture depends on it."

Unfortunately, the language is in sharp decline, the victim of neglect in a
generational paradox growing more acute in the 30 years since the
occupation of Wounded Knee.

For all the pros and cons of the American Indian Movement's standoff
against federal authorities in 1973, the protesters did stand up to
authority in a way that provided a cultural spark that asserted tribal
people's right to speak Lakota freely. Young adults rejoiced at the
possibilities, some of them with fresh memories of being punished for
speaking the language on school playgrounds in the 1950s and '60s. Indians
born since then, however, haven't picked up the torch and run.

"On a lot of reservations, the language is nearly nonexistent," says Belva
Hollow Horn Emery, who grew up in Wounded Knee and now lives in White
River. "That's what is keeping the culture alive. It makes us Indian.
Without the language, pardon my saying, we're just brown-skinned white
people."

Elaine Yellow Horse, an 18-year-old senior at Red Cloud High School in Pine
Ridge, illustrates the gap. "I wish I did," she says when asked whether she
speaks Lakota. "My mom does and that's one of her regrets, that she didn't
teach it to her kids."

South Dakota's overall population is aging with the exodus of the young.
But Pine Ridge sees the opposite with a birth rate twice as high as the
rest of the state.

"I'm 46 and my generation is probably the last generation to speak Lakota,"
Mesteth says. "Most of the people on the reservation are 25 and below.
Almost none of them speak it. Maybe 1 percent is my estimation."

He sees the culprit as the acculturation that Wounded Knee challenged.
"Most kids now spend 70 percent of their time in school and when they get
home most of them watch television," he says. "Everything's English."

That the language hasn't flourished since Wounded Knee is doubly
disappointing for Mesteth, who carries his own painful memory from the '73
occupation. He was 16 when the standoff began, an AIM supporter who was
expelled from high school in turbulent times as youthful demonstrations
turned physical. His grandfather was Pedro Bissonette, an organizer of the
occupation.

Mesteth today, living on Bissonette's land in Cheyenne Creek, salutes the
occupation effort of 30 years ago.

"It showed the world we weren't going to waltz into mainstream society and
everything wasn't all right," Mesteth says. "When AIM came here, they
showed our people we were headed in the wrong direction. Our traditions
were important, and our religious ways were important, and our treaties are
legal and binding. AIM brought those issues to the attention of our
people."

Supporters of Lakota are looking at different ways to bring the language
back. One approach would be immersion courses, which follows a principle
that has students adhere entirely to the language at hand rather than
falling back onto English for definitions and explanations.

The trappings of the computer age are providing an assist as instruction
goes electronic. Hollow Horn Emery, 45, is teaching the language to her 2-
and 6-year-old daughters and making a compact disc of children's rhymes
sung in Lakota. "We'd like to help preserve the language in that sense,"
she says.

>>From his classroom at Oglala Lakota College, Mesteth leads a one-hour
seminar on Lakota after teaching a three-hour session on native quillwork.
It's a modest undertaking on a recent Thursday afternoon, with three adults
joining him at the end of a school day.

As with any language, Lakota locks inside it a structure of thinking unique
to the people who speak it. While many European languages retain
gender-specific terms such as "host" and "hostess," Lakota extends the
gender distinction to the speaker as well. In essence, men talk one way and
women another.

Wearing shaded glasses and parting his shiny black hair both left and right
in a way that accents his bushy gray sideburns, Mesteth illustrates the
distinctions of Lakota with a deep, resonant voice.

For "a sunny day" in English, a Lakota man would say "Ampetu Omaste yelo."
A woman would say "Ampetu Omaste ye."

A translation of "what time is it?" takes the distinctions a step further.

A man would say "Maza skan skan Tona hwo?" A woman would say "Maza skan
skan Tona he?"

The "skan skan" repetition comes from the sense of motion, as in two hands
of a watch moving around a dial. The literal word-by-word in English would
be "moving metal time how many?"

If moving between Lakota and English is clumsy with common phrases, it
approaches impossible in some communication. Just as Western European
languages regard time, life, death and friendship as concepts with meanings
that exceed their literal definition, so too the Lakota have embedded in
their tongue ideas on religion, kinship and nature that defy translation.

If the language goes, "we lose all that valuable information," Mesteth
says. "Ceremonies, songs and prayers are all conducted in Lakota. Our
worldview is centered in the language."

--

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

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