Language summit struggles against 'slow-motion massacre' (fwd)

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Language summit struggles against 'slow-motion massacre'

Posted: June 08, 2007
by: Jerry Reynolds / Indian Country Today
http://www.indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=1096415178

WASHINGTON - Maintaining languages that are spoken by a dwindling number of
speakers can be lonely and isolating work for individuals, which is why
Suzan Shown Harjo considered the encouragements of the occasion a leading
feature of a Native language summit in Washington June 4.

''I thought it was awfully good, because it brought together so many people
who have been doing good work,'' she said after the summit. Gatherings of
Indian people from across the land create a collective wisdom that get
people ''beyond yourself'' and into the work again with the energy of many,
she added.

Harjo, of the Morning Star Institute in Washington, helped to open the
proceedings with a reference to the history of her own Muscogee Creek
Nation. The Muscogee were actually mashed into a tribe made up of multiple
tribes that were mostly force-marched to Oklahoma Territory during the
infamous Removal Era of the 19th century. The result is that approximately
40 dialects and languages, including Euchee of Siouan linguistic stock, are
spoken now within the nation. But few speakers remain of the different
single dialects and languages. The Muscogee Creek are not unique in their
linguistic history, she said.

Sounding a cooperative note, she said that Bear Butte in present-day South
Dakota was a spiritually important locale to perhaps all of 60 historical
Plains tribes. At Bear Butte, warriors laid their weapons on the ground,
setting aside anything that did not have to do with the purpose at hand.
Harjo said the message was worth remembering in a setting where many people
have done different work in the realm of Native language.

The audience of almost 100 people from Native communities nationwide - and
for that matter, Canada and New Zealand - then heard from an array of
speakers who described best practices in language revitalization;
advertised the resources of the federal government, nonprofit grant-making
organizations, universities, libraries and tribes; and shared stories of
war and triumph from the struggle to save Native languages and cultures.

Richard Littlebear, president of Chief Dull Knife College in Lame Deer,
Mont., on the Northern Cheyenne lands, related a personal history with an
all-too-familiar ring to it in Indian country - education at a BIA boarding
school, training as a high school English teacher, ''all angled towards
promoting English, and for a long time that's the way it was. I said, 'No,
we don't need Indian, Native American languages, we don't need Cheyenne. We
don't need another language. All we need to know here is English.'

''Finally about 1980, I started making this, what I would characterize as a
slow-motion epiphany, into becoming an advocate, a very strong advocate, of
our Native languages. Because all through my educational experience, it
seemed to me like somebody had been lying to me about my own language, and
about where I came from and what my identity was as a Northern Cheyenne
person. ... It seems like I must have learned a new word, because I've been
using 'slow motion' a whole bunch here lately. But it seems to me like back
in 1492, a slow-motion massacre started. It gained in intensity in the late
1800s in the northern Plains territory, where they were actually killing us.
The massacres were happening. Now, it has slowed down a little bit. But the
massacres that started in 1492 are still happening today. They are hitting
right at the heart of us, of who we are, because they are attacking our
languages and our culture. The slow-motion massacre is occurring in
curricula, it's occurring in media, it's occurring in the books that we
read, it's occurring in the loss of our languages. And if we do not do
anything to stop this, then we are accomplices in the slow-motion massacre
of our languages, and of our culture. We've got to do something about
this.''

For the first time June 4, Ryan Wilson said, a grass-roots advocacy brigade
of the same mind had come to Washington. Wilson, president of the National
Alliance to Save Native Languages, committed the alliance to organizing and
sponsoring the summit. During a transition between speaker panels, he
surveyed the wide array of people in the National Museum of the American
Indian's Rasmuson Theater and said most of them would be visiting
congressional members and staff on Capitol Hill June 5. There they would
make the case for continued funding of the Administration for Native
Americans' Native language grants program, as well as for a full
appropriation to the Esther Martinez Native American Languages Preservation
Act of 2006, with its all-important provisions for Native language nests and
immersion-learning courses.

''That hasn't happened before,'' Wilson said.

Reference guide launched at summit

WASHINGTON - At a June 4 summit devoted to revitalizing Native languages,
the National Museum of the American Indian, Morning Star Institute and the
Administration for Native Americans unveiled a reference guide to the
establishment and accessing of Native language archives and repositories.

The nearly 300-page publication, also available on DVD, is the result of a
year and a half's research and collaboration between Morning Star's Suzan
Shown Harjo, Helen Maynor Scheirbeck of NMAI, an advisory group and many
other Native and non-Native contributors. It contains a report on how to
build a repository of Native language materials, either virtual or
physical. The publication, ''Native Language Preservation: A Reference
Guide for Establishing Archives and Repositories,'' is available from ANA
at (202) 690-7776.