Poet works to preserve native tongue (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

Poet works to preserve native tongue

Published Wednesday, October 17, 2007.
Meghan McNamara / Staff Writer / mm164705 at ohiou.edu
http://www.thepost.ohiou.edu/Articles/Culture/2007/10/17/21760/

As part of American Indian Heritage month, Ronald Snake Edmo, a linguistic
anthropologist who is a member of the Shoshone-Bannock tribe, will speak
about his poetry and the importance of language to a culture’s life.

The Shoshone language runs the risk of being lost as increasingly fewer
members of succeeding generations learn to speak it. Edmo, who grew up in a
time when children were beaten for speaking Shoshone in school, writes
poetry in Shoshone and English.

The Post’s Meghan McNamara spoke with Edmo about the challenges of
documenting an unwritten language.

The Post: You talk about the risk a culture faces when it begins to lose its
language through the succession of generations. Could you explain the
significance of this risk for an oral culture?

Edmo: Language and culture are intertwined, and there are certain things in
our culture that there’s no equivalent in non-Indian culture. 
 There’s no
equivalent in American culture. But when you lose the language, you also
lose that part of the culture.

Post:  Because Shoshone is an unwritten language and an oral culture
traditionally, do the other members of your tribe support your goal to
write it?

Edmo: That’s a yes/no answer. 
 We’re also known as an egalitarian society.

 No one person has a voice over anybody else. So, everything has to be
done by consensus, and if one person objects, then it can’t be done. Well,
we have people that support this program and we have people that oppose it.

  Mostly it’s because they aren’t involved in it. 
 The only way to get
anything done is to go ahead and do it.

Post: How does the influence or force of popular American culture affect
life on the reservation, and is this part of the threat to the Shoshone
language?

Edmo: That’s part of it. A lot of our young people ascribe to that gangster
culture, they don’t know who they are. 
 We don’t know what the answer is.

 We’re losing our best and our brightest through deaths caused by alcohol
and drugs. 
 These were kids that would be the future of our people. 

What’s our future going to be? That’s a big concern that we all have on the
reservations.

Post: How do you go about documenting an oral language?

Edmo: There are several steps. The first step would be to record 
 and
getting the elders. 
 They’re still fluent in it. So we need to record
their stories. 
 If we don’t understand a word, even an old word that’s no
longer used, we need to ask them to explain that to us and enroll them in
trying to preserve that for the future. 
 The second step is to develop an
orthography (a system of developing symbols to represent sounds) if we want
to teach you how to read and write it, then to develop lesson plans, both to
teach people to speak it, and also if you can read and write the language.
And then, that is just the very beginning of the process of revival.