Keeping Native tongues out of the pickling jar (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

Keeping Native tongues out of the pickling jar

After decades devoted to breathing life into dying California languages,
linguist Leanne Hinton views her profession's value as far more than
academic

[photo inset - Hinton as a Berkeley undergrad, circa 1965, with an
unidentified friend and a state-of-the art Uher portable reel-to-reel
tape recorder in Supai, Ariz. Because the village had no electricity at
the time, she recharged the machine's batteries with the help of a
generator turned on briefly each evening. (Matt Hinton photo)]

By Barry Bergman, Public Affairs | 07 March 2007
http://www.berkeley.edu/news/berkeleyan/2007/03/07_Hinton.shtml

Leanne Hinton first heard the faint cry of dying languages at the bottom
of Havasu Canyon, a 3,000-foot-deep cut in the Colorado Plateau beloved
by backpackers for its clear, towering waterfalls. A remote branch of
the Grand Canyon reachable only by foot, helicopter, or pack animal,
this ancient chasm is home to the 650-member Havasupai tribe, which has
inhabited the village of Supai for eight centuries. When Hinton, then a
Berkeley undergrad, hiked the eight-mile trail down to the village in
the summer of 1964, the Havasupais had no system of written language.

Hinton was instrumental in changing that. And that summer in Supai
changed her as well, planting the seeds of a career — and a calling —
as a champion of vanishing Indian languages, working closely with
tribal members throughout California to combat further erosion of the
state's ever-dwindling language diversity. As part of Berkeley's
linguistics faculty since 1978, including three years as department
chair, she has made it her mission — through both her writings and her
hands-on language conferences and workshops — to keep the fires of
Native languages burning.

"When we lose languages we're losing knowledge," says the soft-spoken
Hinton, who estimates that of the more than 100 languages indigenous to
what is now California, only half still have living speakers. "We're
losing not just a set of words or a grammar — and of course that's very
important to linguists — but, more broadly, we're losing whole
philosophical systems, oral-literature systems, ceremonial systems, and
social systems along with the language. So language is one of an array
of cultural phenomena that are going away."

For Hinton, however, the wider impacts of such losses are secondary to
the toll on — and the inspiration of — the people whose ancestors were
fluent in Karuk, Miwok, Mutsun, and scores of languages and dialects
that today have only a few, if any, remaining speakers.

"I'm really involved in this because of the passion of the people in
these communities who are losing languages," explains Hinton, who last
year received a Cultural Freedom Award from the Lannan Foundation. "The
important thing about language survival is that people see it as a part
of their human rights. And it is. People have the right to retain their
language, and have a right to retain their culture if that's what they
want to do."

An accidental linguist

[photo inset - Longtime linguistics-faculty member Leanne Hinton in her
Dwinelle Hall office. (Peg Skorpinski photo)]

Growing up in La Jolla, Hinton never expected to make a career of
preserving and resurrecting moribund languages, or even — as was
customary then in linguistics — merely documenting them. "My own
journey to the languages of California has been long and full of
detours," she wrote in the introduction to her 1994 book Flutes of
Fire. The journey began, fittingly, in Arizona, with a language,
Havasupai, that is relatively robust.

Hinton traveled to Supai not as a linguist but as a budding
ethnomusicologist. Her father, a retired marine biologist, is the
renowned folk musician Sam Hinton, and she herself studied folk and
ethnic music well into grad school. Her change in direction was set
when she told her academic adviser, the late Berkeley folklorist Alan
Dundes, that she hoped to do field work somewhere within driving
distance over the summer break.

"He just said right out, 'Well, the Havasupais might be an interesting
place to go, no one's really studied their music,'" she recalls.

What the 22-year-old undergrad found — beyond new friends and a culture
that took her in and reshaped her outlook — was that "sung and spoken
language were very different from each other," a discovery that
fascinated her and became the basis of a course she would later teach
at Berkeley. "There were all kinds of very interesting things going on
in the texts of the music," such as the use of archaic words and
non-word sounds that nonetheless conveyed meaning. "I was very
interested in this whole notion of meaning versus words," she says.
"What really got me into linguistics was my interest in that aspect of
ethnomusicology."

Hinton eventually went on to earn her Ph.D. in linguistics at UC San
Diego, and soon accepted a teaching job with the University of Texas.
The Havasupais, meanwhile — for whom she'd been writing a monthly
newspaper column on "how to write your language" since her grad-school
days — asked her to head up their fledgling bilingual-education
program. She accepted, making the 900-mile trip to Supai from Dallas
every two weeks.

The experience was an eye-opener for Hinton. Havasupai "is not what we
call a moribund language, because kids are still learning it," she
explains, pronouncing it "a little bit endangered." But tribal leaders,
worried by the growing encroachment of English on their ancestral
tongue, viewed the burgeoning bilingual-ed movement of the 1970s as a
model they could apply successfully in their own schools. Many other
North American tribes, says Hinton, were also creating programs to
teach a range of subjects in students' Indian languages.

"They saw bilingual education as a way to turn around the process of
language decline they had been going through, and that had started, of
course, with the schools," she says. "They had gone through this long
period of boarding-school education, where the languages were
absolutely not allowed in the schools and weren't allowed on the
playgrounds, or in the dorms, or anywhere, as a way to try to actually
kill off the languages and have everybody become monolingual English
speakers.

"So this was an opportunity, all of a sudden, for the languages to come
back to school, and to regain some of the respect from tribal members
that they had lost," she says. That, however, required a standardized
writing system, something most Western tribes didn't have. Hinton
worked with the tribe to develop one, and in 1984 published the first
Havasupai dictionary.

Yet even though children could speak Havasupai — "one of only 20
[Native] languages in North America that kids are still learning at
home," Hinton says — she detected some problems. The most serious was
the lack of immersion in the second language, with teachers and
students alike constantly slipping back into English.

"Even with Havasupais, where everyone knew the language, teachers would
start out in English, saying, 'Okay, kids, today we're going to talk
about the colors in Havasupai,'" she says. "Teachers would tell me,
'When I write Havasupai I think in English, and translate.' Because
writing itself was sort of this English thing that you do, and it was
hard to transfer."

"It got me very interested in the whole idea of immersion as a
language-teaching method and as a way of interacting," Hinton adds. By
the early 1980s — by which time she was an assistant professor of
linguistics at Berkeley, and accepting invitations from California
tribes to speak on the topic of teaching language — the technique was
of far more than mere academic interest.

Speaking equals success

In addition to leading language workshops with a focus on immersion,
Hinton began writing a monthly column for News From Native California,
a journal started by Berkeley publisher Malcolm Margolin. (She retired
the column after 10 years, collecting some of the essays in edited form
in Flutes of Fire.) In 1992 she joined Margolin and Tongva/Ajachemem
artist and tribal activist L. Frank Manriquez in putting together a
major conference on how to save Indian languages, an event she views as
a watershed.

"It was a very historic conference," she says. "Before that, everybody
was doing their own separate things, and feeling pretty lonesome. And
all of a sudden they were with other people who shared the same
interests. It was a tremendously positive, emotional gathering."

The conference gave birth to a group called Advocates for Indigenous
California Language Survival (AICLS), with Hinton as a founding board
member. The nonprofit now runs a number of programs aimed at putting
into practice an essential key to language survival, but which Hinton
says came as something of a surprise: the need for new speakers of the
old languages.

"To a linguist this was a real learning experience, because when
linguists say, 'Oh, we've got to save these languages,' they often mean
'let's document them,'" observes Hinton. And while she agrees that
documentation is "exceedingly important," it's not enough to save a
language. "A lot of people were saying that 'documenting the language
is pickling the language — we don't want documentation, we want new
speakers, and that's what we want to focus on.'"

And that, in fact, is where Hinton has focused much of her own energy —
that is, when she isn't teaching Berkeley students, directing the
Survey for California and Other Indian Languages, curating the sound
collections at the Hearst Museum and the Berkeley Language Center,
conducting linguistics research, or writing books and articles. (In
addition to works of scholarship, her eight published books include How
to Keep Your Language Alive, a handbook for one-on-one teaching of
endangered languages, and a children's book, Ishi's Tale of Lizard, a
1993 nominee for a PEN Center USA West Literary Award.)

Under the auspices of AICLS, Hinton oversees weeklong "Breath of Life"
workshops on campus every other summer — "I had originally called it
the Lonely Hearts Language Club," she laughs, "but I was overruled" —
at which tribal members gather to learn new techniques for learning,
teaching, researching, and preserving languages that have no speakers.
She also created the Master-Apprentice Program, which pairs an elder
speaker with a younger tribal member who wishes to learn the language.

And whether or not a particular language still has a living speaker,
Hinton makes sure those interested in endangered languages are able to
take full advantage of Berkeley's archives, which she says "represent
one of the largest collection of documents on California Indian
languages in the world, maybe the biggest."

"One of the most important things people learn is that they can come
back here anytime," she says. "A lot of people say they were terrified
of Berkeley, that they would never have come on their own. That they
are actually allowed to go into a library or an archive and study the
materials is something they had no idea about."

Such efforts, Hinton believes, are paying off.

"I think what constitutes success is people using the language," she
explains. "And what I see is that people are. Any word they know,
they're figuring out places where they can use it every day — tribal
councils saying, 'Okay, you have to vote yes or no in our language,
even if those are the only two words we know.' People are developing
their own archives and libraries with copies of all the materials on
the language. People are developing curriculum materials, dictionaries,
phrase books. And so what's happening is that the languages are coming
into use again."

As a preface to Flutes of Fire, Hinton offers up a Maidu tale that
explains the origin of Indian languages and provides the book's title.
Mouse, the story goes, was sitting atop the assembly house, "playing
his flutes and dropping coals through the smokehole," when Coyote
interrupted him. As a consequence, only people in the middle of the
house received fire; today, when the others talk, "their teeth chatter
with the cold." The reason Indians have so many different languages,
the tale concludes, is that "all did not receive an equal share of
fire."

For many, the fire is in danger of going out. Hinton — who still, four
decades after her first visit to Supai, finds it "much more satisfying
to be using my linguistic knowledge for some kind of real-world
benefit, rather than just writing for other linguists" — is doing her
best to fan the flames.

****

Hinton is scheduled to speak on "Native American Languages and Music:
The Role of the Archives" on March 8, at 7 p.m. in the Hearst Museum
Gallery. For details, visit the museum's website at
hearstmuseum.berkeley.edu or call 642-3682.