NATIVE TONGUES: If They're Lost, Who Are We? (fwd link)

[Richard Smith]

I felt this was really an exceptional article

I hope others can feel the same  as i did while reading it.
language revitalization efforts to me are often disgustingly and
often painfully academic, and sometimes its overwhelming
I often wonder if i'm wasting my precious allotted earth time
but articles like this kind of help spur me on to wade
through all those tightly specific damn pronominal prefixes!

Richard Zane Smith



On 4/11/08 1:32 PM, "phil cash cash" <cashcash at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU> wrote:

> NATIVE TONGUES
> If They're Lost, Who Are We?
> 
> By David Treuer
> Sunday, April 6, 2008; Page B01
> 
> LEECH LAKE, Minn. I am not supposed to be alive. Native Americans were
> supposed
> to die off, as endangered species do, a century ago. And so it is with great
> discomfort that I am forced, in many ways, to live and write as a ghost in
> this
> haunted American house.
> 
> But perhaps I am not dead after all, despite the coldest wishes of a republic
> that has wished it so for centuries before I was born. We stubbornly continue
> to exist. There were just over 200,000 Native Americans alive at the turn of
> the 20th century; as of the last census, we number more than 2 million. If you
> discount immigration, we are probably the fastest-growing segment of the U.S.
> population. But even as our populations are growing, something else, I fear,
> is
> dying: our cultures.
> 
> Access full article below:
> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/04/AR200804040321
> 6.html