Language Revitalization Efforts

[Andre Cramblit]

Ancestral Language Revitalization Efforts Complete Successful First Year;
Visitors from Northern California Tribes Observe Classes in Luiseño

05/14/2003 - RIVERSIDE CA  Kris Lovekin, kris.lovekin at ucr.edu


Linguist Eric Elliott works with two young people from Pechanga on
mastering Luiseno, the ancestral language.

Scholars at the University of California, Riverside and cultural leaders of
the Pechanga Band of Luiseño Mission Indians are celebrating the completion
of the first year of an ambitious effort to teach tribal members their
ancestral language. The work is paying off.

Last week, Native Americans from Northern California visited UC Riverside
to observe the Takic Language Revitalization Project in action at the
Pechanga Tribal Headquarters near Temecula. They watched children learn
Luiseño, one of approximately 100 tribal languages native to California.
Fully half of those languages are now nearly extinct.

The Native American Languages Protection Act was approved by Congress in
the early 1990s, and right now there is a movement to provide additional
funding to help revive many of the endangered native languages across the
nation. That could help efforts like the one at Pechanga.

The people who observed the language program were from the Paiute Tribe in
Bishop, the Tule River reservation near Visalia and individuals
representing the Numa Yadoha Program in Bishop. They spent a week at UCR
Extension learning teaching techniques that can help in their own efforts
to revitalize their native languages.

"I really liked seeing the program," said Carrie Franco, who is learning
the Yowlumni language on the Tule River reservation, home to 13 different
native tribes. She is studying her ancestral language in order to pass it
down to her children and grandchildren. Her cousin, Lucy Rodilez, said she
enjoyed watching children at Pechanga sing and understand Luiseño.

The Tule River reservation covers 56,000-acres, including towering redwood
trees and elevations of 7,000 ft. Since there are 13 different tribes on
the reservations, issues of language revitalization get complicated.

Margaret Valdez, who lives on the Tule River reservation, said her father
is Mexican, her mother is Yowlumni and her husband was Navajo. "I have five
children and they all understand Yowlumni," she said. She has started to
teach her grandchildren. When a language dies, she said, so does the
culture.

That is the theory that launched the effort to revitalize Luiseno,
according to Gary DuBois, director of Pechanga Cultural Resources. "With
the death of ancestral languages, the process of comprehending one's own
history and describing the landscape is changed. It becomes impossible to
transmit fundamental cultural ways of knowing across the generations."

He said last week that the first year of the program has gone well, in fact
better than he expected. "We are concentrating our efforts on the preschool
program, and we have waiting lists of Pechanga children who would like to
attend the preschool." Recently, DuBois said, the tribe approved a
kindergarten program to start in the fall. The adult classes are geared to
support the preschool. "It helps family members and tribal members keep up
with the children," said DuBois.

Sheila Dwight, director of International Education Programs at UCR
Extension, helped assembled a team of language teaching experts to work on
the project. And she hosted the group touring the Riverside County language
programs this week.

The lead linguist for the project is Eric Elliott, who is uniquely
qualified for the task. A Southern California native, Elliott spent five
years documenting the endangered Luiseño language working closely with
Villiana Hyde, native speaker of the Rincon dialect of Luiseño. His
doctoral dissertation at UC San Diego was a 1,700 page bilingual
English-Luiseño/Luiseño-English dictionary, the result of thirteen years of
research on the Luiseño language. For the past eleven years he has
documented the Mountain Cahuilla dialect of Cahuilla, and the Serrano
language spoken by one remaining native speaker residing at the Morongo
Reservation of Riverside County.

Joel Martin, Rupert Costo Chair of American Indian Affairs at UCR, helped
put all of the parties together. His goal has always been to design a
program that could be used as a model nationwide.

"We're on our way now," Martin said. "The children are learning so well and
the teachers are doing so well. It is very heartening to see how far we've
come."

This effort is connected to UCR's proposed Center for California Native
Nations, which will help facilitate innovative educational partnerships,
coordinate important research related to Native Americans, and share best
practices. A new Web site at UC Riverside that offers curriculum ideas for
language revitalization, free magazines for children and other resources,
is available at www.americanindian.ucr.edu

 THE TAKIC LANGUAGE REVITALIZATION PROJECT

· Has developed teaching models to revitalize the Luiseño language · Has
created successful preschool and adult classes at the Pechanga Tribal
Headquarters · Has trained tribal members to be teachers in Luiseno · Has
taken the model and demonstrated it to national audiences at conferences,
as well as accepted visits from observers to see the program in action.

Relevance to UCR UCR's focus on American Indian Affairs reflects its
location and unique positive heritage. Located at the fastest growing and
most diverse campus in the UC system, UCR's Native American Studies program
consists of more than 40 courses distributed across many departments. A
strong concentration of faculty in History supports one of the country's
most highly regarded Ph.D. programs in Native American history as well as a
new M.A. program. Efforts are underway to offer an M.A. and Ph.D. in Native
American Studies as well, tapping full-time faculty in Anthropology, Dance,
English, Ethnic Studies, and Religious Studies. UCR's program enjoys
institutional support, including the Rupert Costo Library of American
Indian History, the Costo Endowed Chair in American Indian Affairs, the
Costo Historical and Linguistic Native American Research Center, and a
strong Native American Students Program. Near neighbor to more than 30
federally recognized tribes as well as several unrecognized ones, UCR's
program supports interdisciplinary, culturally sensitive, critically
sophisticated, and communally based research. A Web site is available at
http://americanindian.ucr.edu/

Sheila Dwight Director, International Education Programs University of
California, Riverside Riverside, CA 92521 e-mail: sdwight at ucx.ucr.edu;
Phone: (909)787-4346