"Blackfeet Push to Preserve Langauge"

[Rr Lapier]

Sunday, May 18, 2003
Blackfeet push to preserve language

Bill would help schools teach native tongues

By CHRISTOPHER STEINER For the Great Falls Tribune

WASHINGTON -- Two Blackfeet teachers urged a U.S. Senate committee this week
to approve a bill intended to ensure that Native American languages don't
vanish.

The bill would offer grants to schools starting or continuing native language
programs. Dollar figures for the bill are not yet available.

Of the 300 tribal languages indigenous to the Americas, only 175 are alive
today, according to the National Indian Education Association. In 50 years,
the group says, as few as 20 could be left.

"The loss of native languages diminishes the truth of native ways and
dishonors the lifetimes of our ancestors," Rosalyn LaPier told the Senate
Committee on Indian Affairs. "True native history is identified by the
stories extending back thousands of years and retold out loud in our native
languages."

LaPier, director of the Piegan Institute's Nizipuhwahsin School on the
Blackfeet Indian Reservation, and teacher Jocelyn Davis-DesRosier appeared
before the committee Thursday to explain how the school teaches core subjects
in the Blackfeet tongue. The Piegan Institute was founded in 1987 to preserve
and promote the native Blackfeet language. In 1995, the institute started the
Nizipuhwahsin School, which has 32 students, all children in the Blackfeet
Tribe.

The bill, introduced by Sen. Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, would amend 1990
legislation that protected the rights of Indians to promote and speak their
native languages to fiscally support the programs which it guards. No similar
legislation has been introduced in the House.

The 1990 bill marked an official reversal in policy for the U.S. government
-- which at one time persecuted those who spoke native tongues.

An 1868 report from the federal commission on Indian affairs read: "Their
barbarous dialect should be blotted out and the English language
substituted."

Davis-DesRosier, who is learning the Blackfeet language, sends her two boys
to the school where she teaches. Early on, she said, her friends and
relatives warned her against sending her children to the native-language
school, saying her sons "would have lower academic achievement and would
never make the transition to public school."

The doubters have been proved wrong, she said.

"Learning academic subjects in the Blackfeet language has not diminished
their academic ability, but enhanced it," she said.

This is the case for most children, according to Leanne Hinton, professor and
chairwoman of the Department of Linguistics at the University of California
at Berkeley.

"We know through their intense hard work and leadership that these systems
work successfully to educate students to be literate and fluent in their
ancestral language and accustomed to using it in daily communications and
also are literate and fluent in English, and fully prepared to go on to
higher education in English-speaking institutions," she said to the
committee.

That's exactly the way things have played out at Nizipuhwahsin, said Shirlee
Crowshoe in an interview from the school where she is one of two teachers who
are fully fluent in the native tongue.

"We have had many children go on to the public high schools and have no
problems," she said.

There would be many more of those children if the school had more fluent
teachers like her, she said. Because there are only two teachers fluent in
the language at the school, which teaches children from kindergarten through
eighth grade, it has to limit its enrollment to around 30. There is a waiting
list of more than 100 children, despite the tuition of about $100 a month.

This is why, Crowshoe said, the teachers are rooting so hard for the bill to
pass -- they need more funding to entice a few of the remaining fluent
Blackfeet speakers to teach. Fluent speakers, she said, are scarce -- a
survey taken by the Blackfeet in the mid-1990s revealed roughly 200 fluent
speakers out of a tribal population of about 15,000.

At one time the school employed as many as six fluent speakers, she said.

"But funding is such a big factor, we just couldn't afford to bring them on
again."

Christopher Steiner is a reporter for Medill News Service.


Rosalyn LaPier
Piegan Institute
www.pieganinstitute.org
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