by Christine Graef

Buffalo, New York (Akiing)

Words from a long time ago are coming back, carried on a river flowing around government efforts to extinguish language, past state policy uninclusive of funding, soothing anxiety amid elders who remember and rippling toward the next generations who more and more are echoing the sounds once nearly silenced across the lands.

“Before, we saw linguists, one right after another, talking to us about our language,” said Gerald Hill, Oneida, Bear Clan, former chief counsel for the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin. “Now, it’s evolved into us being the activists. Before, people talked about it and didn’t know what to do. Now, talk is about how to do it, what the resources are, what works and what doesn’t. We have technology. We’ve found how to avoid politics. Now, it’s more of a discovery of what can be done and how it can be done.”

Too often we put it in the hands of others rather than going to our own people, said Hill.

Hill was one of many speakers from around the world who came together to share at the recent Buffalo School State College 13th Annual Stabilizing Indigenous Language Symposium, hosted by the School of Education and co-sponsored by the Seneca Nation of Indians.

About 400 teachers, students and fluent speakers who want to help came together in the campus rooms to share the many links required for language revitalization to be successful and the many techniques to implement it.

“We have the range of every level of the language process,” said Dr. Lori Quigley, Seneca, chair of the Conference Planning Committee and Associate Professor of Elementary Education and Reading at Buffalo State University. “From California, where 35 languages have no speakers but people wanting it back are working with linguists to reclaim it, to full immersion programs for infants through adults such as at Ahkwesasne. We celebrate all these efforts and we’ll leave the conference with the challenge of how to make it different for our children.”

Discussions at the symposium shared ideas about building dictionaries without losing the essence of the oral meanings; text analysis; connecting phrases to aid in the translation and speaking; use of Internet applications and software; multimedia strategies to use when a teacher has limited time to spend with students; storytelling; animation; theater; local cable television and radio stations; case studies on different schools and methods; progress of new programs; effects on identify and pride; adult immersion classes; music and translations into song; measuring progress; technology that translates English into tribal languages; all reflecting support for each other in ways that integrate the best of several teaching modes.

“It takes courage,” said Tom Porter, Sakokwenionkwas (The One Who Wins), Mohawk, Bear Clan. “When it’s gone, language is gone forever and then it’d be termination of Indian lands. There will be a time when we go to court and they’ll tell us, ‘you look like an American and you talk like an American. Indians are long gone.’ ”

The Mohawk Nation Council of Chiefs, an elected council at Kahnawake Mohawk Territory in Quebec, put teeth into their commitment when they wrote a pending bylaw requiring that every employee of the Council had five years to learn to speak Mohawk or they’d lose their employment. This included about 500 people working in every position who were offered classes in immersion programs. In 2001, the Nation declared it their official language as the first community in Canada to run a full immersion program.

“As a result, now I can go there and talk to dozens of little children in language,” said Porter. “I can hear stories from a 20-year-old who can tell me in language.”

In 1993 a meeting at Porter’s community, Kanatsiohareke in Fonda, New York, came together to discuss the problem of language loss. The group found that only 10 percent of the Mohawk people were fluent speakers and many of these were elders.

Language was already being spoken in the full immersion elementary Freedom School opened in 1979. From this, the effort spread out and the adult immersion movement became dominant in the past decade. In spring 2003, they met again at Kanatsiohareke and reviewed the progress. Now 30 percent of the people were speaking Mohawk.

“We definitely are gaining on it,” said Bonnie Maracle, Mohawk, doctorate student of Native studies at Trent University.

The Mohawk Tyendinaga Territory in Ontario taught language as a subject class for two decades but did not produce speakers, said Maracle.

“It’s a way of teaching vocabulary,” she said. “There are levels of language learning. We know that language as a subject is good as a start but always know we can develop into more.”

Immersion programs are a progression, she said. We need to get back to the way of thinking like a Mohawk person. The culture is held within the language, much more than being able to serve a family corn soup or go to a ceremony when we get a chance.

One of the opportunities in Canada is the option of receiving credits for learning the language if the student is involved with a post-secondary accredited program. Tyendinaga is looking at developing a two-year immersion diploma as part of Native Studies Program.

It took a lot of years, it took time, unity, commitment but it only takes a handful of people to get it going, said Maracle.

In the beginning of immersion, they speak in English about the language process and by the end it becomes total language. Maracle said they’ve found a 10-month program done this way is required with adults who learn differently and need much repetition. They then are scooped up as teachers, assistant teachers and curriculum developers.

Total immersion originated in New Zealand among the Maori in 1982 and today, of a population of 530,000, there are more than 120,000 fluent speakers of the Maori language. The Maori are currently working on a dictionary.

Resources such as posters, pictures, vocabulary words, sounds, texts, music, ceremony, stories, students creating skits and films, using drums, songs, bringing in family members and drawing on talents in the community have targeted teaching to every physical, emotional and intellectual sense of the learning process.

“We’re project oriented,” said Kaweienon:ni Margaret Cook-Peters, Snipe Clan, Onondaga. “I can show parents and school boards that the students are speaking well in language.”

Cook-Peters works for the Ahkwesahasne Mohawk Board of Education as its language specialist and teaches Mohawk language and culture at the North Country Community College. She’s developed Talking Books with CD narrations and worked on production of several videos.

She said that a new language initiative called Kanien’keha Tsi Tewata:ti through the Ahkwesahsne Economic Development Agency creates language resources that are delivered on Can 9, a virtualab for language learning. She also works with her daughter Teioswathe to create a variety of media resources such as CD’s, DVDs and posters. Also, the Mohawk Language Nest is now being used to bring language to babies 0 –3-years old.

“It should start from birth and welcoming a baby in birth,” said Cook. “Language is picked up in the womb, the sound of the voice, the rhythm of the words.”

One of the impediments she’s seen in immersion schools is in parents pulling out their children when they begin to think the child will not succeed if he doesn’t receive an English education.

“I’m here to prove that wrong,” said Cook.

Many students who went through the program came out academically successful when they transferred to high school, she said, including her daughter who is a teacher at the Freedom School this year.

“Every child has a gift,” said Cook. “We all carry something we’re good at, even if it’s not reading and writing extremely well. It may be as a great speaker or their gifts will come out in arts.”

The culture is contained in the speaking of the language, she said.

“We make the program fun, using a lot of music in the teaching, translating contemporary songs into language, starting every day with the Thanksgiving Address, sitting according to the Haudenosaunee clan system, tradition is taught naturally within the day, not as a separate program,” she said. “Children hold the wampum to represent the sincerity of their words and how they’ll be carried. Elders come in and share stories and children visit the elderly to sing songs. “

The inter-generational transmission of language does not always have to be from elder to youth, she said.

“We lost one or two generations of speakers so it may be that the children give it to the elders today,” she said.

Cook recommends including the entire community and sharing all resources.

“Funding has not been the biggest problem,” said Cook. “If I’m told the budget is not there for a project, I’ve found another way, like asking local businesses to sponsor it.”

One of the issues always seems to be dialect, she said. With eight distinct Mohawk communities, the effort to revitalize language had to get beyond that.

“We came to understandings on some things and agreed to disagree on other things,” she said.

She also works with the entire Confederacy so all resources are shared among the people and with the students, impressing on them that they are not just Mohawk but are part of the Confederacy.

“A long time ago they sent our people to school to learn English,” she said. “At home they spoke in language. I think it works the other way too.”

“It’s got to be a communal effort,” said Christine Lemley,of the University of Wisconsin. “Everyone’s got to do this. I think that’s really key.”

Lemley’s one-year study of the effects of language participation on identity and pride showed a centering force in reclamation of identity of the Menominee Nation in central Wisconsin.

Practices for one person may not be best for all, she said. Looking at communities and individuals is necessary.

“We can’t just look at language on paper,” she said. “We’ve got to go out and kids have to interact with the community. We have to ask how can families be involved, too.”

The Menominee have offered language classes to the community since the late 1970s with K-12 schools that offer a language class but teach core curriculum in English. Lemley said the Nation is working on a grant for pre-school and kindergarten total immersion.

“The soul of each nation is in its people and embodied in the Native language,” said John Teller, Menominee.

The Menominee’s tribally sponsored language commission adopted a tribal code in 1996 that gives them the right to certify their own language teachers using their own standards that the state must accept.

“Someone can be a fluent speaker but also must have classroom management and teaching skills,” said Teller.

Elders are invited to speak at the tribal schools. Other language resources include youth going out to help harvest rice or maple syrup. Elders will often hold a story telling.

“It’s a technique that children are receptive to,” said Lemley. “Or the kids may ask the elders what they did as teenagers.”

People have asked Lemley if she thinks the language is being lost.

“What does that mean,” she said. “Define fluent. Fluent in conversation or fluent in culture. I’ve come to think of it as more than the language. It’s the thought, the understanding of culture.”

“Language is the first gift Creator gave to us, next to life itself,” said Tom Belt, Cherokee. “Whether human, animal or plant languages, it’s how we interpret our world.”

Belt, who grew up in Oklahoma during the 1950s and 1960s, said he watched the language decline and, encoded within it, the ceremonies and medicines.

“It’s like having a line of people 30,000 years long and you are the next in line,” he said. “Don’t drop it. We were given the language to pass on. It belongs to all of us.”

Efforts made in both the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma and the Eastern Band in North Carolina became stronger when they came together to work on the same front, he said.

“There were always difficulties in dialect,” he said. “We learn language from our mothers and so each of us have that. Diversity is something we’ll need to work on, understand and allow.”

Heidi Altman, Language Planning Consultant for Georgia Southern University, said the Eastern Band has 13,000 enrolled members of whom 6 percent still speak the language. Of these, 72 percent are over 50 years of age.

Western Carolina University, where Belt teaches, has signed a memorandum of understanding with the Eastern Band to establish relation and parameters and support a language revitalization initiative, immersion and teacher education while improving access of resources for the community. A new project in place is an infant immersion for age birth to sixth grade.

“There are 900 speakers left on the reservation,” said Gilliam Jackson, Cherokee, supervisor for the infant immersion program. “When babies begin learning, it gets deeper into their brain, more entrenched. If they ever stop speaking for awhile in their lives, it will still be with them.”

“We today have the benefit of learning what’s not the best way of teaching,” said Vince Shiffert, Tuscarora, language teacher at the Niagara Wheatfield School District in Lewiston, New York. “We have the benefit to know we need to teach how to form sentences, not just words out of context. Often what works best is teaching through whatever a child is most interested in, anything hands on and movement inspired.”

The focus in Tuscarora is about how to motivate people to want to use their language in their communities.

“When I grew up, there were lots of elders still speaking,” said Shiffert. “It was just around you all the time. I never thought there would be a time it would disappear.”

By the 1970s, there were about 100 people speaking the language but numbers mean nothing, said Shiffert.

“If most of the speakers are elders, you’re in trouble,” he said. “Unless the children are speaking it, you’re in trouble.”

Languages may change and shift in accent and syllables and in subtle ways over time, he said.

“That’s not a concern,” he said. “Language is a living thing. It’s fluid, living, breathing and meant to change as it probably always has. It’s the essence of our culture that remains in it.”

For G. Peter Jemison, Heron Clan, Seneca, true desire to learn language emerged in him about the age of 30 when he made the commitment to learn it.

“I’d learned of one community where they had no songs, they had no dances, they had no language,” he said. “That was one of the most painful things I’d heard. I made up my mind I’d do whatever I could in my lifetime to keep that from happening.”

Jemison said learning your Native language is essential to offering Thanks to Creator. Our strength is when we come together and share with each other, he said.

The first question always to ask is, how are we related. The languages contain these relationships, he said.

“By the time I graduated high school, I could only speak three things,” said Brian Maracle, Mohawk, teacher at Onkwaweuna Keatyplakwa at the Six Nations, which has operated a full-time adult language program for the past seven years. “Since then, I’ve learned a lot of vocabulary but up until about eight years ago I couldn’t put together a single sentence.”

What was missing was understanding the internal logic of the language, he said. Instead of trying to memorize each separate sentence, breaking the language down to start from the ground up allows forming thousands of words just from understanding a few hundred roots.

Michael Shepard, graduate student in anthropology at Western Washington University, is working on his thesis, Community Perception of Language Through Participatory Action Research (PAR), a method devised to remove the anthropologist from the conventional role as “expert.” PAR began being used by a new generation of academias in the 1970s for language, healing and substance addictions by affirming with traditional knowledge, said Shepard.

Conventional researchers came in, gathered, wrote research and left or set up resources without first determining from the community their own needs, he said.

PAR develops the issue of concern though the community’s voice and the community retains the ownership and right to the research.

Working with the Northwest Indian College on the Lummi Nation who offers language classes more as an elective than as a first language, subsequently produced few speakers, said Shepard. He said few of the older generation remain.

The Lummi Language Project’s goal is to better understand how people think about their Native language and about how it is taught and used in the community. Shepard said the project is just getting underway. Research activities include concept association such as writing two words on a paper and then the concepts a person associates with them to see what is held in common interest.

Shepard said the model can be applied to many Native language situations.

There are more than 7,000 languages spoken in the world. Scientists estimate that one is lost every two weeks and with it is lost a window into a way of thinking.

In the 2003 documentary, The Last Speakers, Dr. David Harrison of Swarthmore College and Dr. Greg Anderson of the Living Tongue Institute studied languages in Siberia and found that Chulym was disappearing. Many of the elders had been forced to attend boarding schools by the Soviet Union to change what was considered “backward.”

Speakers said they eventually stopped speaking Chulym because it was seen as inferior. Tapping into the few speakers the professors found, they asked for stories or songs to tap into the memories and languages of the elders remaining. They also video-taped the speakers. The next generation may not know the language, but they may want to know what stories the elders were telling, said Harrison. These can be recorded and preserved by a community project.

All language has changed over time said Anne Marie Goodfellow, studying Kwak’wala and Alaskan Athabascan through Western Washington University.

“A lot of speakers are learning for the first time as adults,” said Goodfellow. “This has a lot of implications in how it’s spoken.”

For example, kwah’wah, which means “cannibal bird mask,” is pronounced by those over 40 as xamsaml and by those under 25 as hamsams and p’asp’ay’o (ears) as paspayus by those under 25, adding the “s” as the plural in the English style.

“I’d rather see it modified like this as long as they’re still speaking,” Goodfellow said.

A lot of influence is due to how isolated a nation may be from the European languages, said Jon Reyhner, professor of education at Northern Arizona University.

“The Navajo language survived mainly because they were relatively isolated,” said Reyhner. “There were no paved roads to many places on the reservation and dirt roads were difficult in winter and rainy seasons.”

Thirty-four years ago, when Reyhner taught sixth grade, he said Navajo was the first language of the students but now English is the primary language.

“The breakdown of isolation came with paved roads,” he said.

Language is taught through every grade and continues into the Dine College. The Nation records its language, stories, and offers tapes books, CDs, videos, a television and radio station along with other media to promote the words as a first language.

The effects of literacy on language were a surprise to Barbara Burnaby, a researcher from Memorial University of Newfoundland who studies language in Labrador among the Innu and Inuit.

Each have had various European contact, she said. The Innu, inland hunters, got involved with the fur trade. The Inuit, hunters and fishers along the coast, traveled up and down the St. Lawrence River and got involved with the whale trade.

“Literacy was introduced 400 years ago,” said Burnaby. “They were more isolated from the rest of Canadian society and from the missionaries.”

Today, only 10 percent of the Labrador Inuit are speakers while in Canada, 83 percent of the Inuit are speakers.

Literacy preserved volumes of the Choctaw language, said George Anne Gregory, Ho Anompoli.

During the 50 years between 1830 and 1850, the Choctaw penned their business and events. After the Dawes Act, the writing shifted into English, said Gregory.

“The language body of literature from that period is enormous,” she said. “The Oklahoma Historical Society has thousands of its pages, personal letters, texts, hymns, court documents, that need to be translated. If you look at it, you can see how much was lost.”

Gregory hopes to help a community project bring it online so it’s available to all.

Of the 210 million English speakers on the American continent, only five speak Chemehvevi, a Native language in Arizona. The speakers are being documented with all that they are able to offer.

“The times we live in, we want things instantly, but language is not like that as adult learners,” said Leroy “Jock” Hill, Cayuga, Bear Clan, sub-chief to Deskahe at the Six Nations. “It takes time and it takes dedication.”

He’s still evolving, he said. He can just about learn by listening now.

“What the most fluent speakers have told me is to listen,” he said.

What began in 1982 as a grassroots group meeting once a week with an elder who taught them language, has grown into many language programs including adult immersion and basic level classes with talk now of going deeper into the teachings through the higher form of the language.

The meetings two decades ago began with conversational speaking and vocabulary.

“Then our teacher said we had to change our focus,” said Hill. “We were learning every day talking. We had to learn ceremonial. In one year, we went from about eight speakers in the longhouse to three. There was urgency.”

Hill is still learning. He said he challenges himself to see if he can talk about any situation, such as when he sees something while driving along, he describes it in language. He said he started by building words, filling his head with words and is still working on prefix and suffix structures.

“I was stubborn about learning to write it,” he said. “I can write something in language, come back to it in a month and not remember how to pronounce it. So I’ve invented my own symbols to remember. It’s oral and meant to be spoken.”

“We realized that parents thought they could drop kids off and kids would come out speakers,” he said. “It doesn’t work that way, no matter how good the teachers are. It needs the commitment of parents. There was a need to create a program for parents to have opportunity to learn too.”

A new class was opened and any parent wanting to learn could get together. It started out on weekends. No registration was required, just whoever would come, said Hill. It began with a base of nouns and verbs.

“What is needed is to create situations, whether one time a week meeting for dinner, getting together with fluent speakers, listening, engaging,” he said.

Attitude is a big factor whether it’s the learner or the teacher, he said.

For more information on Teaching Indigenous Languages go On The Net:

http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~jar/TIL.html.