Idaho State University Professor...Help Save Native Language (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

Idaho State University Professor Heads to Southern California to Help
Save Native Language

       POCATELLO, Idaho, Feb. 27 (AScribe Newswire) -- Idaho State
University anthropology professor Dr. Christopher Loether, who
specializes in the Shoshoni language, has been hired for 18 months to
help save the language of the Serrano Indians living in southern
California on the San Manuel and Morongo Reservations.

       Loether is building on work done by University of California, Los
Angeles professor Dr. Ernest Siva, a member of the Morongo Indian tribe
who is half Serrano and half Cahuilla. Siva, a Serrano speaker, has
worked with the Morongo and San Manuel bands of the Mission Indians for
many years.

       "Basically, there are only three people left who speak the
language," Loether said. "The last woman who spoke only the Serrano
language, who was in her 90s, died last year, but we have a lot of
material collected from this woman, Dorothy Ramon, who was Siva's
aunt."

       The San Manuel Reservation is located in the foothills of the San
Bernardino Mountains, just north of the city of Highland, and occupies
740 acres. About 68 adult and 129 children are tribal members,
according to Loether.

       The 32,000-acre Morongo Indian Reservation is set near the base
of the San Gorgonio and San Jacinto Mountains. Tribal membership is
about 1,200, according to Loether.

       Loether will first learn the Serrano language, then train
teachers to teach the language in schools. The language will be taught
to pre-school children next fall, then to successively higher grades
each year, based on the model of a Hawaiian language program taught on
the Hawaiian Islands in every grade from kindergarten to graduate
school.

       "Different Indian groups are trying to preserve their languages
using programs based on the Hawaiian model," Loether said. "One
California tribe located south of us, the Pechanga, recently
implemented a language program that was very successful."

       Loether will also assist Siva in teaching the Serrano language in
classes at UCLA next fall. The university will begin offering a
two-year certificate in Serrano culture and language.

       The Serrano Indian language is a member of the Uto-Aztecan
language family, the same as Shoshoni. Paiute is also a member of that
language family. Loether learned the Western Mono language while
earning his bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees in anthropology
at UCLA. He learned the Eastern Mono language while working on a
project in the Owens Valley in California.

       While at ISU, Loether has also become a Shoshoni language expert,
working with ISU adjunct professor Drusilla Gould. The Shoshoni
language program began in 1989, and ISU became one of the first
universities to offer a Native American language to fulfill the foreign
language general education requirement. Loether and Gould have
published a Shoshoni language textbook, "An Introduction to the
Shoshoni Language" (University of Utah Press 2002), and 35 to 40 people
per year are enrolled in its Shoshoni language courses.

       Although the Serrano language is related to the Shoshoni and the
Mono languages, learning and teaching Serrano is difficult because of
the lack of fluent speakers and written materials on the language.

       "Serrano is related to Shoshoni and is as close to Shoshoni,
perhaps, as English is to German. They are definitely related but there
are a lot of differences between them," Loether said.

       There is already a writing system in place for the Serrano
language developed by scholar Eric Elliot. The writing system uses the
Roman alphabet with a couple of extra signs and "a couple of letters
that don't stand for the same thing they do in written English,"
Loether said. The instructional book of the Serrano language, patterned
after Loether and Gould's Shoshoni textbook, will include examples of
conversations, dialogues, and interactions.

       "We will teach students useful phrases they can put to use
interacting with other people in real situations," Loether said. "This
method is known as the 'ulpan' method of language immersion and was
first developed by the Jews of Palestine to teach Hebrew, when they
were revitalizing that language in the early 1900s. It is now used to
teach new immigrants to Israel the Hebrew language."

       Members of the ISU anthropology department have been active in
recent cultural preservation projects. Gould has traveled to Shoshoni
reservations throughout the West to help with language projects.
Professor Dr. Anthony Stocks has helped a number of Central and South
American tribes and indigenous groups acquire and manage lands in
critical conservation areas.

       ISU is located in Pocatello, Idaho, which is adjacent to the Fort
Hall Indian Reservation. The reservation has about 5,000 residents,
approximately 3,000 of them are Native American. The Fort Hall tribe
has about 3,500 enrolled members. ISU averages about 350 Native
American students each semester out of a total enrollment of about
13,500. Shoshoni language courses are well attended, and generally
one-third to one-half of those enrolled are Native Americans. Two
Shoshoni and one Chippewa Indian are on the ISU anthropology department
teaching staff.

       "We get people (enrolled in ISU Shoshoni classes) who are just
interested in the language and the culture, but the majority of our
students are from Fort Hall," Loether said. "However, we've had
students from about every Shoshoni Indian reservation in the West over
time. Shoshoni from Nevada, Wyoming, and Utah have all attended our
classes, as well as Comanche, who speak a dialect of Shoshoni."

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