Indian groups focus on saving languages
Posted: July 09, 2008
by: McClatchy Tribune Business News
By Faye Flam -- The Philadelphia Inquirer
PHILADELPHIA (MCT) - In the Lakota language, a single word expresses the awe
and connectedness with nature that some feel looking at the northern lights.
In Euchee, the language makes no distinction between humans and other
animals, though it does differentiate between Euchee people and non-Euchee.
And the Koasati language of Louisiana provides no word for goodbye, since
time is seen as more cyclical than linear. To end a conversation, you would
say something like, ''This was good.''
More than 300 American Indian languages flourished in North America at the
time of Columbus, each carrying a unique way of understanding the world.
And despite an often-brutal campaign to stamp them out, more than half of
those languages have survived, including the Delaware Valley's Lenape,
though the pool of speakers has dwindled.
Can they be saved? Representatives from Indian groups around the country met
with linguists and other academics in Philadelphia recently to see what they
could accomplish together.
''We're talking about an emergency situation,'' said Richard Grounds, a
speaker of the Euchee language and co-organizer of the meeting, held at the
University of Pennsylvania Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology.
The youngest person to grow up speaking Euchee as a first language is now
78, said Grounds, a professor at the University of Tulsa. The rest are in
their 80s.
Grounds learned from his family how Indian languages were systematically
squelched. His grandmother, he said, grew up speaking Euchee but, as a
teenager, was forced into an English-only boarding school where teachers
would wash her mouth out with soap when she uttered a word of her Native
tongue.
In the past few years, he has been racing to coax all the words and wisdom
he can from tribal elders.
And yet, at the meeting, a number of young people spoke and even sang in
Euchee, Lenape, Miccosukke, Lakota, Miami and other endangered languages -
something that Grounds said gave him hope.
The situation in North America is part of a worldwide erosion of language
diversity. At stake are not just words. For Native communities, language
embeds traditions, religion, medicine and geography, as well as a more
general way of seeing the world.
''It's not only about the use of [medicinal] plants, etc., carried in a
language, but literally ways people have of knowing themselves,'' Grounds
said.
Some languages, for example, have no way to give directions using left and
right, because their speakers navigate with a less self-centered view of the
world than we do, said Leanne Hinton, a linguist at the University of
California - Los Angeles. They think more in terms of local geography.
Ryan Wilson, a member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, said that the quality his
people value most in a man is something like courage but includes a degree
of independence and perseverance. It has no direct English translation, and
with the word might go the idea and the reason it once mattered.
Wilson, president of the National Alliance to Save Native Languages, said
there also was a word that describes the feeling that you cannot live
without someone. It is similar to love, but something is lost in that
translation.
Languages seem to be going extinct like species of plants and animals. That
comparison holds up pretty well, except that languages can occasionally be
brought back to life.
Growing up in Ohio, Daryl Baldwin said he was told that the language of his
Miami tribe was extinct, but he did not accept that. As an adult, he set
about digging up all available records and teaching himself.
''It changed the way I thought,'' he said about learning the language after
29 years of speaking nothing but English.
The Miami language contains wisdom about which foods are healthful -
something that today might have helped Indians avoid being
disproportionately affected by Type 2 diabetes, Baldwin said. He's working
to perpetuate the language as director of a program called the Myaamia
Project at Ohio's Miami University.
In the Maskoke language, time and space are seen very differently from
Western perception, said Marcus Briggs-Cloud, a member of the Maskoke Nation
of Florida and a theology graduate student at Harvard.
In English, time is more linear, whereas it's more cyclical in Maskoke.
There's also a cyclical nature to space, and some ceremonies focus on the
renewal of space.
While the academics see these languages as windows into the human mind, the
American Indians see them as a way to reconnect to their heritage and to the
ancestors who used them.
''In the next few years, my tribal community will either see our language
restored to a new generation, or we will bury it forever in the grave of our
last few elderly speakers,'' Jacob Manatowa-Bailey said of the
Oklahoma-based Sauk language.
Although they seem to have common needs, Grounds said, the academic
linguists interested in American Indian language have not always worked in
the best interests of the people they study.
The academics use funds to catalog and dissect languages that might have
been used to revive them, he said.
And linguists sometimes compete for access to the few remaining elders,
whose time might be better spent teaching the language to young people who
would use it.
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