Keeping a language alive (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

Keeping a language alive
Squamish Elders circle around the issue

Saturday, January 7, 2006
By Reporter
Jane Emerick Special to the Chief
http://www.squamishchief.com/madison%5CWQuestion.nsf/0/298A8C1658543744882570EE00247B9B?OpenDocument

Only two elders in the Squamish Valley retain the ability to fluently
speak Squamish Nation’s language. Alex Williams and Addie Kermeen are
the two remaining Squamish Valley citizens who can still speak their
native language, and they’re trying to pass on their knowledge.

Several Squamish Valley elders are working towards teaching their people
and the community about the Squamish Nation culture. And they say their
native language plays a large role in this education.

“You can’t teach our culture without our language,” said Shirley
(Hum-Te-Ya) Toman. “Teaching our children in English makes it harder.”

Thanks to residential schools and the Canadian government’s history of
trying to assimilate the First Nations Peoples, the language has been
virtually wiped out.

In the schools, First Nation’s children were not allowed to speak their
native languages and would be punished for doing so.

“You were strapped or put in the closet,” said Toman, who spent five
years at St. Paul’s residential school in North Vancouver. “Some had
their tongues pierced with a pin and told it was so they would remember
to not speak their language.”

Toman said she had already lost the language when she attended
residential school because she was the second generation of attendees
and her parents had been told to not teach their children their native
tongue.

“We didn’t learn the language because it would threaten our living
standards at the schools,” she said. “By not knowing the language we
couldn’t be punished for speaking it at the schools.”

Both Kermeen and Williams were able to avoid attending the confines of
Canada’s residential schools by escaping the Provincial police who
enforced First Nation’s children to attend residential schools from
1879 to 1986.

“They hid me away,” said Williams, speaking of his parents and the
elders in his community.

Toman, Kermeem, and Williams are all members of the Squamish Valley
Elder’s Circle, who came together, along with six others, 14 years ago
to help heal the suffering they endured at the residential schools.

“I lost everything my parents taught me at those schools,” said Marjery
(Lats-Mat) Natrall, a Squamish Elder who attended St. Paul’s. “And once
you loose it you can never get it back.”

Bob Baker, a Squamish Elder, spent seven years at St. Michael’s
residential school in Alert Bay and said the government went so far as
to split up children from the same communities so they wouldn’t be able
to speak to each other in their different native languages.

“In order to get our people out of the language and the culture they
moved us to where nobody spoke our language,” he said.

“My Dad said there is no use teaching you [the language] you will only
go back to school and get beat up,” said Chief Eleanor Andrews, who
spent eight years at the Sechelt residential school and is a member of
the Squamish Elders.

Andrews said she still knows some of her native words but it has become
difficult for her to pronounce them.

The Squamish Valley education department is working in the community to
preserve the native language.

Native dance classes are held twice a month at Totem Hall, where the
Squamish language is incorporated as a part of the singing and
drumming.

Williams was involved with the education department in the creation of a
CD ROM that teaches about the Squamish language. The CD was created
through a grant from the First Peoples Language and Culture Council in
Victoria.

“We are in the process of creating our second language CD ROM,” said
Rose Reimer, the administrative coordinator for the Squamish Valley
Education department.

She said preserving the Squamish Nation language is important because it
teaches First Nation’s children in the community about their history.

“For our children to succeed they need to know who they are and where
they come from and they have to remember the elders and the ancestors
that came before them and what their struggles were and to honor that,”
she said.

Reimer said she believes the strength of Squamish’s language will
continue to grow.

“As long as we have the recordings and people are willing to learn, the
future of the language will always be there,” she said.