Native Nations, Native Voices/Igbo (Nigeria), Mohawk, Chamorro (Pacific) and Hawai'ian

[Gordon Bronitsky]

	Native Nations, Native Voices continues to gain national and
international publicity and attention.  I’m stll raising the funds for
the festival but I wanted to share with you these recent e-mails from
writers in Igbo (Nigeria), Mohawk (New York) and Chamorro (Commonwealth
of the Northern Marianas Islands.
	In addition, one of the invited writers is Larry Kimura, a Hawai’ian
language writer (and much more!) who is a faculty member at the
University of Hawaii at Hilo.  I’m also sharing with you an article
from the Chronicle of Higher Education about the work he and others
have done to revive Hawai’ian language and culture.
	Thank you.

Gordon Bronitsky

	As a native speaker of igbo language and a native writer(poems) in
igbo, i wish to participate in the forthcoming native language
festival.igbo language is a language of the kwa subfamily in the benue
-congo language family spoken in eastern nigeria with an estimae of
60million speakers.

i would need more information about this festival inorder to register
myself.hope to here from u .bye.

chris
(Chima Eleodimuo)

												

	From: 	  James.Stevens at fredonia.edu
	Subject: 	Interest in Native Voices Festival
	Date: 	December 10, 2004 12:19:04 PM MST
	To: 	  g.bronitsky at att.net

Dear Mr. Bronitsky,

	My name is James Thomas Stevens. I am a Mohawk poet and graduate of
the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. Currently I teach at
SUNY Fredonia in New York, after teaching for five years at Haskell
Indian Nations University in Kansas. I just finished a collaborative
series of poems involving translation of Mohawk and Samoan with Samoan
poet Caroline Sinavaiana. I saw mention of your event on the Iroquois
listserve, but I am hoping you can send me something more.
	All best to you. Skennen'kowa (In the Great Peace),
James

Gordon:

	We have a teacher teaching our native language and she writes all her
instructional materials including stories.  I think she would be
delighted to attend the July conference.  Do you think you could give
me some more information on it?

Thanks,

Florine
(Florine Hufschneider, Principal, Tinian High School, Commonwealth of
the Northern Marianas Islands)
												
 From the issue dated December 10, 2004
CHRONICLE ON HIGHER EDUCATION


   Talking a Language Back From the Brink Hawaiian professors band
together
to revive the islands' dying native tongue


Audio clips: Listen to Hawaiian chants from a traditional hula class,
and
to parts of a Hawaiian 101 class (Audio clips require Quicktime player)

Text: Basics of speaking Hawaiian


By RICHARD MONASTERSKY


(NEWS RELEASE FROM) Hilo, Hawaii

On the first day of "Hawaiian Studies 474,"  a dozen students line up
just
inside a classroom doorway, open their mouths in unison, and breathe
life
into an ailing culture. Under a bank of fluorescent lights, young men
and
women wearing T-shirts and shorts chant an old Hawaiian poem asking
permission to enter a place of learning.

"Kunihi ka mauna i ka la'i e," they intone without stopping for breath,
voices blending in a melody that hovers around a single ancient note.
Kalena Silva, a professor of Hawaiian language and studies at the
University of Hawaii at Hilo, asks his students to repeat the entrance
poem several times before he chants a response, ending in a drawn-out
tremolo that fades to silence. Then he begins his traditional-hula
class,
starting with a lecture on the history of the dance.

As he asks questions, tells jokes, and keeps the students engaged, not a
word of English passes his lips. This upper-level course, like others
offered by the department, is taught entirely in the Hawaiian language.
In
the early 1970s, when Mr. Silva was in college, he could not have taken
a
class like this one. The University of Hawaii-Manoa, which he attended,
treated Hawaiian as a foreign language, and a relatively unpopular one
at
that. Few professors and even fewer students had any fluency in the
state's native tongue.

State law actually prohibited teachers from using Hawaiian as the
classroom language in elementary and secondary school -- a holdover from
the colonial rules imposed by Americans after they wrested control of
the
islands from the original Polynesian inhabitants in 1893. That law and
the
cultural dominance of the United States nearly succeeded in killing off
the native language. But over the past 25 years, Mr. Silva and a trio of
other professors at Hilo have given Hawaiian a second chance. Since
their
days together in college, Mr. Silva and his friends have made it their
mission to resuscitate the language and the culture.

Along the way, they have established language- immersion schools
reaching
from pre-kindergarten all the way through to a master's degree. They
have
testified before Congress, changed state laws, and are now establishing
the country's first doctoral program in indigenous languages. And they
have created a small but burgeoning community of fluent Hawaiian
speakers,
some of whom are becoming the next generation of educators. "It's been
an
inspiration to a lot of other groups in the United States," says Suzanne
Romaine, a professor of English at the University of Oxford, in England,
who has studied threatened languages.  Representatives of the Blackfoot
nation and other American Indian groups have visited Hilo to study the
college's programs. When the Hawaiian professors started their work,
only
32 people under the age of 18 spoke the language at home. Now some 2,000
children are enrolled in Hawaiian-immersion schools, and as many as
6,000
people have some fluency in the language. "It's now secured a foothold,"
Ms. Romaine, who has advised the Hilo professors on their doctoral-
program proposal. "I don't think anybody would have predicted that
possibility 30 or 40 years ago."

The Spam Invasion

Through much of the 20th century, native Hawaiian culture was spiraling
downward. American sugar- plantation owners, who had overthrown the
sovereign Hawaiian nation at the turn of the 20th century, suppressed
the
native language so successfully that few people born after 1920 spoke
Hawaiian at home.  Then World War II brought thousands of American GI's
to
the islands, and with them came a tsunami of cultural influences that
drowned out the existing heritage.  Spam became a staple on Hawaiian
tables. By the 1960s, many Hawaiians in the newly minted state -- which
spells its name Hawai'i -- were looking outside the islands for an
identity. "It wasn't a prideful thing to be Hawaiian," says Clayton
Hee, a
state senator who was in high school with Mr. Silva. "I'm half Chinese,
and when I was younger, if anybody asked me, I would say I was
Chinese-Hawaiian."

Mr. Hee and Mr. Silva attended an elite private academy called the
Kamehameha School, which is financed by a bequest from a Hawaiian
princess
descended from King Kamehameha. The school accepted only students with
native Hawaiian ancestry. Despite its namesake, though, the academy did
not encourage students to study the language of Kamehameha. Mr. Hee took
Spanish there. But Mr. Silva was drawn to a course in Hawaiian because
he
wanted to connect with his grandmother and others of her generation.
"There was a lot of aloha -- warmth and love," he says. "The way they
interacted was so beautiful, and I wanted to be like that."

Later, at the University of Hawaii, Mr. Silva studied the language under
Larry L. Kimura, who had graduated from Kamehameha a few years ahead of
him. Later another graduate of the school, Kauanoe Kamana, arrived on
the
Manoa campus, on the island of O'ahu.  She also became a student of Mr.
Kimura's. The cadre from Kamehameha formed a lasting bond.  Now, Mr.
Silva, Mr. Kimura, and Ms. Kamana are all faculty members in the College
of Hawaiian Language, at the state university system's Hilo campus, on
the
Big Island of Hawaii. A fourth professor in the college, William (Pila)
Wilson, also studied Hawaiian under Mr. Kimura on the Manoa campus and
later married Ms. Kamana.

Together in the 1970s, the four started a revolution by reaching toward
the past. At the time, most students of Hawaiian were learning it for
quiet academic purposes:  so they could comb through documents from the
unified Hawaiian kingdom of the 1800s and read the many
Hawaiian-language
newspapers that sprang up during that time. But Mr. Kimura and his
students had a different, more vocal, idea. "The main contribution that
they made is to get people to think this could be a viable language to
serve your everyday needs," says Kerry Laiana Wong, an acting assistant
professor of Hawaiian language on the Manoa campus. "They tried to make
it
a living language again. That's where the movement, at least in the
language, really got its impetus."

Family Values

At the dinner table, it's clear that the Hilo professors have made their
point. Mr. Wilson, Mr. Silva, and Ms. Kamana are so used to conversing
in
Hawaiian that they laugh when they hear one another talk during a meal
with a mainlander.  "It's really strange to speak English with these
people,"  says Mr. Wilson, who grew up in Honolulu in a family that
hailed
from Kansas. Mr. Wilson was hired by Hilo in the late 1970s to set up a
B.A. program in Hawaiian studies. As part of the hire, he stipulated
that
upper-level courses in the program would be taught entirely in Hawaiian.

 From classroom to bedroom, he brought those lessonshome. After Mr.
Wilson
married Ms. Kamana, they started using Hawaiian as their primary
language
before the birth of their first child, in 1981. "You make the decision
to
do it,"  she explains. After rearing their son in Hawaiian at home, they
faced a challenge when it was time for preschool and they couldn't find
any where Hawaiian was spoken. So, out of necessity, they banded
together
with other families and started their own.

Along with their friends and colleagues, Ms. Kamana and Mr. Wilson set
up
a nonprofit corporation, the 'Aha Punana Leo (language-nest gathering),
in
1983 to run Hawaiian-language preschools. They based their program on a
successful one pioneered by Maori activists in New Zealand. The
nonprofit
group created its first preschool, on the island of Kaua'i, to serve a
small community of Hawaiian speakers from the nearby island of Ni'ihau.
That privately owned island has a population of some 200 people, who, to
this day, use Hawaiian as their first language. The second Punana Leo,
in
Hilo, attracted families like that of Mr. Wilson and Ms.  Kamana,
second-language learners rearing their children in Hawaiian.

When it was time for their son to enter kindergarten, Ms. Kamana and Mr.
Wilson started one of those, too, without authorization from the state.
(A
longstanding Hawaiian law prohibited educators from teaching in the
native
language.) They were prepared to go to jail for their actions. But they
managed to get the law changed and to establish a full elementary
school.
Then came a laboratory school for middle and high school, called Nawahi,
which is run jointly by their college, the nonprofit corporation, and
the
state department of education.

Their efforts extend far beyond the usual activities of college
professors. "We had to train the teachers and change the law," says Mr.
Wilson. "We had to make the curricular materials, and we even had to
create words for things that hadn't existed in the lives of the older
people."  They brought Hawaiian into the modern world by inventing words
such as huna hohoki, for neutron, and wikio, for video.

Sink or Speak

On the first day of school this year Ms. Kamana, who serves as principal
of Nawahi, lined up more than 100 students to greet Mr. Silva and a
visitor. The children stood at attention, arms straight down at their
sides, chanting a Hawaiian poem together. Those students are but a small
fraction of the nearly 2,000 children enrolled in Hawaiian-immersion
programs around the state. From the modest beginning of one preschool,
20
years ago, the list has grown to include more than a dozen private
preschools and 20 Hawaiian-immersion schools, all using materials
developed by the Hilo college.

Many other students enter the language stream at the university level.
In
a section of Hawaiian 101 at Hilo, Haunani Bernardino leads her 20
students at a gallop through their first week of instruction. Every
action
is a teachable moment. When someone sneezes, she asks, "How do we say,
'Bless you?'" The class calls out in chorus, "E ola." The path these
students are taking is much easier now than it was a generation ago,
when
Mr. Wilson and his cohorts faced countless roadblocks.

In the early 1980s, Mr. Wilson learned that he was breaking the law by
setting up immersion schools, so he took the matter to the state
capital.
There he spoke with Mr. Hee, a former student, who at the time was
serving
in the State House of Representatives. Together they led an effort that
by
1986 repealed the law. Since that success, Mr. Wilson and Mr. Hee have
joined forces many times to plow through the state bureaucracy in order
to
start other immersion programs, the Hawaiian- language college, and the
master's-degree program.

Mr. Wilson's efforts haven't stopped at the state's borders.  In 1990 he
and others at the Hawaiian-language college worked with Sen. Daniel K.
Inouye, a Democrat from Hawaii, to help draft the Native American
Language
Act, which supports efforts to preserve the indigenous languages of the
United States. Last month he visited the senator in Washington, D.C., to
drum up support for S 575, an amendment to the act, which would help
export the language-immersion program used in Hawaii to other regions of
the United States where indigenous languages are vanishing. The effort
was
unsuccessful this term, but Mr. Wilson will try again next session.

Campus Rivalry

Now Mr. Wilson is back in Hawaii, asking for more from the state. The
Hawaiian-language college this year submitted a proposal to start a
doctoral program in Hawaiian and indigenous-language studies, which
would
be the first of its kind anywhere in the world, says Oxford's Ms.
Romaine.
One branch of the program would focus on Hawaiian, while another would
cater to scholars and educators from other cultures who want to learn
how
to revitalize or study threatened languages elsewhere. "There is a need
for this because now there's a great deal of interest in the problem of
language extinction and language revitalization around the world, and
there isn't any place where people can go to receive training," says Ms.
Romaine, who might play a role in the program.

Once again, Mr. Wilson's former student, Mr. Hee, is in a position to
help. Last month he was re-elected to the State Senate, where he will
serve as chairman of the higher-education committee, which oversees the
University of Hawaii System. The Board of Regents met in October and
approved the plan in concept, as long as there is sufficient
coordination
between Hilo and the flagship Manoa campus, which houses all of the
university's current doctoral programs.

There is a bit of a rivalry between the two campuses when it comes to
teaching the Hawaiian language.  Although it has more students and more
faculty members, Manoa is a step behind Hilo and is now trying to
establish its own master's program in Hawaiian-language studies. Some
professors at Manoa have wondered whether Hilo has sufficient
qualifications to run a graduate program.  They note that Mr. Silva and
Mr. Wilson have the only Ph.D.'s in the faculty of the Hawaiian-language
college there.

Mr. Wilson responds that it's a Catch-22 of sorts.  "Since there are no
graduate degrees in our area, it's a problem," he says. "We fought
really
strongly to ensure that the hiring in our program would be based on
actual
knowledge of Hawaiian language and culture." The college can point to
some
recent academic successes.  It has turned out four graduates with
master's
degrees in Hawaiian language. And Mr. Silva is editing a two-year-old
journal of Hawaiian-language sources, called Ka Ho'Oilina,"  which is
translated as The Legacy.

"We're finally at the graduate level, at the truly academic level," says
Mr. Silva. Hawaiians have watched for decades as non-native scholars
studied Hawaiian historical documents indirectly through translations.
But
now, students fluent in the language are starting to mine the hundreds
of
thousands of historical sources written in Hawaiian. "We are able to
look
at Hawaiian cultural material in our own language," he says. "It gives
us
added weight and insight into this material."

Nonetheless, the academic advances are only a small step toward the
professors' main goal of bringing Hawaiian back into people's lives.
"I'm
looking forward to a time -- I'm not sure I'll see it in my lifetime --
when there is a large enough community of speakers" to sustain the
language, says Mr. Silva, while driving on the outskirts of Hilo.
Linguists estimate that it might take as many as 100,000 speakers to put
Hawaiian on that solid a foundation. Only about 5,000 or 6,000 speak the
language now, but schools and colleges are training more every year,
says
Mr. Silva as he pulls into the parking lot at Nawahi, where faculty
members and students are, day by day, resurrecting the language of
Kamehameha.

"We're not there yet," Mr. Silva says. "But maybe in 50 years."


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Section: The Faculty
Volume 51, Issue 16, Page A8

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Copyright © 2004 by The Chronicle of Higher Education