Some Indian languages in Oklahoma on endangered list (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

Wed September 19, 2007
Some Indian languages in Oklahoma on endangered list

By Devona Walker
Staff Writer
http://newsok.com/article/3129256/1190178834

Thousands of tongues in the world are on the verge of becoming extinct,
including 40 American Indian languages in Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico,
according to a recent U.S. National Science Foundation and National
Geographic Society study.

Oklahoma has one of the highest densities of indigenous languages in the
United States, primarily because of the large diversity of American Indian
tribes within the state.

"Once you lose your language, you lose a lot of your identity,” said Richard
Zane Smith, an artist of the Wyandotte Nation.

Smith has spun the Oklahoma earth into clay pottery for the better part of
25 years. For the past two, he's reintroduced the Wyandotte language to the
some 200 tribal members who still live in northeastern Oklahoma.

Language and culture
Wyandotte

The Wyandotte language officially has been extinct since the 1930s.

Since then, hundreds of tribal members have left the Wyandotte Nation to
join the nearby Seneca Tribe, largely because the Senecas did a better job
at preserving tribal customs, Smith said.

One frustration they faced was that the Wyandottes had not been able to hold
a green corn ceremony since the 1930s, when the last elder, capable of
conversing in the language well enough to preside over the
Thanksgiving-like ceremony, died.

"When another language comes to dominate the culture, you start thinking
different, and you start resolving problems differently,” Smith added.

Yuchi

There are five elderly men of the Yuchi Tribe, of Sapulpa, able to converse
in its moribund language.

Unlike the Wyandotte, which is similar to other American Indian tongues,
there is no other language in the world similar to Yuchi.

The Yuchi were driven from Tennessee to Oklahoma in the early 1800s by the
U.S. government, along with many of the nation's tribes.

In the early 1900s, most Yuchi tribal members spoke their language fluently.

Then, the government boarding schools started severely punishing Yuchi
students for speaking their native language, according to National
Geographic research. Subsequently, the children abandoned their parent's
language in favor of English.

Smith, too, spoke of similar pressures on the Wyandotte children during the
"boarding school” years.

For the Wyandottes the boarding school years ended in the 1970's when the
old Wyandotte Indian School finally closed its doors.

But these experiences were not unique and were mirrored on numerous
reservations around the country.

Since then, many are returning to their native tongues, he says.

"That's why now, I try to do what I can with cultural preservation and
revitalizing languages,” Smith said.

Many languages

There are about 7,000 languages spoken in the world. One language dies every
two weeks. Researchers say languages from rural Australia to Siberia to
Oklahoma are dying on a daily basis. Other endangered language hotspots are
the U.S. Southwest, South America — Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, Brazil and
Bolivia — British Columbia, and the states of Washington and Oregon.

Half of the world's languages are likely to vanish in the next 100 years,
according to the Living Tongues Institute of Endangered Languages.

"There's been a couple of kids in class who have asked ‘why are we learning
this language? No one can use it to speak to us' ” said Smith. "It's a
question that kind of haunts me, too. How do I give a good answer to a
kid,” Smith said. "So, I told him, it was like picking up an arrowhead.
When you find an arrowhead on the ground, you are the first person to pick
it up since it was lost.”

~~~

Other hot spots

•Northern Australia, 153 languages: Researchers have documented such small
language communities as the three known speakers of Magati Ke, the three
Yawuru speakers and the lone speaker of Amurdag.

•Central South America including Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, Brazil and Bolivia
— 113 languages: Small and socially less-valued indigenous languages are
being knocked out by Spanish or more dominant indigenous languages in most
of the region, and by Portuguese in Brazil.

•Northwest Pacific Plateau, including British Columbia in Canada and
Washington and Oregon in the U.S., 54 languages: Every language in the
American part of this hot spot is endangered or moribund, meaning the
youngest speaker is over age 60. An extremely endangered language, with
just one speaker, is Siletz Dee-ni, the last of 27 languages once spoken on
the Siletz reservation in Oregon.

•Eastern Siberian Russia, China, Japan — 23 languages: Government policies
have forced speakers of minority languages to use the national and regional
languages and, as a result, some have only a few elderly speakers.

Sources: Australian government, U.S. National Science Foundation and
National Geographic Society



Contributing: The Associated Press