Indigenous Language Institute debuts community-based handbooks (fwd)

[Phil CashCash]

[ilat list manager note: although this article is from September 2003,
it seemed appropriate to post since it mentions some beneficial and
important information. pcc]

~~~

Indian Country Today (Lakota Times) 9/3/2003 V.23; N.12 B1

Indigenous Language Institute debuts community-based handbooks

Author Woodard, Stephanie

SANTA FE, N.M. - The Indigenous Language Institute (ILI), an 11-year-old
nonprofit, is getting ready to send to the printer a set of 18- to
32-page how-to handbooks for tribal language instruction. Topics in the
10-volume series include doing an initial community language survey,
teacher training, and evaluating an existing curriculum.

Funding for the project came from the Ford Foundation, the Educational
Foundation of America, and the John B. and Catherine T. MacArthur
Foundation.

"The handbooks will be available by November 2003," said ILI's Executive
Director, Inee Yang Slaughter. "They're designed for ease of use. You
can pull out the one you need, rather than deal with a bulky book."

The series is self-contained and can be put to use immediately - a boon
to those without time to travel to training sessions.

Dr. Ofelia Zepeda, a Tohono O'odham professor of linguistics at the
University of Arizona, noted that the information in the booklets is
not language-specific and can work in a variety of communities. "In the
past, some tribes have had programs, but the approaches were not
necessarily adaptable to other tribes. Or perhaps there was no way to
disseminate materials that had been created," said Zepeda. "In other
cases, a community may have heard about a program somewhere else, but
couldn't get information on it. Accessibility has been a problem."

Zepeda, a board member of ILI, formulated the project in collaboration
with Dr. Akiro Yamamoto, a professor of anthropology and linguistics at
the University of Kansas. To execute the concept - which included
collecting up-to-date information from tribes around the country - ILI
then called in Dr. Tessie Naranjo, a sociologist from Santa Clara
Pueblo whose Ph.D. is from the University of New Mexico, Sheilah
Nicholas, a Hopi doctoral candidate in American Indian Studies at the
University of Arizona, and Dr. Mary Linn, curator of Native American
languages for the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History at the
University of Oklahoma and a professor in the school's anthropology
department.

According to Dr. Michael Krauss of the University of Alaska Fairbanks,
only 175 languages remain of some 300 extant at the onset of European
colonization; of the surviving ones, just 20 are widely spoken by
children. The most oft-cited cause for the decline is the
Native-language eradication policy of the boarding schools to which
many Indian children were sent during the 19th and 20th centuries.

The situation in the Western Hemisphere is part of a global trend,
observed Dr. Douglas Whalen, president of the Endangered Language Fund,
a nonprofit at Yale University that funds community - and
university-based projects worldwide, including research on Paiute and
Creek. The large regional languages - English, Spanish, Swahili,
Chinese, and others - are overwhelming the smaller languages, said
Whalen.

Sometimes, even minority languages are swallowing up other small ones.
It's a complex picture," he added. "But lately there has been a lot
more activity and awareness of the small languages at the grassroots
level."

Slaughter has watched that happening in the United States. "In the past
few years, we have seen a tremendous increase in the number of tribal
language programs," she said.

"It's a credit to the young people who are learning their languages,"
said Ernie Stevens, a member of the Oneida Tribe of Wisconsin and
Chairman of the National Indian Gaming Association, which has just sent
out an appeal to member tribes to support ILI. "These children are
stepping up to their responsibilities. The damage the government did is
just now being reversed."

The handbook series joins other ILI programs, including symposia,
training seminars, a resource directory, community honoring events, and
an annual Youth Language Fair that recognizes children for songs,
prayers, readings, and other presentations that use their heritage
languages. The organization's Web site contains such information as
lists of funding organizations and experts, a paper on intellectual
property issues, and a bibliography.

The creation of a Language Materials Development Center is under way,
thanks to a recent $100,000 grant from The Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation. In addition to producing teaching materials, the center
will offer training and networking opportunities for language
practitioners and teachers. To develop a secure financial base, ILI has
launched a $5-million endowment campaign, with Cherokee actor Wes Studi
as honorary chairperson.

The handbook project commenced with evaluations of tribal needs and
existing curricula. Starting in 1999, Naranjo, Linn, Nicholas and
others toured 54 communities from coast to coast and from the Arctic to
the Sonoran Desert. In each locale, they learned how many people at
what ages understood or spoke the language, and at what level. They
also looked at how it was taught: for example, in a classroom or in a
mentor-student relationship, with immersion instruction or in
combination with English.

Naranjo described a visit to the Pechangas, in southern California.
"They have an incredible program at their Head Start," she said. "While
a teacher instructs the children in English, a linguist, who's a
non-tribal member, repeats everything in their Luiseno language. The
kids pick it up subliminally, which you can see when they're working
independently. I liked that a whole lot."

The elementary school at Cochiti Pueblo, in New Mexico, had an
immersion-style approach, according to Slaughter, who accompanied the
evaluators on some of the trips. "As soon as the children cross the
threshold of the language classroom, they hear only Keres," she
recounted. "The main instructor, a Keres speaker from the community who
has had teacher training, leads activities like acting out a
traditional story or responding to flash cards. Two assistants, one a
young adult and the other an elder, reinforce the lessons through
repetition. The children are always addressed and respond in full
sentences, so they learn the entire structure of the language."

According to Naranjo, the ILI handbooks, as she and her fellow
evaluators have written them, strive to help each group decide what
will work best for its situation. "We heard their voices, their
descriptions of what works and what doesn't. Now, we're trying to give
them back what they really want. And we make it easy for them," she
said. "That's the ingeniousness of this concept as Ofelia Zepeda and
Akiro Yamamoto devised it."

For more on the series or other ILI programs, contact the organization
at 560 Montezuma Avenue, Suite 202, Santa Fe, NM 87501; (505) 820-0311;
www.indigenous-language.org.