"The Missing" and Language Awareness

[ronkinm at georgetown.edu]

> FROM CNN
>
> Movie spurs interest in 'Missing' dialect
>
> Tribal schools busing students to see frontier film
>
> Tuesday, December 16, 2003 Posted: 11:19 AM EST (1619 GMT)
>
> SANTA FE, New Mexico (AP) --
> Word swept through the Mescalero reservation like an early
> winter wind that characters in the film "The Missing" spoke
> a dialect of Apache.
>
> Most adult Apaches in the audiences have said they could
> understand every word of the Chiricahua dialect -- and the
> children suddenly wished they could, too.
>
> That's what Mescalero councilman Berle Kanseah and Chiricahua
> linguist Elbys Hugar intended as technical advisers for the Ron
> Howard film, a tough tale of 19th century frontier life starring
> Tommy Lee Jones and Cate Blanchett that has been in theaters for
> about three weeks.
>
> Television and popular culture are killing minority cultures,
> starting with language, Kanseah said.
>
> "There's a generation gap that's growing," he said, suggesting
> Apaches aren't the only ones facing it. "We need to enforce the
> home and not lose our way of life, which is our language."
>
> It was the first film that any of them could remember in which
> Apache was spoken well enough on screen to be understood. Usually,
> Westerns were dubbed in Navajo, a related language, said
> supporting
> actor Steve Reevis, a Montana Blackfoot who has worked several
> films but never spoke Apache before "The Missing."
>
> The film is set in southwestern New Mexico in 1885, just as the
> last of the Apache conflict was ending. The Jones character's
> granddaughter, Blanchett's daughter, is abducted by a ragged band
> of American Indians and whites who sell women into slavery in
> Mexico. Jones and co-star Jay Tavere set out to keep the slavers
> from reaching Mexico.
>
> The slavers are led by a "brujo," a medicine man gone bad, played
> by Eric Schweig.
>
> Apaches appreciate the film for showing them as they were
> -- the good and the bad, family oriented, generous, faithful
> to their religion and good-humored. The brujo played by
> Schweig is not intended to be Apache, though he speaks Apache,
> the producers say.
>
> Many Apaches have gone back two and three times to see "The
> Missing,"  Kanseah said. The producers gave a screening for 500
> Mescalero students in Alamogordo last month, and the tribe has
> been busing students to theaters in nearby Ruidoso. Two more
> screenings were held here Sunday for hundreds more students
> from several tribes who attend Santa Fe Indian School and other
> tribal schools in the surrounding area.
>
> "It made me feel proud," said Megan Crespin, 8, a third-grader
> from Santo Domingo School. Her tribal name is Moonlight.
>
> Kevin Aspaas, 8, a Navajo student said he liked the hawk that led
> Jones back to his family. He is learning Navajo and said a few
> words in his native tongue.
>
> There aren't that many Chiricahuas left. They were
> rounded up and sent to Florida in 1886, shunted back to Alabama,
> Oklahoma and finally to the Mescalero homeland in south-central
> New Mexico in 1913.
>
> "There are only about 300 people who are fluent in Chiricahua
> today," Tavere told the audience Sunday.
-----