Saving ‘DNA of a culture’(fwd)

[phil cash cash]

Saving ‘DNA of a culture’: Doctoral student recording endangered
language of Sandia Pueblo’s natives

The University of Chicago Chronicle
November 3, 2005 - Vol. 25 No. 4

By Jennifer Carnig
News Office
http://chronicle.uchicago.edu/051103/endangered-language.shtml

The results of Erin Debenport’s research in New Mexico hold more than
her dissertation in the balance—the future of an entire language is
resting on her work.

Debenport, a doctoral student in Linguistics, is the recipient of a
Documenting Endangered Languages grant, a new multiyear effort that
partners the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National
Science Foundation in an endeavor to preserve records of “key
languages” before they become extinct. She was awarded a $40,000
fellowship—one of 13, with most having been awarded to faculty at major
universities—to support her research in recording and revitalizing
Southern Tiwa, a Native American language spoken at Sandia Pueblo, New
Mexico.

Debenport is part of “a rescue mission to save endangered languages,”
said NEH Chairman Bruce Cole. “Language is the DNA of a culture, and it
is the vehicle for the traditions, customs, stories, history and beliefs
of a people. A lost language is a lost culture.”

About half of the 6,000 to 7,000 languages currently used in the world
are headed for oblivion, experts at the NEH and NSF estimate.

“Fortunately, with the aid of modern technology and these federal funds,
linguistic scholars can document and record these languages before they
become extinct,” Cole said.

In Debenport’s project, she is recording and archiving audio materials
in Southern Tiwa and training tribal members in linguistic methods.
This will allow for the creation of an online dictionary, as well as a
dialogue-based curriculum for teaching the language. The result will be
an archive of a language that had never been recorded, and the immersion
of non-Tiwa speaking members of the tribe in the language of their
parents and ancestors.

Southern Tiwa is a Mesoamerican heritage language dating back to
precolonial times, one of four different languages from three different
language families in the New Mexico Pueblo community. Sandia Pueblo,
where Southern Tiwa is spoken, is located 10 miles north of Albuquerque
and has a population of 500 to 600 people. Less than 40 members of the
pueblo are able to speak the language, none younger than 58.

As with many other indigenous communities in North America, the
“postcontact” or postcolonial period has been typified by a shift away
from indigenous language use, Debenport explained. In this case, both
English and Spanish have fundamentally replaced the aboriginal
language. The proximity of the pueblo to Albuquerque, combined with a
history of forced assimilation in Indian boarding schools and
stigmatization, has only accelerated the trend.

A sign on the wall of the Sandia Pueblo Learning Resource Center
illustrates the direness of the situation. It reads “Tiwa” with a red
slash through it. The caption below says, “Once, we were told we could
not speak our language. Don’t let it be lost again.”

“In many ways, this is a critical time; if something isn’t done to save
this language soon, it will die out,” Debenport said. “But things are
also more complicated than that in many ways. Language is political
power. It is emblematic of sovereignty. There are issues of
colonization, power, race, religion, identity, economics and politics
all wrapped up in this one issue.”

This time also marks a turning point in the tribe’s history. Once
dominated by severe economic depression, the pueblo now runs a
successful casino. With the influx of revenue come tourists,
developers, and land and economic disputes, with many outsiders now
claiming that they, too, are members of the tribe. One way that people
can prove their connection to the community is through the Southern
Tiwa language.

In her work with the pueblo, Debenport must navigate her way around all
of these issues. She is not a native Southern Tiwa speaker, and in many
ways her interest in the language carries with it the painful baggage of
the record of indignities forced on Native Americans.

The history of anthropologic and language research is intertwined with a
history of missionary work, colonialism and a pattern of members of the
academe treating indigenous communities as “objects or a living
museum,” Debenport said.

Only recently, she continued, has a real interest in reframing these
relationships and forging genuine partnerships between researchers and
the community been demonstrated. One of the first steps has been to
expand the idea of what it means to be an “expert.”

Debenport’s current project builds on three years of predissertation
fieldwork at Sandia Pueblo, and an ongoing partnership with the tribe’s
education staff, the real experts, Debenport said.

On its own, the community created a position within its Education and
Wellness Department to concentrate on issues of language and cultural
preservation. In the fall of 2002, Debenport, then working with a
linguist at the University of New Mexico, was invited to work with the
tribe to create a dictionary. The resulting work is an orthography
capable of accurately capturing the sounds of Southern Tiwa, while
remaining close enough to the English alphabet to encourage ease of
use. A basic interactive dictionary was created with the capability of
sorting by English, Tiwa, semantic field and part of speech.

In many ways, this first step was revolutionary for the tribal
community. Southern Tiwa has for thousands of years been an oral
language. The choice to embrace a written form was not made lightly,
but most agreed it was that or risk the extinction of the language.

Subsequent independent work with the tribal education staff has built on
the steps already taken, with Debenport and three native speakers
already designing a curriculum for use in adult language classes and
recording audio materials to supplement each lesson, as well as
recording more lengthy texts for the sake of preservation.

The partnership worked so well that Debenport was invited to stay and
continue working with the tribe’s education team on the dictionary and
curriculum, which soon will be introduced in Head Start classes. She
also was given permission to work on her dissertation and to make
extensive recordings of the language.

“I’m simply aiding the tribe in the way that they’ve asked me to,”
Debenport said. “And in exchange, I get to see firsthand this amazing
historical moment when a language is moving from oral to written.”

One issue she had to overcome in the negotiations was the question of
where the materials would be kept—would they be Debenport’s or the
University’s, or would they belong to the pueblo?

“Because language typifies culture, there is an understandably
conservative attitude toward letting outsiders come in and study them
and their language,” she said. “And there’s also the concern about this
being used for profit or in ways they can’t control.”

So the written, and possibly oral, materials will be kept at the pueblo.

“It’s a real personal relationship,” Debenport continued. “There’s a lot
of trust on both ends. They trust me with their culture, and I trust
them with my dissertation.”

But what she will receive may be more valuable even than her doctoral
degree. “Just being here is an honor for me,” Debenport said. “I will
gladly commit the rest of my life to seeing this project through.”