Linguist, poet, professor encourages students (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

Linguist, poet, professor encourages students

By SUSAN RANDALL, Staff Writer
November 20, 2004
http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=13406877&BRD=1817&PAG=461&dept_id=68561&rfi=6

SIGNAL PEAK - Ofelia Zepeda, linguist, poet, professor and recipient of
the MacArthur Fellowship "genius grant," shared her experience and
poetry Wednesday at Central Arizona College.

She was fortunate to go to a public school, she told the audience, which
included many O'odham middle and high school students, college students
and community members.

There was a time when American Indian children were sent away to
boarding schools and not allowed to use their native languages.

"They were forced to use English," she said, "and for many of them, they
lost their language."

When Zepeda and her older brothers and sisters first went to school,
they could speak no English, only O'odham.

"In our family, our parents and their parents, none of them had
English," she said, "and none of them had ever gone to school. So
school for our family was a relatively new thing."

Stanfield Elementary School was the first place they had to learn and
use the English language.

"It is kind of a strange thing," Zepeda said, "to put a child in a
situation, in a classroom where they don't have access to any of the
information that is going on. Back then it was called, 'sink or swim.'"

And a lot of O'odham children in her classes sank and drowned, she said.
They never learned much English and left school by seventh or eighth
grade.

Zepeda, however, learned to switch back and forth between English at
school and O'odham at home.

She was the first in her family to go to high school and attended Casa
Grande Union High School with Billy Allen, who now teaches social
sciences and Pima language there.

After graduation, she went to CAC.

"I'm not sure why I came here," she told the students. "None of my
parents ever went to school, so there were no models, nobody to follow.

"Actually what I wanted to do was join the military, but my mother
wouldn't let me do that."

Perhaps she went to college, she said, because some of her elementary
school and high school teachers gave her a little more attention than
she was used to.

"When people do that to you as a child, you want to do better," she
said. "And when I came here I had the same thing. I met some very nice
professors here and I worked closely with them and they were very
supportive.

"So I think that was one of the reasons I continued to go on. And I just
kept going and going and going until I was done."

She earned her associate's degree at CAC and her bachelor's degree,
master's degree and doctorate in linguistics at the University of
Arizona, where she was hired.

"But the whole time it was always connected back to what I started
saying about language," she said. "I always had the O'odham language
with me."

Zepeda learned to read O'odham and published "A Papago Grammar," the
first O'odham grammar.

She also began teaching written O'odham to native speakers and teachers.

Not much O'odham literature was available, so Zepeda had her students
write little poems, plays and songs in O'odham. And she began writing
with them.

"That's how I got started writing in O'odham," she said, "for my
students. And I continued writing. I still write in O'odham today."

She found her subjects in the memories of things she had seen and heard
when she was a child. Most of her poetry is about the desert, the rain,
the people in her life. Some poetry she translates into English.

One of those poems is "B 'o 'e-a:g mas 'ab him g ju:ki*" (It is going to
rain) in "Earth Movements," a collection of poems in O'odham and
English with a CD.

Zepeda read it to the group in O'odham, then in English.

Someone said it is going to rain.

I think it is not so.

Because I have not yet felt the earth and the way it holds still in
anticipation.

I think it is not so.

Because I have not yet felt the sky become heavy with moisture of
preparation.

I think it is not so.

Because I have not yet felt the winds move with their coolness.

I think it is not so.

Because I have not yet inhaled the sweet, wet dirt the winds bring.

So, there is no truth that it will rain.


She regrets, Zepeda said, that she never learned to sing. She admires
O'odham people who are beautiful singers and some of her poems contain
songs.

A poem she wrote for daughter begins with the lyrics of a song from the
movie "The Little Mermaid," and moves on to explain how O'odham people
should behave when they visit the ocean.

Tohono O'odham and Akimel O'odham people know the ocean, Zepeda said,
even though they live in the desert.

"Our summer rains come because of the ocean," she said.

When O'odham people visit the ocean, they should greet it, she said.
They should say goodbye when they leave and give the ocean a gift.

"And if we want, we can ask for something."

In the old days, people sometimes asked for and came back with special
powers.

The poem "Ocean Power," in the book "Ocean Power: Poems from the
Desert," is about men from northern Mexico who had never seen the ocean
until they were deported by way of San Diego. The end of the poem says:


We are not ready.

We have not put our minds to what it is we want to give to the ocean.

We do not have cornmeal, feathers, nor do we have songs and prayers
ready.

We have not thought what gift we will ask from the ocean.

Should we ask to be song chasers

Should we ask to be rain makers

Should we ask to be good runners

or should we ask to be heartbreakers.

No, we are not ready to be here at this ocean.


We can still ask the ocean for a gift, Zepeda told the students. "I
doesn't matter that it is 2004."

During her career at the university, Zepeda became director of the
American Indian Studies Program and co-founder of the American Indian
Language Development Institute, a summer institute for American Indian
teachers from the United States and Canada.

She has won numerous awards, edited many collections by American Indian
writers, taught countless classes and is considered the foremost
authority on Tohono O'odham language and literature.

But she said she still will not talk in a group unless someone asks her
opinion, "then I have a lot to say." And she cannot always look at the
faces of the people in an audience.

"All these things that I come with," she said, "it's who I am, being
O'odham. It is difficult to shed and there's no reason to shed it, if
it works with everything else.

"The background you come with can be such an asset in many ways. The
thing that you must learn - and it's not an easy thing to learn - is
how to use it, how to take advantage of it."

Now she and others are working on an urgent problem.

"It is a sad situation," she said. "And it is something that you guys
are a part of and your parents and your grandparents."

Very few young American Indians are learning their language, she said.

"They are not learning it at home, because nobody speaks it at home."

She and others have been teaching O'odham and trying to create
situations where the O'odham language is heard and used by
grandparents, parents and young people, especially young children.

CAC student Dwayne Lopez, male youth commissioner for the National
Congress of American Indians, said American Indian students in some
tribes are required to know their native language before they can
graduate from high school.

Zepeda said that was a good idea. Only a few high schools and middle
schools offer O'odham, and then only as an elective.

She teaches O'odham at the UA and the new community college in Sells.
Allen said O'odham also is taught at Scottsdale Community College on
the Salt River Indian Reservation.

One of the middle school students asked Zepeda how old she is.

"I am very old," she said, "old enough to be a grandmother."

She did not know if she was 49, 50 or 51 because her birth date was
unknown when she started school.

Because she is "so old," she added, she hopes to see more young O'odham
going to the university and getting their doctorates, so she can retire
in 10 or 15 years.


©Casa Grande Valley Newspapers Inc. 2004