Blackfeet children learn culture and language

[Harold F. Schiffman]

>>From the Philadelphia Enquirer,

 Posted on Sun, Feb. 16, 2003

Tribe's schoolchildren learn culture

By Fred Tasker Knight Ridder News Service

BLACKFEET RESERVATION, Mont. - "Tsa nii ksistikowatts sa-ahsi?" teacher
Shirley Crowshoe asked her class of elementary students sitting in a
circle on a thick rug in a bright, modern classroom. "What kind of day is
it outside?" Jessie DesRosier, 13, was quick to raise his hand: "Sugapii
ksisko, ahstosopo," he said. "Nice day, cold wind."

Jessie is one of a handful younger than 60 in the 15,000-member tribe on
this isolated reservation who can speak its native language. He is one of
31 students in a total immersion school in the Blackfeet language and
culture set up by Darrell Kipp, Harvard-trained historian of the Blackfeet
Tribe, and teacher Dorothy Still Smoking. They created it because too few
Blackfeet children knew the tribe's language and customs.

"It was a legacy of when children were sent to government mission schools
and weren't allowed to speak their own language or follow their religion
or customs," said Arthur Westwolf, a teacher at the school. The school
teaches everything in Blackfeet, even math. "It's an effort to bring
healing and positive self-identity to our children," Kipp said.

The Browning school is being copied widely among America's tribes as part
of the "renegotiation of reality" movement that has tribes telling their
side of the Lewis & Clark Expedition story during its 200th anniversary
over the next three years, Kipp says. He hopes it's not too late. In 1900
there were 300 viable Indian languages, he says. Today there are 185. In
30 years there will be fewer than 20, because the majority of native
speakers today are older than 60.

Jessie, whose Blackfeet name is Cree Talker in English, and Ahsinapoyii in
the Blackfeet language, is getting instruction in Blackfeet culture. On
one cold winter day, he joined his class in a simplified version of the
tribe's Sun Dance, as classmate Mack Momberg, 8, (Blackfeet name
Piitakkatsimann) pounded on a drum.

Westwolf sees great promise in Jessie. But, like other bicultural children
in America, the youth is torn between old and new. "I'm grooming him to be
a teacher," said Westwolf. Jessie said: "I think I want to be a Marine."