[lg policy] ASU center bringing new life to Native languages

Fri Dec 3 15:17:08 UTC 2010

ASU center bringing new life to Native languages

By Mary Shinn November 29, 2010 at 10:44 pm

Languages once as diverse as the people who spoke them are falling
silent around the world. In our own state, indigenous languages like
that of the Mojave tribe are considered endangered, and linguists at
ASU are working to save them. The Center for Indian Education at ASU,
created 51 years ago as a research, teaching and outreach effort,
works with the Navajo Nation, Gila River Indian Community and others
in the state. There are about 175 to 200 Native American languages
still spoken in the United States said Teresa McCarty, the co-director
for the Center for Indian Education at ASU.

Of those languages, only about 20 are still being passed down to
children as first languages. Most of these Native American languages
are spoken by individuals beyond childbearing age — many of them
elders over age 65 — putting the languages at risk of being
permanently silenced. Once a language becomes silent, unless it has
been well documented through video and audio recordings, it is
extremely difficult for that language to be spoken in its original
form. “Imagine trying to learn a language you have never heard
spoken,” she said.

It’s possible for the language to be learned again using texts, like
bibles, originally written in or translated into the Native American
language, she said. This is why community-based programs across the
U.S. are working hard to continue to speak the language. When the
center was created, one of its primary goals was to prepare teachers
to be more sensitive to cultural differences between Native American
children and non-Native teachers. Over the years, the center has
worked with many different schools in different Native communities to
help promote retention of indigenous languages and cultures. “It’s a
worldwide movement and the center is an important node,” McCarty said.

Fort Mojave

The Center for Indian Education has facilitated workshops for both
learners and speakers at the Fort Mojave Indian Reservation in
northwest Arizona, California and Nevada.

Fort Mojave has about 22 elders who speak some Mojave, McCarty said.

Natalie Diaz, a linguist and the program coordinator for Fort Mojave’s
language recovery program, said the tribe does not differentiate
between fluent speakers and partially fluent speakers because they
want as many people as possible to be involved in the process.

The tribal council for Fort Mojave is working in partnership with the
center on its language preservation and revitalization efforts.
“It’s a testament to how   badly people want to do it,” Diaz said.

Diaz is working to preserve the language by recording conversations
among the elders, learning the language herself and working with
elders to teach it in conversational and cultural settings, like
making pottery or cooking.

Since February, 12 core learners at Fort Mojave have rallied around
the elders to help build the program. These 12 are committed to
learning the language so they can pass it on to their own kids and
other people in the community, and they will help teach in the tribal
day care.

There are many other community-based efforts similar to Fort Mojave,
but it’s one of the youngest in Arizona. Navajo language
revitalization efforts began in a Window Rock public school in 1986 on
the Navajo reservation. At Fort Mojave, the learners are adults around
age 30, Diaz said.

They take part in classes every week with elders where they practice
conversational Mojave in a group setting. They also have practice
breakout sessions on their own.

At these sessions, they discuss dialectical differences in the speech
of different elders, since Mojave is spoken differently at Fort Mojave
than in Parker.

Joe Scerato, a staff member at the cultural preservation project at
Fort Mojave, said there were probably always differences between the
Northern, Central and Southern Mojave tribes but they became more
after the Southern Mojave were forcefully relocated by the federal
government in 1865 to a reservation in Parker.  Scerato tries to help
everyone understand that the differences in the dialect are not
errors.

The learners also practice short phrases like “Mat mithaava” and “Mat
ithaamotm.” These phrases mean “Are you angry?” and “I am not angry.”

The learners said there have been many benefits to learning the
language, but an unanticipated effect was the intergenerational
relationships and understanding learning the language has built.

“[The elders] were afraid to speak it in front of people as much as I
was,” said April Garcia, an education administrator for the Mojave
tribal government and learner.

Garcia said learning the language helps her build a stronger
relationship with the elders in her community and gives her a better
sense of her identity.

“It strengthens who I am as a Mojave woman, as a friend, as a sister
and as a member of the community,” Garcia said.

Native language education

Diaz said one of the major goals of the program is to bring Native
songs and language into the Fort Mojave day care.  Introducing Native
language into schools near reservations is one of the keys to bringing
a language back.

Diaz and her team are currently working to introduce simple songs and
lullabies to the tribal day care program.

“Chuksa, iivi, iimemipuk iime kwatharap…” is the beginning of the
modified version of “Head, Shoulders Knees and Toes” song the group
will introduce.

Although it takes many years, other languages like Hawaiian were
brought back from the brink of extinction, beginning with “language
nests,” McCarty said.

These “language nests” are family-run preschools designated for
learning the Native language. In the preschools, only the Native
language is spoken, which McCarty described as language immersion.

“Children are immersed in the language spoken by elders, learning it
naturally as children formerly did at home,” she said.

Mary Eunice Romero- Little, a professor of applied linguistics who
works with the Center for Indian Education, facilitates workshops to
help communities that want to promote their language.

There are a few schools that have been able to use a bilingual
enrichment approach for language revitalization in Flagstaff and
Window Rock on the Navajo reservation, even though bilingual education
has been effectively banned by “English for the Children” legislation
in Arizona public schools, she said.

The state law was passed in 2000 and states that reading, writing and
other subjects must be taught in English. Bilingual education is
allowed in schools in which 90 percent of the children already speak
fluent English.

“They are abiding by the same laws and they are accountable to the
same standards” as other schools, McCarty said.

Parents voluntarily enroll their children in these schools because
they want their children to have the opportunity to learn their
heritage language and culture. Research, McCarty added, shows that
students in these schools perform as well as or better than their
peers in English-only programs.

The Mojave reservation is a long way from bilingual education,
although Diaz said the local schools are interested in implementing a
program.

Global efforts

Susan Penfield, program director for the Documenting Endangered
Languages program at the National Science Foundation, said studying
endangered languages around the world helps linguists and scientists
understand how people in that culture think and how they live.

“Without linguistic diversity we will never know the capabilities of
the human mind,” Penfield said.

http://www.statepress.com/2010/11/29/asu-center-bringing-new-life-to-native-languages/

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