Learning Your lnaguage (education)

[Andre Cramblit]

Denver Post
A 'foreign' language
Lakota Rare class seeks to reclaim culture, keep kids in school

 By Eric Hubler  Denver Post Education Writer

 Monday, May 12, 2003 - Beverly Granger cries as she thinks of all that was
lost because she couldn't speak to her grandmother in Lakota - and all that
is being  regained now that her son Robert is learning the language in a
course at Denver East High School.

 "I feel very privileged," said Robert, a 17-year-old junior. "There're not
many places to learn Lakota. Plus it's my language, which gives it more
meaning. I'm  hoping to teach it to my children."

 This is not an after-school club, but a bona fide language course
sanctioned by the Denver Public Schools curriculum department. Students get
foreign-language  credit - an irony that Rose Marie McGuire, head of the
district's Indian Education Program, couldn't help noting.

 "It's not a foreign language. It's an indigenous language," she said.

 Instructor Gracie RedShirt Tyon Foote is McGuire's counterpart in
Jefferson County schools, and she comes to Denver four times a week to
teach the class, which  is in its first semester. She and her students are
not only preserving history but making it, according to educators involved
in American Indian culture. Nationwide,  few K-12 schools offer Indian
languages.

 "Usually it's French or German or Spanish or any of those popular European
languages. But you never hear, especially in the inner city, anyone
teaching a native  language. I think it's amazing," said Suzette Brewer,
spokeswoman for the American Indian College Fund, which is based in Denver
and supports 34 tribal  colleges across the country.

 "That's wonderful news," said Albert White Hat Sr., a Lakota language
professor at Sinte Gleska University, a Lakota college in Rosebud, S.D, and
the author of  the textbook used at East. "Public schools don't generally
teach that unless they're on the reservation."

 For a century, Brewer said, Indian children were sent to boarding schools
that discouraged them from speaking their native languages - or worse.

 "They basically had their languages beaten out of them," said Brewer, a
Cherokee.

 The boarding-school movement allowed two-thirds of Indian languages to
slip into extinction and instilled a dislike of school that still harms
Indian students,  Brewer said. Indians nationwide have worse dropout rates
than any other ethnic group, she said.

 That's true in Denver. In a district where two-thirds of its students
graduate from high school - already low by state and national standards -
only 46 percent of  Indians do, according to DPS figures.

 RedShirt Tyon Foote's class is part of an Indian Focus Schools system
meant to improve those numbers. A quarter of DPS's approximately 850
American Indian  students go to three elementary schools and one middle
school, in addition to East and the Career Education Center, that offer
support services and activities.

 Some are recent arrivals from reservations and accustomed to tiny rural
schools, McGuire said.

 "Many times our kids get lost. They're just not used to an urban high
school," said McGuire, who is a Dakota. (Dakota, Lakota and Nakota are
members of the  Siouan language group. Speakers of each tongue can
understand speakers of the others, McGuire said.)

 Students who are reserved in other classes come alive in Lakota class,
McGuire said: "You'll see more participation. They're more sure of
themselves, more  connected."

 Like Robert Granger, Nathan TwoEagles-Downing, a sophomore, is a Lakota
looking to reclaim his roots.

 "I always wanted to be able to communicate with my grandpa," he said.

 Other students belong to different tribes with unrelated languages, but
they're glad to be learning any Indian language at all. Freshman Brandon
Ruiz is an Apache,  but his elder, or mentor, is a Lakota, and now he's
beginning to understand some of his elder's language.

 A few students aren't Indians at all, just intellectually curious.

 "Spanish and French, they seem so common. I try to learn new things,"
sophomore Debby Romero said.

 Mastering Lakota means recognizing that language can change entire
societies, professor White Hat said. Many Lakota words took on new meanings
when  Christianity came on the scene, and today's students are trying to
rediscover their original meanings.

 The phrase "wakan tanka," for example, meant "every creation," but
missionaries translated it as "great spirit."

 "That's a description of the Christian God," White Hat said.

 It didn't fit the Lakota philosophy, which held that all people, animals
and natural phenomena were relatives, worthy of respect and cooperation but
not worship,  he said.

 "In our department here, we are doing what we call laundering the
language," White Hat said. "We have to go back to the original meaning of
the word and how  that addresses the Lakota philosophy, the Lakota way of
thinking. We found that the language is very challenging, very
complimentary, very honoring, and really  kind of a progressive type of
thinking."

 Using White Hat's text, RedShirt Tyon Foote is teaching the students at
East High that in Lakota, language and relationships are inseparable.

 An example: To show respect and preserve household peace, brothers and
sisters traditionally did not speak to one another. "Living in tipis,
avoidance was  practiced to give people their privacy because it's a
one-room home," she said.

 "The class is so much more than just language," RedShirt Tyon Foote added.
"There are social rules, philosophy, the culture, history,
misinterpretation of different  words when it was written down by
missionaries."

 A frequent stumbling block for students is that men and women use
different word endings. Brewer said Lakota speakers find Kevin Costner
funny in "Dances  With Wolves" because he speaks female Lakota.

 While most Lakota today live in South Dakota, it is appropriate for Denver
to play a role in the renaissance of the Lakota language, Beverly Granger
said. Lakota  routinely traveled through Colorado, where they formed
alliances with Cheyennes and Utes, she said.

 And, in modern times, Denver has emerged as a center of American Indian
culture.

 Granger said she fled the violence, alcoholism and poverty of the Rosebud
reservation at 19, lived for many years in Nevada, and only felt her
homesickness ebb  when she came to Denver in 1989 and saw the annual Denver
March Pow Wow.

 For the first time, she said, she saw Indians of different tribes doing
something other than bickering.

 "Everyone was dancing together. It was an intercultural pow wow. I just
sat there and cried," she said. "Denver's just a good place to be for
American Indians."