Preserve Indian Languages

Finding ways to preserve California's Indian languages

Slip of the Tongue

Leigh Fenly
Staff Writer

23-Nov-1994 Wednesday

One summer when the blackberries were ripe, a hot, dry wind moved through
the Karuk Indian village where Violet Super lived. Flames ignited the
nearby hillsides and, driven by the wind, moved rapidly toward her house.

"Then this old medicine man came up the dirt road with a wet, burlap sack,"
Super recalls. "And he stood at our house talking in Karuk, saying these
words and hitting the ground with that burlap sack. And the fire went out
all around us, like buckets of water had poured from the sky."

That was 60 years ago when there were Karuk words for killing fire. Now
those words are gone, long forgotten.

Super, now 76, still lives in the Klamath River settlement near the Oregon
border. She is one of a dozen remaining Karuk Indians who know the
language. But most of the miracle-making words of the medicine men,
reserved for the few, disappeared decades ago.

California has always been one of the most linguistically diverse regions
in the world. In the 1800s, more than 100 native languages were spoken
here, representing six linguistic families.

Now the state has the dubious distinction of having more endangered
languages than any other place in North America. Words are disappearing and
the clock is ticking for about 50 Native American languages.

In her book, "Flutes of Fire," Leanne Hinton conservatively estimates the
number of Shasta language speakers as zero. Liberal estimate: 1.

Similar numbers exist for Modoc, Cupeno, Cahto, Juaneno, Maidu, Tolowa and
Miwok. In Southern California the number of tribal speakers is higher, but
the prognosis for the languages is still grim. Diegueno, Cahuilla and
Luiseno speakers each number less than a hundred.

"Not a single California Indian language is being learned by children as
the primary language of the household," explains Hinton, a UC Berkeley
linguist who has worked with California native languages for 15 years.

The killing blow to all language, she explains, is when children don't
learn it at home. "When the elders die, the languages vanish from the face
of the Earth."

It's a pattern being seen throughout the world. Michael Krauss, a linguist
at the University of Alaska, estimates that 90 percent of the world's
6,000 languages will be gone by the next century. Languages such as the
Alaskan Eyak, Native American Chickasaw and most of the 100 remaining
aboriginal Australian languages have a doubtful future. Even American
Navaho, with 100,000 speakers, seems doomed because few children are
learning it.

To researchers, the reasons to rescue vanishing languages are self-evident.
It's not that different from saving endangered species, explains UCLA
researcher Jared Diamond. "What makes condors more wonderful than the Eyak
language?"

Language, after all, is a vessel of information. "There's a lot of
knowledge that dies when a language dies. The pharmaceutical knowledge in
the rain forest -- the knowledge of plants and how they cure -- is deeply
tied to language," Hinton says. "There is so much to learn about the
amazing choices humans have in organizing and talking about the world
around them."

But, in the end, such idealistic motivations don't matter, she insists.
Learning a language is far too difficult to do for academic reasons. "The
most compelling reason why a language should survive is because its
speakers want it to survive. There really is no other important reason."

Just learning it

Now for the first time in California, the desire among Native Americans to
learn their languages and the tools to teach these vanishing tongues appear
to be coalescing. One of these tools is money.

This fall, five California language projects received the first round of
funding from the Native American Languages Act of 1990. The act, funded
with about $1 million, declares it a federal policy to preserve Native
Americans' rights to use and develop their languages.

With its $125,000 grant, the Washoe tribe in northern California near the
Nevada border plans to begin the state's first Native American language
immersion preschool.

The Hupas, northeast of Eureka, plan to use their grant money to buy
language recording equipment and for language training, explained Jill
Fletcher, a Hupa language educator.

A third grant will support the Master Apprentice Language Learning program,
which teams elders, as tutors, to younger, motivated Native Americans.
Initiated by the California Native Network in 1993, the program now has 17
teams throughout the state, representing nine native languages. The idea is
to fund the living expenses of teams of elders and younger tribal members,
so they can isolate themselves from English-speaking society and become
immersed in traditional culture and language.

"For a long time a lot of us were waiting for some expert to come in and
help us," says Terry Supahan, a 35-year-old Karuk educator. "Now we realize
we have to just get out there and learn it."

Many mornings Supahan walks from his house to see Violet Super, his
great-aunt and now his tutor. Like the other Master Apprentice teams, Super
and Supahan have committed 20 hours weekly for language learning. During
this time English is verboten; only Karuk is spoken.

"The other day he asked me to tell him the story of my days growing up,"
Super said, chuckling. "Now that's a long story."

After a year, Supahan describes his language skill as
high-beginner/low-intermediate. True to the adage that a teacher needs to
be only one chapter ahead of his students, Super now teaches the language
at Orleans Elementary school, where half the 100 students are Karuk.

In Central California, Matt Vera has moved back home with his mother,
Agnes, to learn Yowlumni, a Yokuts language. Melodie Carpenter, an
eighth-grade teacher, is learning her traditional language, Hupa, from her
uncle, Ray Baldy. Other teams are working on the languages of Mojave,
Wintu, Tolowa and Yorok, among others.

"By learning the language," explains Network director Mary Bates Abbot,
"the native world view and values begin to re-establish themselves. A whole
way of being is encoded in the language."

Variations on these programs are popping up throughout the state. Mark
Macarro, library manager on San Diego County's Rincon Reservation, says
classes in the Luiseno language will soon begin. Already, preschoolers are
taught words and phrases in a weekly program.

On the Campo Reservation, Native Americans and linguists have compiled a
1,000-word Kumeyaay dictionary and phrase book. The reservation, in east
San Diego County, has received a $50,000 grant to create a master plan for
preserving the Kumeyaay language. Monique LaChappa, director of education
at Campo, expects that the master apprentice concept will get started on
the reservation by the end of next year.

Overriding the myths

The key to the new programs is immersion. Nothing new there. Linguists have
long realized that the best and quickest way to learn a language is to go
where it's spoken and plunge in. But the trick here is to create an
immersion situation in languages no longer commonly spoken.

Hinton, daughter of San Diego folksinger Sam Hinton, suggested the idea of
matching elders with younger learners at a Tribal Scholars meeting in Marin
County in 1992, convened to discuss ideas for preserving native languages.
Within months, the Native California Network, a tribal coalition, had
secured shoestring funding, Hinton had developed the training program and
teams had been chosen.

As she explains, "All these misconceptions exist about how adults must
learn a new language -- that you have to learn in a classroom, that you
have to learn to write the language, that you have to learn differently
from a child. None of that is true. Some teams have a hard time having
faith enough in this system. But it does work. And once the teams learn the
principles, it can be done cheaply and it doesn't take outside experts."

The teams are encouraged to do normal and traditional activities together:
shopping, gardening, basket making. "There is a great deal of language that
comes up in the context of these activities." Teams are instructed in basic
linguistic approaches, such as how to be an active learner or teacher, how
to use gestures to get meaning across, and, most of all, to be patient.

After the first year, more teams were added to each language because one
problem that arose was isolation. "Some elders found it really hard to be
continuously talking in the language to someone who was not understanding
it," explained Hinton. With multiple teams, the elders can speak to each
other with the apprentices listening and not run out of things to say so
quickly.

Before Matt Vera moved back home, he had a good vocabulary in his native
language but wasn't advanced enough to put sentences together. Now he and
his mother sit around the breakfast table discussing in Yowlumni their
dreams of the previous night.

That, says Abbot, "is a phenomenal amount of progress."

A few fluent speakers

What difference such programs can make in preserving language is unknown.
Some linguists privately suggest that nothing at this late date can rescue
languages so close to death.

Hinton's position is far less dire -- the fire may be out but the ashes
are still warm. "Obviously, producing a few fluent speakers is not going to
be enough. Many other things need to be done, but this step is crucial.
What has to happen is that a few fluent speakers need to be produced to
carry on these languages in crisis."

As they are revived, the languages are changing. Obviously, a big chunk of
vocabulary is missing in languages that quit evolving almost a century ago.
This creates some interesting dilemmas. For instance, when the Hupa Indians
wanted to do a language skit involving eating in a restaurant, they needed
a word for spaghetti. There was no such Hupa word.

Eventually, the Hupas decided that spaghetti resembled a favored native
dish. "Now," says Hinton, "the Hupa word for spaghetti is eel tendons."

Likewise, there was no word for purple until one day when a Hupa elder
observed decidedly purplish bird droppings on his car. Now purple is
droppings from birds eating berries.

Most often the elders are charged with creating the new vocabulary. But
there is much debate about new words, and also about old ones. Among such
small cadres of speakers, heated disagreements arise about words, grammar
and syntax. What will survive will most certainly not be pure languages.

Says Hinton, "What interests me is what is it that the apprentices are
speaking? It takes a long time to speak exactly as the elders speak, and
the apprentices may never get to that point.

"One interesting thing is that what these apprentices know is going to be
the language that survives. I have a lot of questions about what it is that
they are speaking and how it differs from the elders' way."

In this mutable environment, linguists, too, find their roles changing. A
key advantage to the Master Apprentice program is that linguists are not a
required ingredient. Sore feelings still remain from earlier relationships
between linguists and Native Americans.

"A lot of Indians feel that the work done in the past wasn't applicable to
their needs and was used for people's promotion in the scientific
community," says Hinton. "What I'm trying very hard to do is figure out
how one can do science and yet be useful to the community in the same
process."

For two decades, linguistics has been moving away from applied research
toward theory, such as how language is represented in the mind. There's
not much in that for rescuing Native American languages. "A lot of students
are developing skills that they could use to help Indians save their
languages," says Hinton, "but it's tough to do that and develop a career
at a university where mainstream linguistics is all about arcane theory."

In the end, Hinton believes the Native American communities must lead the
way. "I don't see myself in a role of motivating the desire to keep
languages alive, but rather in helping people once they have the
motivation.

"What's really important is that the people be empowered to save their
language -- or not save it."

Terry Supahan, for one, votes to save it. "I dream of a time for my
great-great-grandchildren in which the language will be strong and will
give them a bridge into the modern world."

copied from <http://www.pechanga.net/finding_ways_to_preserve_califor.htm> 7/9/00.