Posted on 06/01/2008 5:16:06 AM PDT by Diana in Wisconsin
BLACK RIVER FALLS, WI — In the country of the white pines, by the waters of Lake Superior and the banks of the Wisconsin River, the voices are dying one by one.
The first languages of Wisconsin, the vessels bearing ages of American Indian history, song, medicine and prayers, could be as little as a generation away from an all-abiding silence. Languages that are grafted to the land and that together once counted tens of thousands of native speakers in the state, now have only an aging few here.
Without unprecedented action, the state's tribes will test the Ho-Chunk belief that the fate of a people is tied to their native tongue.
"There's a story that we have that we were given this language by God, and as such, this language is considered to be sacred," said Andrew Thundercloud, a Ho-Chunk educator working to reverse the slide. "And I was told in this story that when our language is gone, the world will end.
"We see that our language is disappearing. Our beliefs are disappearing ... if we do not keep our language, we're going to exist as Ho-Chunks in name only."
The five surviving Indian languages of Wisconsin — Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Ojibwe, Potawatomi and Oneida — are quietly suffering from the same pressures of assimilation pushing languages around the world toward extinction.
To a person, tribal leaders interviewed for this series insist their languages can still be saved. And to do it, tribes are mounting their most ambitious efforts.
But these underfunded programs face the highest odds.
Consider:
• Only about one-half of 1 percent of state tribal members — about 300 aging men and women in all — are native speakers of the state's Indian languages. That's according to more than 50 interviews with linguists and members of all 12 state tribes. Menominee, which is spoken nowhere else in the world, has only 10 to 20 native speakers left who mastered the language as children.
Potawatomi, a language spoken mainly in Wisconsin, has about 10 native speakers remaining here. The Oneida tribe has just three left in the state, and the youngest is 87. The Mohican language once spoken by the Stockbridge-Munsee tribe, and the Mohegan language of the Brothertown tribe, have already been lost here.
• Almost all Wisconsin tribes have a language program, and native languages have been introduced in many reservation schools. But a Wisconsin State Journal review found only two fledgling teaching programs in the state that are attempting to produce fully bilingual students by immersing them in those languages.
• The resources individual tribes devote to saving their language can vary from more than 30 employees to a single worker, the review found. The difference depends partly on a tribe's priorities but also on whether the tribe has a profitable casino or can win competitive outside grants.
• In 2003, the Legislature ended a long-standing program and stopped spending state money to preserve this endangered human heritage. By contrast, the state is expected to spend $2.6 million this year to protect threatened wildlife like the trumpeter swan and the Karner blue butterfly.
"How do you justify saving a critter when you have a native language to the state that you're just going to let become extinct?" said Rep. Terry Musser, R-Black River Falls, the point person on tribal issues in the Legislature. "We wouldn't do that with an animal ... but here we have a culture that, unless something changes, that's what's going to happen."
Without these languages, life in Wisconsin would go on, just as it would without history museums or vestiges of the state's German and Norwegian heritage.
But Rand Valentine, a UW-Madison linguist and specialist in Ojibwe, said the likely death of Wisconsin's native languages represents an incalculable loss to the state's shared history and culture.
"It's like burning your libraries," Valentine said. "It's like killing your past."
Reviving fading tongues
Hope remains. Native Hawaiians and the Maori people of New Zealand have had success in reviving their languages through immersion schools and day-care centers, said Lyle Campbell, director of the Center for American Indian Languages at the University of Utah.
A new generation of tribal members is starting to adapt these programs for languages here, including Ho-Chunk and Ojibwe, which is also known as Chippewa.
"We have between five and 10 years, I'd say, to turn the corner," said Henning Garvin, 3l, who helps coordinate these programs for the Ho-Chunk.
In the future, scholars and tribes will still be able to draw on incomplete recordings and dictionaries of the state's native languages. The deeper question, experts said, is whether the languages will continue to live fully among tribal speakers as they have for millennia.
That's because few children are learning these languages from their parents, the surest path to fluency. With the possible exception of Ojibwe — which is spoken by perhaps 10,000 people outside of Wisconsin — these languages belong to the most endangered class, one that linguist Gregory Anderson, director of the Living Tongues Institute in Salem, Ore., calls "moribund."
These languages have endured not only neglect but outright efforts to kill them off. In the past, Indian boarding schools punished students for speaking their language. Today, English dominates schools and popular culture, and young people often must leave their reservations for colleges or jobs. The poverty on many reservations forces tribal leaders to choose between meeting the needs of the moment and preserving the heritage of the past.
With the loss of a language — or even just a learned native speaker — tribes forfeit an often unrecorded encyclopedia of traditional medicines, ancient place names, unwritten histories, and sacred knowledge such as the proper way to pray to one's creator or bury a tribal member.
A sustaining force
For Thundercloud, the Ho-Chunk language is a lifeline that has pulled him through war, family hardships and decades away from home. Today, he works as the curriculum developer for the Ho-Chunk tribe's language division.
As a boy in Melrose, near Black River Falls, Thundercloud, 64, grew up speaking Ho-Chunk as his first language. With his paternal grandfather, he would sit in a secluded spot outdoors or lie in his bed at night and listen as the older man taught him the ways of their people.
As a Marine in Vietnam, Thundercloud listened to audiotapes of his father and grandfather telling him stories in Ho-Chunk about how generations of their family's ancestors had survived distant battles. When his own son was paralyzed in a mountain bike accident in 1998, Thundercloud reminded him in their language that his life was not over and that one day, in the afterlife, his broken form would again be whole.
But even as Ho-Chunk was sustaining Thundercloud, the language itself was weakening.
Working with another Ho-Chunk tribe in northeastern Nebraska, Thundercloud saw the tribal language and ceremonies were falling out of use there much faster than back home. Even in Wisconsin, where nearly all native speakers of Ho-Chunk live, the tribe now has only about 200 of these elders left. That's more than any other tribe in the state, but still only about 3 percent of Ho-Chunk tribal members.
Gradually, Thundercloud came to understand what elders like his grandfather had meant when they said the world would end if the tribe lost its language.
"When I was a kid I used to think about ... you know, apocalypse and the great floods and the fires and everything," he said. "But as I become older and I look, I understand what they mean is that we as a people will no longer exist. Our world (would be) gone.
"Sometimes I'm moved close to tears because of this."
'A long, hard road'
Molly Miller, 55, lives with that loss. Miller, a member of the state's Stockbridge-Munsee band of Mohican Indians, is trying to revive her tribe's language, which lost its last native speaker decades ago. Rather than focus on the surviving written sources in Mohican, Miller has gone to Canada to study with elders who speak the Munsee dialect of a related language known as Delaware or Lenape.
"It's a long, hard road," Miller said of her work. "You cannot learn language from a book."
The Menominee have nowhere to go to replenish their language if it's lost. It is spoken only beneath the centuries-old, 150-foot-tall white pines that the tribe has nurtured on the traditional lands of its northeastern Wisconsin reservation.
"If we didn't have the language, we wouldn't be Menominee," said David Grignon, director of the tribe's Historic Preservation Office. "We're lucky that we still have it, that we can say this is our language and that right after creation we spoke this language."
In the early 1990s, Grignon, 57, set out to help his tribe pass that language on from the dwindling number of native speakers of Menominee before it was too late. With the help of federal grants, Grignon and the historic preservation office started a mentoring program in which elders laboriously taught the language to a handful of adult learners who were then certified to teach it in area schools.
This "master-apprentice" program drew a few successful young learners like Joey Awonohopay, the grandson of an unofficial tribal chief who has been interested in the language since boyhood.
Other groups like a tribal Language and Culture Commission have since taken up the work, and the College of Menominee Nation now has a federal grant to help give more training to some of the same teachers created by Grignon's mentoring program.
"A little bit of light is beginning to shine through," Awonohopay, 36, said of the tribe's efforts. "There is hope."
But Menominee County, which includes the tribe's reservation, has been ranked as the poorest in the state. That makes it hard to fund needs like health care, schools and roads and still pay for language programs, tribal legislator Gary Besaw said.
"We're in a world where you have to, like it or not, pay bills," Besaw said.
Guiding the spirit home
Meanwhile, the pool of elders and native speakers from which tribes like the Menominee can draw grows smaller.
In July, the tribe lost 78-year-old Lillian Nelson, the last member of the Menominees' sacred but now ended Medicine Lodge, a group that once performed special tribal ceremonies. A teacher of Grignon and others, Nelson spoke Menominee with a diction and usage so elegant that one of her former students calls it the "chief's language."
On the sweltering day of Nelson's traditional burial, Grignon delivered the ceremonial words in Menominee that his people must say to guide the spirit of a loved one on its four-day journey in the afterlife.
"I'm speaking for the person who taught me how to speak, and I'm sending her home the way she would like her ceremonies to be," Grignon said afterward, recalling his thoughts that day.
Nelson had helped prepare Grignon to speak for her, and for the long tradition that she had embodied. As her casket was carried to a waiting hearse, a group of her young students beat a drum and sang an honor song for her.
The beat of the drum thudded through the earth, so that the music could be felt as much as heard by the mourners; the voices of the singers — raised up in an ancient, endangered tongue — soared toward the sky and then grew quiet.
THE SERIES AT A GLANCE
Sunday — The present: The state's five native languages, the heart of Wisconsin's American Indian cultures, face profound threats to their survival.
Monday — The past: Old attempts by the federal government to strip native students of their language are still felt today.
Tuesday — The future: Fledgling efforts hold out hope for a new generation of bilingual speakers.
Quick! Let’s send in the Federal government!
I was thinking more along the lines that English is next...
I guess I’m supposed to feel some White guilt.
Not necessarily. I don’t. More like, “unless we learn from History we’re condemned to repeat it” with our own language.
Where do we get “Save the Ho-Chunk language” bumper stickers?
The English language was the greatest gift anyone ever gave us Celts. Without it, we'd all be goatherds, like the Basques.
People are quite capable of learning more then one language as children. So having them fully fluent in both by the time school started would be simple.
One of my patients had been married to one of the Navajo Wind Talkers. She cried when she told me that none of her children or grand children speak the language.
See blames the forced relocation ( at gunpoint) of children to English-only boarding schools. She did not have happy memories of he time in her boarding school.
If they wish to save the language, they will need to get their children into schools which completely immerse them in the language.
The children of my first husband ( whites of Northern European ancestry) attend a magnet school in California that immerses the children in both Spanish and English. His children are completely bilingual and have excellent command of both English and Spanish. They are fluent in both because the teachers have demanded excellence in both languages.
The problem with Ebonics is that is a corrupted dialect of English, and no demands are being made on these children to master standard English.
By the shores of Gitchee Gumee, by the shining big sea waters...
Spare me the drama. Vestigial languages are no more than curiosities for the etymological equivalent of the antiquities fan. If the tribes want to preserve them, fine by me --no harm in that--but let no one please try to tell me that if the last speaker of Ho Chunk drops dead the world has suffered some massive irreplaceabe loss.
Sitting here laughing!
Saving this language could give us insight to the history of the area before Europeans settled the area. For the interest of science and history, we should preserve this language. All language is good. All language carry information. To let information die is akin to burning a library or setting a book on fire. We should at least tape record the last few native speakers of this language and keep their language on file for future peoples to learn how to speak.
If we had had completely private schools, and funding followed the children and didn't go directly to the schools, Native Americans would have decided these language issues privately among themselves.
Also,...One of the major reasons these languages are suffering is that up to the 1960s and beyond, the government **forced** ( sometime at gunpoint) Native American children into English-only boarding schools and into homestays with English-speaking families.
As Milton Friedman would say, “Ah! The Law of Unintended Consequences!”
The problem exists because government schools have been and are largely out of the **direct** and immediate control of the parents.
The death of a language that bears witness to a culture, a culture which is part of our culture, part of what it means to be an American is to be mourned. It is not the place of conservatism to demolish the past and pave it over with no visible remaining trace, but to revere it, to understand that received cultures reflect tens of millennia of learning to adopt to an environment, and reflects a widom that cannot be recreated overnight. It is Marxism that tries to obliterate the past, not conservatism.
Does this mean that centralist government action is required? I don't think so, as I don't know what good it would do. But I for one will stand by the side of the road, hat off, head bowed in reverence, sad to the loss for which we are poorer and not richer.
Why is spanish the only other language offered? I don't want my children to speak spanish.
This, to me, is like the Anthropologists whining when ‘forgotten’ tribes are discovered — soon they WANT to join civilization, to give up their sheep-skin clothing, to buy food at markets. The scientists are all upset, but the people WANT to have new ways.
If these languages were really important, those who spoke them would have taught them to the next generation.
For the interest of science and history,
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Exactly!
The migration of people have been traced through language. This has been a recent discovery and very, very useful in the fields of anthropology and medicine.
At the very least, we need to get these languages recorded.
Really? Who are they going to talk to?
It is not the place of conservatism to demolish the past and pave it over with no visible remaining trace, but to revere it, to understand that received cultures reflect tens of millennia of learning to adopt to an environment, and reflects a widom that cannot be recreated overnight.
I find it very odd that you blame "conservatism" for this. On what do you base your claim?
It is a Spanish immersion school, essentially for American-born, English speaking children. It is a magnet school. I do not know if the offer classes in other languages as is typically seen in the regular government schools.
Great post.
Language, yes (which is what we should hope for among conservatives...).
Government action, no.
But the loss of real language tat bears witness to a culture is no small thing.
I think this happens in most immigrant families as well. My parents were fluent speakers of Greek who immigrated to the USA in the early 1970s, my sister and I were both born in the USA and we attended Greek school (really an after-school program, and yes, it is real!). While my sister and I both know Greek, we don't speak it to one another, and we spoke it on a limited basis with our parents as both were fluent English speakers before they moved here.
Now that my own child is on the way, I am not sure what I will do regarding teaching him or her Greek. My wife is not of Greek descent, and with my limited Greek speaking abilities, there'd be no one with whom the child could actively converse in Greek. It also doesn't help that all of our Greek-speaking relatives abroad speak fluent English!
It is government and its forced relocation of Native American children into boarding schools and English speaking family homestays that **greatly** hastened the destruction of these languages.
Stupid bureaucrats!
It will be bureaucrats and government (through our entire existing system of compulsory ( at threat of gunpoint government schools) that **WILL** hasten and is **NOW** hastening the destruction of the entire fabric of Western Civilization as well.
Stupid educrats!
“The English language was the greatest gift anyone ever gave us Celts. Without it, we’d all be goatherds, like the Basques.”
Ireland seems to be doing great with Irish. At least, it’s doing better than English-speaking N. Ireland.
I find it very odd that you did not understand my post.
I am not sure what I will do regarding teaching him or her Greek.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
I studied Latin in high school and no one speaks Latin,...But...I am grateful I had the opportunity. It improved my understanding of my own language, English, and learning the vocabulary of my health field was somewhat easier than if I didn’t know it.
I wish I had studied Greek for the same reasons.
I wish I had studied French for the same reason.
Wow! Life before spell check was tough! I had to look up every French based word in the dictionary.
Andy Jackson isn't blaming conservatives. But, I, as a conservative, stand with him in mourning the loss of these languages.
Forcing several generations of Native Americans into government English-speaking boarding schools drove a stake into the heart of these languages. Surely government imposed ( at gunpoint) schools is not a conservative principle. It is a Liberal/Marxist abuse.
Okay, I see it now. Kind of a disconnect from one paragraph to the next.
I don't see conservatives being blamed for the loss of native languages. It seems to me that govt overall is being blamed.
I don't "mourn the loss" of these languages as much as I mourn the losing of English as our primary language.
Navajo is a living language, with well over 100,000 native speakers. While the percentage of Navajos speaking it continues to drop, the absolute number of speakers is still increasing, due to the large increase in their population.
Very little is written in Navajo, with very little use of the written language even on the rez. Odd, that.
Actually, I also took one semester of Latin in HS. Much of it is ripped off from Greek. :)
Have to wonder at this. If the languages are already dead and nobody but a couple Phuddy Duddies can make head or tail of any of it then what is lost that isn't already gone?
Getting their children into Navajos immersion K-12 schools would help. That does not mean that they should neglect achieving full competence in English.
Many of these anthropologists are malcontents who hate capitalism and the American way. They want to keep their dark-skinned mascots in picturesque squalor as a validation of their own beliefs.
-ccm
Only a third of the Irish can speak Gaelic fluently. Fewer than a hundred thousand of them, in the furthest west and northwest reaches of the country, are truly native speakers. For most of them it is like the instruction of French among the English-speaking population in Canada: something they learn half-heartedly in school, and have little use for, other than to qualify for government jobs.
-ccm
Thanks, I stand corrected.
At first, my response was “We might as well start having tribes where the main language is Yooper”, but then I started thinking about the Evolution of languages. First, a language starts out as an accent, then it evolves into a dialect, then it evolves into a pidgin, then into a creole, then it turns into a brand new language of its own right.
But the forces that cause languages to evolve are usually geographic isolation (Or in this racist case, race based isolation) from the main language. Now that society is integrated, any further evolution of this language is just a way to racially isolate people in an integrated world. That’s why Ebonics shouldn’t be taught.
It’s not a real language, it’s just a dialect that’s a relic of times when the speakers were enslaved and isolated from society rather than included in society. So in other words, we may as well still start including tribes that speak Yooper.
I completely agree.
Ebonics should not be confused with a Spanish language immersion school that teaches excellent Spanish and English.
My husband and I ordered the British version of the TV program “The Office”. We could simply could not understand it. It really was like a foreign language. The accent, jargon, and slang was so thick it was impossible.
We had the daughter of a friend visit us for a summer. She was from England. When we told her that we had to **concentrate** and pay attention when listening to Masterpiece Theater, she was amazed. Her response, “But we understand you!”
Actually, in the 1800s, American English, Australian English and all sorts of English dialects were predicted to evolve into their own languages by the middle of the 1950s. Radio and television have pushed back the evolution of those languages into simply dialects.
That’s what I fear with the English language with the internet. People wouldn’t know what’s standardized anymore. In fact, in the local newspaper, I saw many editing errors, including my most dreaded your/you’re misuse.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.