Posted on 02/25/2009 4:11:21 PM PST by SJackson
In a time of intense financial pressure, Gov. Jim Doyle has set aside $250,000 a year in his state budget proposal to restart a longstanding state program to help American Indian tribes save their endangered languages.
Only about one-half of 1 percent of state tribal members are native speakers of the state’s five native languages, with some counting just a handful of elderly speakers, the Wisconsin State Journal reported in a series in June.
The Democratic governor said that, in spite of the $5.9 billion budget shortfall he faced in writing his budget, the state needed to act now or risk losing the opportunity to save a part of its shared heritage.
“It’s an example of one of the things where if you don’t put something in and you let it die you never get another chance,” said Doyle, who as a young lawyer once worked with Navajo-speaking clients on their tribe’s Arizona reservation. “This is, in dollar terms, a very small item in the overall budget. But it’s enough that we can keep this alive and keep it moving in the right direction.”
Rep. Robin Vos, R-Caledonia, the ranking Assembly Republican on the Legislature’s budget committee, said the proposal was likely worthwhile. But he said it was less important than holding down taxes and paying for other priorities that Doyle did not completely fund in his budget, such as providing electronic monitoring of sex offenders.
“I believe in the idea, but it’s just not more important than other things that were cut,” Vos said.
The proposal won praise from tribal leaders gathered at the Capitol Tuesday for the annual State of the Tribes Address.
“I appreciate that the governor, with what he’s facing, could find $250,000 for tribal languages,” said Lisa Waukau, chairwoman of the Menominee tribe, whose language has only some 15 speakers and is spoken nowhere else in the world.
Unlike the European languages that are part of Wisconsin’s shared heritage, such as German and Norwegian, tribal languages can’t be learned by traveling to some place outside the state where they’re still being widely used, Waukau said.
“Once native languages are dead here, there’s nowhere we can go,” she said.
Doyle would use money paid to the state from tribal casinos to provide $250,000 a year for competitive grants to tribes and school districts, which would work together to teach students.
In recent years, language programs have been paid for by the tribes themselves, with some help from federal and private grants. Phil Shopodock, chairman of the Forest County Potawatomi, said his tribe had been able to fund its language programs through its successful Milwaukee casino but that, particularly in the current economic downturn, less fortunate tribes were forced to choose between funding basic needs and ensuring that their language and culture survive.
“It’s the rock. It’s the foundation,” Shopodock said of the importance of tribes’ languages to their cultures.
During the last state budget crisis in 2003, the then Republican-controlled Legislature cut $220,000 a year that had been going to pay for tribal language and culture programs. That cut eliminated a program dating to 1980 and came at a time when tribes were just starting innovative teaching methods that are helping young children become fluent speakers for the first time in more than a generation.
Sen. Bob Jauch, D-Poplar, who has four Ojibwe reservations in his northern Wisconsin district, said he supported bringing the program back to help protect a cultural legacy for both the tribes and the state as a whole.
Brian Bisonette, secretary-treasurer of the Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe, said his tribe would like to expand an innovative charter school on its reservation that teaches children from preschool through the fourth grade largely in Ojibwe. So far, that school has been able to carry on with its work without direct state dollars but has struggled with its plans to expand to higher grades, he said.
“Every year it’s a challenge to keep the funding levels that we have,” he said.
I think we need a really big subsidy ~ particularly from those Scanderhoovians in Wisconsin ~ big ~ really, really big!
Earth to Dim Jim Doyle:
We speak English here in the United States of America now. I see no reason to spend tax-dollars in the middle of a recession to preserve dead languages!
An interesting question, and not really much money, what's much money any more.
I've had this question asked twice in my life by members/officials/educators of western tribes, given the re-emergence of Hebrew as a living language, and the perseveriance of Jewish culture. Other than the trivial, I didn't have any concrete suggestions, other than the names of educators who might. But I do think it's far more a question of family and community, and unrelated to money.
There are still a few German speaking locales around too, though dying out. I think it’s a great objective, but not a problem likely to be solved by the state or by funding. Don’t tell Obama I suggested there’s a problem government can’t solve.
Pulu See Pacumba!
I am sorry I never had a chance to learn Tsalagi. My native heritage is important to me. I’m not supporting spending buku tax dollars, but Tsalagi is not a “dead” language, to me, and many other Americans. You might be surprised to know how many Freepers have NA roots.
We also use modern tools, such as computers, so therefore we shouldn’t spend hundreds of millions of dollars on libraries as well.
More seriously, if lawmakers really want to get across that these are hard economic times to a governor who is spending money like it’s going out of style, cut the 250k from his office’s budget. After all, a dead language is far more useful and relevant than more government drones.
It’s good to ask the question about why gov’t money is needed to do this. It’s all well and good to talk about people’s heritage and preserving something from a culture, but, does it have to be done by the government?
Literally every penny spent by gov’t, at all levels, can be justified as being a worthwhile expenditure in some way.
You are IMO correct. And I'd have a real hard time supporting something like this when times are lean. And there are alot of things that I have a problem with like the entire Porkulus - those funds come from WI...
With AI languages, for a good period of time, it was illegal to speak many of them. It was part of forced assimilation. Remove a few generations of a people from the culture and you have a large gap.
I can't say of other AI Nations/Tribes but to the Dine, there is no separation of language, custom, culture, religion.
How come you not speak real Kubi-Ki?
Preventing languages from dying is a good thing, esp Native ones IMO. Not sure this is the best time to throw money at the problem though. Couldn’t a University handle this?
I agree on both points. In WI, the Ho Chunk and others have very successful and profitable gaming casinos, and it would seem appropriate for them to fund this type of historical preservation.
I probably wouldn’t be surprised at the number. Tax dollars aside, I think it’s an interesting question, and traditions worth preserving. Even if it cost some tax dollars, though I don’t know how government does it. I think it’s more an issue of passing on cultural traditions. Where there wasn’t a long history of the written word, I think it’s hard to preserve language. While Hebrew is often held up as a newly living language, it’s been alive for millenia in text. Is Latin dead, I don’t think so. Without the written tradition, I can see how it becomes problematic, but it’s the cultural traditions that are important to preserve.
More important, i suspect government will fail in a task like this, irrespective of the size of the expenditure.
Dine, that’s the language of all the Navajo nation, right? My allusion in post 4, both were Navajo, and very concerned about the preservation of their culture. The evil of forced assimilation I’ll leave for another thread.
“In WI, the Ho Chunk and others have very successful and profitable gaming casinos, and it would seem appropriate for them to fund this type of historical preservation.”
But remember...’Diamond Jim’ Doyle is in the back pocket of the Ho-Chunk Nation. They gave him hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign funds. This is payback.
‘Wisconsin Conservative Politics Ping List’ PING!
This is really stupid. Fewer languages means more communication and better understanding of each other.
It is interesting to note that people who support endangered languages generally refuse to personally speak only those languages. Wouldn't that be the best way to preserve an endangered language?
I need to polish up my college German. Could I please have just $500,000? It would improve German-American relations a lot.
Nr., erwerben Ihr eigenes Geld.
Huh? I told you I need $500,000 to polish up.
You didn’t say anything about Polish! I know some Polish too, KIELBASA!
Moj Boze! Tak,pan (pani?), trudny.
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