Language Top Priority

[Andre Cramblit]

Language restoration a top priority at Mashantucket conference
© Indian Country Today April 05, 2006. All Rights Reserved
Posted: April 05, 2006
by: Gale Courey Toensing / Indian Country Today



MASHANTUCKET, Conn. - Buffy Sainte-Marie, an entertainment icon both  
within and outside Indian country, expressed the overarching theme of  
the recent Mashantucket language conference - that language is not a  
part of a people's culture; it is a people's culture.

Sainte-Marie, who was born at Piapot (Cree) Reserve in Saskatchewan  
and raised in Maine and Massachusetts, was the keynote speaker on the  
second day of the conference, which took place Feb. 22 - 24 at the  
Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center. ''The Mashantucket  
Language Conference: Preservation and Reclamation of Indigenous  
Languages'' was the third biennial event exploring the academic and  
cultural uses of aboriginal languages.

More than 150 people from all over the United States and Canada  
attended the conference where 30 presenters, including linguists,  
artists, students, musicians, poets and storytellers, described their  
wide-ranging scholarly research, language restoration projects,  
pedagogy and art.

Sainte-Marie spoke for more than an hour and a half to a captivated  
audience about her work in language education, sometimes gliding  
across the auditorium floor or punctuating a point by stamping her foot.

''Language and culture cannot be separated. Language is vital to  
understanding our unique cultural perspectives. Language is a tool  
that is used to explore and experience our cultures and the  
perspectives that are embedded in our cultures,'' Sainte-Marie said.

Famous as an Academy Award-winning singer/songwriter, Sainte-Marie  
has a teaching degree, a degree in oriental philosophy and a  
doctorate in fine arts from the University of Massachusetts. In 1968,  
she founded the Nihewan Foundation for American Indian Education and  
helped develop the Cradleboard Teaching Project, an ever-evolving  
interactive multimedia CD-ROM teaching tool that presents curricula,  
including aboriginal language, in culturally meaningful ways for  
Indian children.

This new way of learning gets rid of the old stereotypes of ''dead  
text about dead Indians,'' Sainte-Marie said.

''What we're looking for is effectiveness in revitalizing our  
languages, in saving the cultures of our communities, and in building  
the self-esteem of people in those communities and passing into the  
future generation the yet-evolving wisdom and skills of Native  
American cultures,'' said Sainte-Marie.

Toward the end of her presentation, an audience member asked for a  
song, and Sainte-Marie obliged.

Using her microphone as a drum, she sang ''Relocation Blues,'' a  
plangent song about the former government practice both in the United  
States and Canada of removing children from their homes and placing  
them in boarding schools where they were forbidden to speak their  
native languages.

Among the other presenters that day was Drew Haden Taylor, an award- 
winning playwright, author, filmmaker and humorist who recently  
published his 17th book, ''Me Funny,'' about Native humor. Hayden  
Taylor described himself as half-Ojibway and half-Caucasian.

''That makes me an 'occasion' - either a special occasion or, at the  
very least, a memorable occasion,'' Hayden Taylor said, cracking up  
the audience.

Hayden Taylor grew up on the Curve Lake Reserve in Ontario, where he  
would fall asleep to the sound of family members talking and laughing  
under a tree in the yard. Starting out as a writer, he noticed that  
most of the work by Native writers was ''dark, angry, depressing,  
bleak and sad; and I began to think, is this the kind of writing I  
have to do?''

Humor, he realized, was the ''shield and sense of sanity'' that  
allowed Native people to survive 500 years of oppression.

''I wanted to explore the Native funny bone,'' Hayden Taylor said.  
Native people like to tease a lot and Native humor is often self- 
deprecatory, he said, but it doesn't reinvent the wheel. What makes  
Native people laugh also makes non-Native people laugh, Hayden Taylor  
said.

Klewetua, aka Rodney Sayers, gave a presentation called ''Water Was  
Our Highway,'' reflecting the rivers and ocean-based landscape of  
Ahswinnis, an area now known as Port Alberni, British Columbia, where  
the Hupacasath First Nation artist lives and works.

Sayers is a ''student of language'' who inherited his tribe's  
language program by default - no one else applied for the job, he  
said. In addition to his work in the language revitalization project,  
Sayers is a river guide with his tribe's tours; and both the language  
and river work shape his production as an artist, he said.

A PowerPoint presentation showed, among other things, an image of  
mountain range that marked the easternmost boundary of the tribe's  
territory. The mountain range is called ''Jagged Peaks Pointing  
Upwards,'' Sayers said.

''We have restored as many place-names of our territories as  
possible, and we don't name places or things after living people or  
people at all because when you move on you don't want things attached  
to you in this world,'' he explained.

Many of the tribes' elders - who were fluent speakers and, therefore,  
culture-keepers - have passed on, which makes the work difficult,  
Sayers said.

The language, called the Nuu Chah Nulth Barkely dialect, originated  
around the activities of the tribe's ancestors, many of which  
centered on fishing and river activities.

''A lot of those activities are gone or have few participants so the  
language has become obscure and hard to apply to everyday life and  
difficult to translate into English for learning purposes,'' Sayers  
said.

The language project has compiled a phonetic alphabet with some icons  
not present in the English language and is about to publish its third  
language book.

''Really, what we need to do is get people talking our language in  
our homes. My mother was a fluent speaker with a huge amount of  
knowledge of our history, but she never taught me. She went to  
residential schools as a child, so I'm not sure if they took the  
spirit out of her, but she's gone now and I'll never know,'' Sayers  
said.

'''The Water Was Our Highway' is the name of my presentation, but  
we've got to get rid of the past tense. The water is our highway and  
it's the way we're going to travel and it's a matter of understanding  
our language and applying it, rather than just thinking of it as a  
thing that we have to achieve,'' Sayers said.

.:.

André Cramblit: andre.p.cramblit.86 at alum.dartmouth.org is the  
Operations Director Northern California Indian Development Council  
NCIDC (http://www.ncidc.org) is a non-profit that meets the  
development needs of American Indians

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