Keeping a language alive

[Rrlapier at AOL.COM]

Keeping a language alive: Co-founder of Blackfoot immersion school in 
Browning visits UM this week
By KIM BRIGGEMAN of the Missoulian

    
Blackfeet linguist, poet and teacher Darrell Kipp told students at the 
University of Montana on Tuesday that youngsters in his Cuts Wood School in Browning 
learn their native language more efficiently by using a combination sign and 
oral language. 
MICHAEL GALLACHER/Missoulian    


Blackfeet learning Blackfoot - what a novel concept.

Not long ago it was, Darrell Kipp said Tuesday.

“Twenty years ago, the notion of revitalizing our language was met with 
hostility. That shocks people today,” said Kipp, a Blackfeet and graduate of 
Harvard University.
    
Kipp is on campus at the University of Montana this week, speaking at classes 
and Wednesday night at the Gallagher Business Building about the Piegan 
Institute and the pioneer language immersion school he helped found in Browning.

More than a century of assimilating America's Native people into an 
English-speaking society by “religious and public institutions” was highly effective, 
he said.

“The conditioning of people to reject or replace something as close to them 
as their language was highly effective,” he said.

So when Kipp, Dr. Dorothy Still Smoking and Edward Little Plume launched Cuts 
Wood School in downtown Browning in the mid-1990s, they were met with 
antagonism and resentment on the reservation.

Kipp told of facing the wrath of Blackfeet who told him point-blank that 
speaking the native language was the devil's work. He was called a mercenary, bent 
on exploiting the language in order to sell it.

It wasn't, “Hey, you shouldn't do that,” Kipp said.

“It was, ‘What the hell are you doing? Who in the hell do you think you are? 
What are you trying to be - a big Indian and steal everything?' ”

Perhaps most troubling was the notion that the Cuts Wood School, a K-8 
institution at which only the Blackfoot language is spoken, was out to harm the 
children.

“I think this really reflects the educational standards of Montana, and it's 
certainly an American philosophy, that the only route to success is an 
English-speaking trek,” he said. “Anything less, or anything different, is a serious 
mistake.”

Some saw Cuts Wood School as promoting something bordering on child neglect.

“The fact that you would risk your child's mental stability by proposing to 
have your child talk in an archaic language is close to pure negligence,” he 
said, repeating one charge he heard.

But time and research have proved the language immersion school's value.

Three of the school's graduates are now in college. Others have scored well 
in testing, including four at off-reservation high schools in Cut Bank, Valier 
and Billings.

A master's study by a University of Montana psychology student in 2003 
presented what Kipp called a “very powerful case” that Cuts Wood students actually 
outperform those with public school backgrounds.

“These children have been schooled in a program that never gave them a formal 
English language, yet they go into public schools and excel as English-based 
students,” he said.

How to explain that?

“Here at the University of Montana, how many students come from other 
countries with limited English and max out your Ph.D. programs in science and math?” 
Kipp said.

Cuts Wood also teaches sign language, and the multilingual approach is known 
to succeed in schools, be they American Indian or not.

That success extends to other disciplines, Kipp maintained.

In the Blackfoot language, children can count to a million much quicker than 
in English, for example.

“It's just a shift in a suffix,” he said.

“The thinking is that tribal languages, because they're archaic, are stunted 
in their ability to deal with sophisticated mathematics. The fact of the 
matter is they're able to incorporate all the attributes of modern-day mathematics, 
but because the language works so differently, they often can make quantum 
leaps, like going from 10 to a million (quickly).”

The Blackfoot language also doesn't distinguish between gender.

“Oftentimes you think, how does that reflect, just in world view?” Kipp 
said.

Blackfoot and other tribal languages have a fourth and fifth person in their 
grammatical structure.

“English-speaking people just can't go there,” and are often repulsed by the 
idea of learning sentence structure and diagramming, Kipp said.

He said the Blackfoot language is primarily made up of “timeless verbs,” 
most often in the present tense that describe things in an animate state. The 
term for moose translates to “dark moving into the brush.”

“I think that's a moose,” he said.

The world isn't divided into animate and inanimate objects. In an office in 
the Native American Studies building on campus, he pointed to a bowl of apples, 
a table, a reporter's shirt.

“Using English, they're all dead,” he said. “But you make the next step up 
to science, and you get into physics and chemistry, then you realize the 
table's not dead, and there are things going on in your shirt.”

The Browning school, an offshoot of the Piegan Institute, and another 
launched by the Mohawk tribe were the nation's first American Indian language 
immersion schools. They've been models in recent years for the successful Nkwsum 
(Salish) school in Arlee and the White Clay (Gros Ventres) at Fort Belknap.

In 1990, Congress passed and President George H.W. Bush signed a Native 
American Language bill that “at least acknowledged the legality of speaking our 
language,” Kipp said. “Native American languages were outlawed until 1990.”

Last December, Bush's son signed into law an act providing a competitive 
grant system for native language immersion programs.

“That's a big jump,” said Kipp. “Twenty years ago you were accosted by your 
own people, told to mind your own business and that Native languages were like 
a vase thrown on the ground - broken forever.”

Living language

Darrell Kipp will speak Wednesday night about the work of the Piegan 
Institute in Browning and the emerging national language revitalization movement in 
American Indian communities. The free lecture, at 7 p.m. in the University of 
Montana's Gallagher Business Building, Room 106, is presented by Native American 
Studies department and the Calvin B. Stott Scholar fund.    
    
missoulian.com 


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