Volkswagen acquires the Hochank language

[warr0120]

Well, Henning, I wish YOU had been the one to inform people in the first
place about the project and a Hocank person and scholar's perspective on
it. Thank you for addressing some of the issues that were not addressed in
Johannes' email. Seeing the project from a Hocank perspective is exactly
what I find most important, and almost always missing from linguists' and
anthros' work who claim authorship or directorship and leave no space for
the voices of the community being studied to come through enedited, as far
as how they view the project. (except see Young Bear and Theisz 1994,
Standing in the light a Lakota way of seeing, with an introduction written
by the primary informant.)

My immediate concern is the extreme emphasis on documentation, which to be
done well and usefully does require expertise and much attention to detail.
But documentation can be a distraction, one of those activities that can
let you feel busy and productive while the real problems continue
unhindered, and can even exacerbate the problems of identity as reliance on
experts from outside the community becomes more acute.

I know the powerful roles that documentation can play for self-empowerment
and language revitalization in particular. But I wish people's first
initiative when big sums of money came around was NOT to manufacture
objects: dictionaries, grammars, "children's" books, videotapes, or
interactive cdroms, that make you feel proud, but are static. It would seem
much more important to spend every penny possible getting all the fluent
speakers together with children in the community so the language can be
passed on in the most efficient and natural way possible. And probably the
only really lasting way of language transmission for a whole culture. I
hope the Hocank nation is successful in its current use of natural language
learning methods, but I will NOT rest assured. Every step toward
strengthening natural language and culture transmission is an amazing and
important experience. But it will never be enough. The tide against the
language and culture is so very strong. (By the way I'm offering these
thought in general, not just as response to you, Henning - you clearly
emphasized much of this in your own email.)

I see the training of new generations of teachers as essential, people with
voracious scholarly appetites (I hope you're hungry Henning, and from the
emails you send to the Siouan languages list, I think you fit my stereotype
of a healthy native scholar) and acccess to great materials, who can create
new materials: but all so that ADULTS who need to learn the language can
learn. Kids don't need dictionaries or picture books. They need fluent
adult speakers who care for them and spend extended time with them, giving
them encouragement, love, and a positive identity in the language. You
can't get that from materials, not matter how interactive they are.

I don't intend to criticize the Hocank nation's choices of whom to work
with. I mean to arouse some discussion as to individual motivations and
hopes. People always discuss their Grand Projects in objectified terms (at
least in writing, I'm sure it's sometimes different when you do get to meet
people in person) and never tell what their feelings are on the issue. That
may scare off the academic in many of you, but I see a healthy relationship
as one in which feelings are expressed openly and intellectualization is
minimized.

When motives and hopes aren't discused, I fear the continuation of the
colonization and genocide project. No one is doing it intentionally, but if
the sum of many well-funded projects continues to shift focus away from the
real activities of language empowerment (fluent speakers spending lots of
caring time with younger people, most especially), I fear that people with
amazing skills and inspiration like you, Henning, will spend mountains of
effort on endeavors with very low leverage, as far as getting the language
to the next generation, and insuring the language as a source of
life-giving identity for everyone (not just the few kids who excel in
language classes). At the very least when someone promotes a project, I
wish they would say WHY they're doing it, what their feelings about the
situation and propsed project are. Motivation, to me, is always more
important than credentials, because motivation seems a greater determinant
of good work than initials after your name. Though it seems the longer your
CV, the less people feel they should explain themselves. But that is
definitely my stereotype of academics (though not totally unfounded).

I envision using all resources to get people who are fluent in the language
and culture together with young people in a positive environment where
healthy identities can be nurtured in the language. It is those people who
learn the natural way that will grow up and produce the great literature
appropriate to a healthy literate language. It's great when a few
individuals create strong indentities in their traditional cultures, but a
few people commited to acquiring and documenting the language, even
supported by a whole army of (non-speaking) linguists isn't going to tip
the balances against the forces of hundreds of years of ever more refined
and invisible genocide. (see
http://www.preventgenocide.org/law/convention/drafts/ for the original
United Nations definition of genocide, before the big nations who regularly
practice it trimmed the convention down a lot, and see Churchill 1997, A
little matter of genocide, Chapter 7 "The United States and the Genocide
Convention" p.363-398, for an enlightnening discussion of the
matter...actually no, you should just read the whole book.)

When it comes down to it, I see myself and all other academics, as agents
of the dominant culture. (see Churchill 1997 p.93-94, "The specter of
Hannibal Lecter", for discussion of some unintended (at least consciously)
consequences of academic work) Whether or not we want to admit it, and it's
really better if we DO admit it, we are possbily the ones who will finalize
the genocide (e.g., by focusing everyone's attention away from what would
really make the difference, like dealing with the social problems that lead
to negative identity and hence language loss), or else we finalize the
acculturation of indigenous people into the dominant culture (e.g., by
convincing people of the necessity of being liguists and converting the
language to a corpus of bastardized english-dependent texts; when IS
somebody going to write a real native language dicitonary? an english
dictionary doesn't explain everything in Hocank, so why do native language
dictionaries convert everything to english?). So when intiative (even my
own) comes from outside a native community and works its way into the
community, I fear for what we are all not seeing.

At least the Hocank nation gets to archive the material at home, and they
already do have strong language efforts underway. Now why didn't Johannes
mention that? Sorry if I've attacked individuals too strongly (or whole
nations). But criticism is a good thing, I think. It's all the talk about
etymolgies and semantics and dictionaries (which I do enjoy) while I know
there's little kids who could be learning the language who are being
forgotten.

If only at the heart of linguistics was the commitment to personally
acquire and transmit the language(s) you study... But why do academics
RALLY do their work? (see Hull 1988, Science as a process, for the best
psychosocial analysis of academia I've ever seen...then you'll see where my
stereotypes come from, personified by real people I know/am.)


I'll stop talking now,
Pat Warren