Native language hangs on in schools (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

Native language hangs on in schools

Allen Best
Vail, CO Colorado
May 12, 2007
http://www.vaildaily.com/article/20070512/NEWS/70510018/0/FRONTPAGE

CANMORE, Alberta — Only three of the 50 languages once spoken by aboriginals
in Canada are expected to survive into the future.

Those languages — Inuktitut, Cree and Chippewa — each have more than 20,000
speakers.

Some languages are already gone. Others have just a few hundred speakers and
are likely headed to extinction. The language of the Stoney-Nakoda, who live
at the foot of the Canadian Rockies between Calgary and Banff, remains in
doubt.

About 4,000 of the Stoneys remain, although even many of them do not speak
their native language, reports the Rocky Mountain Outlook.

The language suffered after the signing of a treaty in 1877. Children were
then put into schools and encouraged to forsake their language and culture.

In time, this thinking that pressured the Indians to melt into the
mainstream slowed a bit, and in the 1970s the Stoney-Nakoda language became
written.

Now, schools teach the language. But teaching the language, notes the
Outlook, is only part of the equation. Like anything, it has to be
relevant.

As a result, the school at Morley, where the reservation is located, now has
a strong cultural component in its curriculum. In these classes, students
learn about their own culture and their history along with skills that will
allow graduates to get jobs or to receive further collegiate training.

Preserving their language is also a celebration of their culture and an
affirmation that they are survivors, says the Outlook: “They are not, as
once believed, mere charges of the government, but instead, in control of
their future and their identity.”

Even so, survival of the language is iffy. Popular culture and mainstream
media are in English.