Church urged to help preserve Native American language and culture (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

Church urged to help preserve Native American language and culture

By staff writers
12 Oct 2007
http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/5908

Native American languages have been under "extreme and direct attack" for
generations and many are in danger of extinction, the director of a project
working to save the Euchee language has told United Methodists in the USA.

Richard Grounds, project director of the Euchee (Yu-chee) Language Project
in Sapulpa, Oklahoma, works with the five remaining fluent Euchee speakers
left in the United States. His daughter, Renee, a board member of the
United Methodist Commission on Religion and Race, has dedicated her life to
helping him keep the language alive - reports UMC's Kathy Gilbert.

Speaking in Euchee, Renee introduced her father to members of the commission
at Ware Chapel United Methodist Church before his presentation on the
project.

Commission members were taking a day during their 3-7 October 2007 board
meeting in Oklahoma City to visit Kiowa Native American United Methodist
churches and to hear from Native American United Methodists.

Caroline Botone and Henry Joseph Willis greeted the group in their native
languages of Kiowa and Choctaw.

"This is really a pretty special event," Grounds said. "We are hearing from
our elders at this meeting in their own languages. This is what their
mother spoke to them, and that's why they speak it to you."

Grounds said the World War II generation still speaks their native
languages, and most of that generation is slowly dying, taking the
languages with them.

"In this state where 25 indigenous languages are still spoken, only four of
those are being learned by children; all the rest are only spoken by
elders," he said. "The words you heard from my daughter, Renee, speaking
the language of my grandmother are extremely unusual."

The commission funded Grounds' Euchee project from 2000-2004 through the
Minority Group Self-Determination Fund. The fund was established by The
United Methodist Church to empower racial and ethnic minority people within
and outside the church.

The tradition of passing down native languages was "crushed through a very
ugly, sorted, intentional process" that took young people out of the tribes
and put them in boarding schools where they were forced to speak English.

"I would guess billions of dollars were spent destroying our languages,
breaking down our ceremonial ways, assaulting our traditions," he said.

Churches have been complicit in the dispossession of Native Americans, he
said. He told the group that Methodism founder John Wesley came to Georgia
in 1835 and met the Creeks, Muskogee, Chickasaws and Euchee. Wesley wrote
"really ugly things about these native nations," Grounds said.

"But he really saved his most cruel remarks for the Euchees, saying that the
Euchees killed their own children - things that were not really true and
things he didn't really have a basis for making the claims," Grounds said.

"Colonialism is taking other people's resources to service your own
interest. It's taking the richness of others in order to build your own
wealth. It was a fairly ugly process. In the context of the United States,
it was done under the name of U.S. expansion, a lot of patriotic fanfare,
often with a Christian veneer over it."

The use of Native American mascots and names points to the same thinking
today that says "if it's Indian, it's ours. It's no longer just the
resources. It's no longer just the land. It's literally the name. It's
literally the identity," he said.

"We want our young people to be proud of their languages."

Globally, Grounds said, the next 20 years likely will see the loss of half
of the world's languages and, in the United States, about 70 percent of
indigenous languages are projected to die out.