Legislator steps up fight to save tribe's language (fwd)

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Monday, January 23, 2006

Legislator steps up fight to save tribe's language

By Paul Carrier, Portland Press Herald Writer
Copyright © 2006 Blethen Maine Newspapers Inc.
http://pressherald.mainetoday.com/news/state/060123penobscots.shtml

AUGUSTA — Michael Sockalexis, 58, remembers when he and other Penobscot
children were told by their teachers not to speak their own language at
school.

Today, Sockalexis says, his grandchildren eagerly soak up Penobscot
vocabulary in an after-school program on Indian Island. They get so
excited about what they are learning, he said, that they can't wait to
share it with their proud grandfather.

   Sockalexis, who represents his tribe in the Legislature, wants to
build on such efforts and expand the Penobscot Nation's struggle to
preserve its language. He has filed a bill "to develop a program to
maintain and preserve the Penobscot language."

   The bill would deposit $300,000 in a Penobscot Language Preservation
Fund operated by the state Department of Education. The state would use
the money to help the tribe save its language, and to provide matching
funds for additional aid from the National Endowment for the
Humanities.

   Maine's four Indian tribes - the Penobscot Nation, Passamaquoddy
Tribe, Houlton Band of Maliseets and Aroostook Band of Micmacs - speak
languages that are closely related. Those tribes and the Abenakis
comprise what is known as the Wabanaki Confederacy.

   Precise figures on the use of the Penobscot language are hard to come
by, but Sockalexis said there are only "a handful of traditional
speakers" among the tribe's more than 2,300 members, more than 1,000 of
whom still live in Maine. Many other Penobscots know some words and
phrases, he said, but they are not fluent.

   "My age group was the last generation to be immersed in it" at home
as children, Sockalexis said, but he is no longer fluent. "I used to
(speak Penobscot) as a young kid," Sockalexis said, but in the years
that followed, "I lost it."

   The goal now is to reclaim the language by instilling it in the
tribe's children, Sockalexis said, because Penobscot "is at a tipping
point" and the key to preserving it "is getting it back to a
conversational language."

   The tribe, which has a reservation on Indian Island, is working hard
to do just that, using an after-school program that serves all students
in the K-8 school, as well as an immersion summer camp at which students
speak nothing but Penobscot.

   Sockalexis said his request for state funding, and the matching funds
it would attract, would allow the tribe to move the language program
back into the regular classroom, where it was before the money ran out.

   Tribal leaders in Maine say preserving native languages is important
so the younger generation can understand its roots and so older people
who grew up speaking an indigenous language can express themselves in a
way that may be more natural to them than speaking English.

   "I prefer to speak (Passamaquoddy)," said Wayne Newell, 63, of Indian
Township, a Passamaquoddy language coordinator and an authority on all
of Maine's tribal languages. "When we were kids, that's all you spoke.
That's all you had. That's all you saw," he said.

   Now, Newell said, native children of all tribes are unlikely to
become fluent in their native languages, or to speak them at all,
unless they learn them at school. "All of the indigenous languages in
North America are very much in a challenged situation," he said, and
Penobscot is no exception.

   Newell said efforts like those of Sockalexis are important because
language defines people. As Edwina Mitchell of Indian Island, a
Maliseet who works for the Penobscot Nation, put it: "I think Maliseet.
That's why it's sometimes difficult for me to put something down in
writing," because of the differences between Maliseet and English.

   Newell noted that verbs are more important than nouns in the
Passamaquoddy language. And nouns in the family of languages that
includes both Passamaquoddy and Penobscot are either animate or
inanimate, in much the same way that nouns in French are masculine or
feminine.

   "You can have a complete sentence in Passamaquoddy with one word,"
Newell said. He said there are some English words that have no
equivalent in native languages, or that translate very differently.

    There is no Passamaquoddy word for "wild," for example, because "we
have no concept of it" as Indians, Newell said.

   In Passamaquoddy, "wood-frame house" translates as "white man's
wigwam," and the Passamaquoddy word for "white man" is not a
descriptive term at all, but a question: "Who is this?"

   "Whenever you lose a language, you lose more than just a language,"
Newell said. "If I told you a (humorous) story in the Passamaquoddy
language, it would be extremely funny to Passamaquoddy speakers," he
said, but translate it into English and the humor is largely lost.

   "The culture is transmitted through the language," Sockalexis said,
making it especially important to make Penobscot a conversational
language once again.


   "There are legends in Penobscot that are lost in translation,"
Sockalexis said, reinforcing Newell's point that "if you take away a
language, your field of vision becomes more limited."

Staff Writer Paul Carrier can be contacted at 622-7511 or
at:pcarrier at pressherald.com