O'odham linguist comes to Washington (fwd)

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O'odham linguist comes to Washington

© Indian Country Today January 04, 2006. All Rights Reserved
Posted: January 04, 2006
by: Philip Burnham / Indian Country Today
http://www.indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=1096412202

WASHINGTON - Hearing a phrase of Tohono O'odham in Washington is like
catching sight of a rare and beautiful bird. It's a language of hushed,
lilting sounds, perfect for making songs about rain and corn or writing
poems about desert clouds.

That's how Ofelia Zepeda, linguist and writer, began a public talk at
the National Museum of the American Indian one evening late this fall -
in O'odham, her native tongue. She was in town to attend meetings on
Native language preservation and to sign copies of ''Home: Native
People in the Southwest,'' a companion book she co-authored for a
recent exhibit at the Heard Museum in Phoenix.

Like many people native to the Southwest, Zepeda's life is a braid of
different languages and lands.

Her parents crossed over from Sonora, Mexico in the 1950s and settled on
the periphery of the O'odham reservation in Arizona. Zepeda was born in
a wooden row house in Stanfield, surrounded by fields of cotton, and
didn't speak any English until she was 7. She told her audience she
felt ''too lazy'' for the labor of picking cotton and decided to get an
education instead, becoming the first in her family to finish high
school. In fact, she may be the first person in American history to
earn a doctorate in linguistics and a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship
for being too ''lazy.''

Zepeda is co-founder and director of the American Indian Language
Development Institute in Tucson, Ariz., a summer residential program
that trains teachers how to instruct Native languages and integrate
them into school curricula.

Endangered languages are a global problem, Zepeda urged. ''Language
shift,'' which began in earnest with European contact in the Americas,
has only lately been perceived as a serious threat to tribes. English
speakers don't think much about language, she said flatly, ''the way
they don't think about breathing.'' Other communities fear their last
linguistic gasp is near at hand.

Zepeda's tribe numbers about 22,000, half of whom speak O'odham, a
percentage many tribes would envy. Not all of its speakers are even
bilingual. Zepeda recounted translating in a city court recently for an
O'odham in her 20s who couldn't speak English, a sign the tribal
language is not the sole preserve of elders.

But young people aren't learning the language at home, said Zepeda, and
in school they get stuck in O'odham classes that are isolated from the
rest of the curriculum. Asked about the future of her mother tongue,
she gazed around the auditorium and replied sheepishly, ''I can't lie,
because my friends are here.'' Zepeda went on to explain she is still
waiting for tribal leaders to do something decisive about language
loss.

They did do something about the old tribal name, Papago, a word derived
from the O'odham phrase for ''bean eaters.'' ''I haven't heard that
word in a long time,'' Zepeda laughed. She mused that a novice speaker
probably approached a tribal member long ago and mixed up the question
''Who are you?'' with ''What are you eating?'' - and his answer stuck
ever after as their public name. In 1986 the tribe put forward its own
words for ''desert people'' - Tohono O'odham - and reclaimed its
traditional name through an act of Congress.

A practical writing system for O'odham, devised in the 1960s, has
official status. But aside from Zepeda's books and an occasional
article in the tribal newspaper, the script is confined to scholarly
efforts.

''The nice thing about language,'' Zepeda said, ''is that it's something
that can be taught.'' In fact, Native Hawaiians and the Maori of New
Zealand are pulling languages back from the edge of extinction. But she
is wary of what could happen even to a seemingly strong language like
O'odham if nothing is done to stop the persistent trend of language
drift.

A linguist at the University of Arizona, Zepeda sharpens her language
skills as a working poet. Her poems, often about women, range from an
elegy for an aging centenarian with floor-length white hair to a fond
recollection of the poet's mother, whom the family knew as the ''best
tortilla maker west of the Mississippi.''

Sometimes it's a phrase, sometimes an idea that moves Zepeda; it might
be 20 years before it's ready to be written down. She writes in two
languages, as different from one another as a hawk and a thrush. An
O'odham poem rendered in English, she advised, is more a complement
than a translation.

For all her learning and education, Zepeda, like many O'odham, lacks
''papers.'' She was born at home and has no official documentation of
her origins. After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, she's even had
trouble traveling to Mexico, the land of her ancestors, without an
affidavit testifying to her birth. ''Who was there when I breathed a
first breath?'' she read to the audience from one of her poems. ''Who
knew then I would need witnesses?''

Her parents, illiterate in English, ''spoke a language much too civil
for writing,'' Zepeda said. Those words brought tears to the eyes of a
woman who has picked cotton, published a grammar of O'odham,
established an international name and fought the battle to keep a
soaring language alive.