Volkswagen acquires the Hochank language

[warr0120]

This forward is in response to "General Motors Purchases Indian Languages"
an spoof article from the Watley Review that someone posted to the Dakota
and Ojibwe mailing lists at the university of minnesota a month ago. That
article is available at:

http://www.watleyreview.com/2003/072903-2.html

Here's some of my thoughts:

Sometimes funny things aren't so funny anymore. Here's a forward from the
Siouan languages list.  Keep in mind the key phrases "documentation of
endangered languages", "so that they are accessible for non-speakers",
"archived at the Max Planck Institute of Psycholinguistics in The
Netherlands", and "they are supposed to be accessible to everyone." It'll
be great if it's true, right?

While this may benefit the Hochank nation to some extent, the key
attractiveness seems to be that it seems easy. A bunch of people want to do
all this work for us? Great! But it scares me. It's the perennial outside
expert problem magnified a thousand times. We, the experts, shall come to
you, take your language, and store it for safe keeping in our museum in the
Netherlands. Sounds kind of like Franz Boas' desperate need to import a few
Eskimos from Greenland, then oops they died in his offices during their
stay, and well, since they're already here, let's just put skeletons in
these nice glass cases for 'posterity's sake'.

It's so nice that all these academics can get paid, build their
reputations, and help everyone feel good about "doing the right thing" and
working like emergency room doctors to preserve these languages as they
gasp their last breaths (while the cameras are rolling, of course). And
then feel good that another large "corpus" (dead body) of data has been
successfully removed from its environment to the safe keeping of some
dominant cultural institution.

What I would like to see is:

Take that big chunk of money and GIVE IT TO THE HOCHUNK NATION to do this
work themselves, and offer your expertise to help out. Use that money to
put Hochank people in the position to be empowered, not further subjugated,
objectified, and packaged for the museum. Like Darrell Kipp says, no you
can't come make a movie about us. Give us the cameras, show us how to use
them, and we'll make a movie about ourselves. And we'll make sure we get
plenty of copies of the movie.

But, no, look who's always got to be in the driver's seat (linguist,
missionary, politician...)


Here's the forward:

Fwd: Documentation of the Hocank language:

On 24 Oct 2003, Dr. Johannes Helmbrecht wrote:
> Dear Siouanists,
>
> I'd like to diseminate some information about
> a recently launched project for the documentation of
> the Hocank language via this list. It might be of
> interest for linguists working on other Siouan
> languages as well.
>
> The documentation project is one of about twenty
> or so projects within the large funding initiative
> for the documentation of endangered languages of the
> Volkswagen Foundation in Germany. The Volkswagen
> Foundation has nothing to do with cars as you
> might assume. It is a foundation with a
> remarkable budget (the money came originally
> from the privatization of the Volkswagen company
> - I guess way back in the 50ies)that aims at funding
> innovative research in various fields of science,
> and sometimes even in the humanities. The funding
> initiative for the documentation of endangered
> languages started a few years ago. The central goal
> of the specific projects is to create a
> representative text corpus of the specific
> endangered language including audio and video tapes
> of all kinds of text types such as narrations,
> conversations, and so on. The recordings of the
> texts have to be transcribed, grammatically glossed,
> and translated so that they are accessible for
> non-speakers of the language. The texts corpora will
> be archived at the Max Planck Institute of
> Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen (The Netherlands, they
> are supposed to be accessible to everyone, to the people of the community
> that is in danger of loosing its language, to linguists, to
anthropologists
> etc. If you wish to learn more about the general outline of the funding
> initiative, check out the web sites of the Max Planck Institute and the
> Volkswagen Foundation:
>
> http://www.mpi.nl/DOBES/
> http://www.volkswagen-stiftung.de/suchen/index_e.html
>
> Now, I would like to turn over to an outline of the project for the
> documentation of the Hocank language. Within this three years project we
try
> to accomplish several sub-projects. First of all, we work on a
represenative
> corpus of texs, a kind of oral library of the Hocank language. We plan
(and
> already have begun) to tape (audio and video)stories and conversations of
all
> kinds of situations, participants, and genres. Because of the degree of
> endangerment of Hocank, there are some restrictions, e.g. it seems that
> parents - kids conversations are no longer possible to document and the
like.
> But the situation is definitely much better in Hocank than in other
languages
> such as in Wichita where only a few speakers and semi-speakers are left.
>
> The second sub-project of our project is the creation of a bidirectional
> dictionary Hocank-English and English-Hocank. We start from the various
> lexical studies that already exist and that are compiled in Valdis Zeps
> dictionary. We have already converted this dictionary into a shoebox
database
> (with more than 6000 entries) and have begun to revise the entries
> linguistically. Josephien Withe Eagle's lexical study served in a way as
a
> linguistic role model for the format of the  entries. A lot of words are
> missing in the Zeps file, many entries lack grammatical information
> altogether, and many English glosses are wrong or rather missleading.
Based
> on the glossing and translation of our recorded texts we will enrich and
> revise the whole dictionary within the next three years.
>
> The third sub-project is the grammatical description of the Hocank
language.
> For quite a while, I am myself working on the grammar of Hocank. A first
> draft of the a grammar of Hocank will/ should (?) be written by the end
of
> the next year. This grammar will go beyond the somewhat restricted
> morphological perspective of Lipkind and Susman. Currently, I am working
hard
> to learn more about the syntax (simple and complex clauses etc.)of
Hocank. I
> will also distribute some of my findings in form of papers to the
Siouanists
> community so that they may be discussed from a wider Siouan point of
view.
>
> The fourth sub-project is the development of linguistically structured
> teaching materials that should be helpfull useable for the language
teachers
> of the Hocank Language Division (in Mauston, WI), as well as for the
> students. Here we are really starting from the scratch, although the
Hocank
> Language Division has developed some materials mostly dealing with
structured
> vocabularies. The grammar, the dictionary, and the text corpus we are
working
> on should serve as a basis for this enterprise. It is also planned to
teach
> the language teachers to use these materials efficiently.
>
> Such a project as the documentation of the Hocank language cannot be
achieved
> by one person, we are a team and I should now introduce the individuals
> involved in this project. The directors of the project are Prof.
Christian
> Lehmann and myself from the University of Erfurt, Germany. Prof. Lehmann
has
> worked a lot on language endangerment and the possibilities of the
> docmentation of a language. He was also one of the group of German
linguists
> who worked out a proposal for such a large funding initiative for the
> Volkswagen Foundation back in the second half of the 90ies. We have two
> co-workers, Nils Jahn, Juliane Lindenlaub (she joined us very recently),
and
> a student aid, Iren Hartmann. This is the German side of the project that
> works in close cooperation with the Hocank side of the project. The
Hocank
> side is basically the Hocank Language Division in Mauston, WI. The
director
> of the Language Division, Willard Lonetree, has supported this project
from
> the beginning. The trib
> al government, the legislators, approved this project as useful for the
tribe
> and documented their commitment to this project by funding two additional
> positions in the Hocank Language Division particularly for this project.
So
> there are two tribal members, Henning Garvin and Kjetil Lowe, who both
> graduated in linguistics.
>
> I think this should suffice for the moment, but I promise to add some
news
> about the project occasionally in the future.
>
>
> ****************************************************
>
> Dr. Johannes Helmbrecht
> Universität Erfurt
> Seminar für Sprachwissenschaft
> Postfach 900221
> D-99105 Erfurt, Deutschland
> Tel. ++49/ 361/ 737-4202
> Fax. ++49/ 361/ 737-4209
> E-Mail: johannes.helmbrecht at uni-erfurt.de
>
> ****************************************************

p.s. how much will it cost to put the Hochunk Nation on a plane to the
Netherlands?