Cowboys & Indians / April 2009 / Saving Native languages

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Saving Native languages

The cause to save Native languages is gaining momentum, and hope, from new generations of Lakota speakers.

"Kill the Indian in him, and save the man."

At best, it was a misguided social notion, at worst a prescription for cultural genocide. But in the late 1800s, this new approach to the "Indian problem" represented progress. Instead of being killed outright, Native Americans would be educated in the white man's ways. The infamous words were spoken by Capt. Richard Henry Pratt, a retired military officer, in response to Gen. Philip Sheridan's comment, "The only good Indians I ever saw were dead." Opposed to the federal government's ongoing promotion of Indian massacres, Pratt opened the first off-reservation Indian boarding school in 1879 in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in the belief that integration, not eradication, was the answer.

Over the next century, hundreds of thousands of Native American children would be educated in boarding schools that expressly prohibited students from speaking their native language in the hope that they could be assimilated into mainstream American culture.

Antiquated thinking? Yes. Dusty history? Not really. Attendance at Indian schools peaked in the 1970s, when an estimated 60,000 Indian children were enrolled. "From 1880 to 1978 all of the Native traditions — spirituality, language, everything — were outlawed," says Albert White Hat Sr., director of the Lakota language program at Sinte Gleska University, a tribal university on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in Mission, South Dakota. "The law was enforced very effectively through the teachings of the missionaries. If they knew you practiced any spiritual or Native traditions, when you died they would bury you outside of the church cemetery and tell your family that you were burning in hell. When you are 5 years old and your uncle is buried outside of the cemetery wall, that will scare you for the rest of your life."

No surprise, then, that deeply instilled fear and shame are, according to White Hat, some of the most difficult hurdles to overcome in teaching Native languages. He should know: He's the author of Writing and Reading the Lakota Language (1999), the first Lakota textbook written by a native speaker, and has been teaching new generations of Lakota speakers for the last 30 years. He knows about language loss firsthand. Raised at home by his mother, who was born in 1893 and was fluent in Lakota, White Hat was sent to a government boarding school at the age of 16. "The students were all Indian kids, but I was ridiculed because I was Indian," says White Hat, now in his 70s. "Most of the other students had been in there since they were 5 years old. There were only a few of us that had been able to retain our heritage up until our teenage years. We understood the language fluently. We understood the spirituality of it."

One year after he was sent away to school, White Hat's mother died (his father had previously died working in military defense during World War II). Nonetheless, White Hat went on to graduate with a self-described third-grade education and a newfound resentment of his heritage. "I was angry that I was born an Indian," he says. It wasn't until the 1960s, when he discovered medicine men who were practicing Lakota and traditional spiritual practices underground, that White Hat regained a sense of pride in his culture. "I started to find what I was happy in the most, and that was the language," he says. That's when he began researching and studying Lakota in earnest, despite warnings from his own family that his soul was in danger.

White Hat soon discovered that instead of his soul, the language itself — and its inherent spiritual meaning — were in danger of being forever lost. Primarily an oral language, Lakota was first transcribed into phonetic English by missionaries in the 1830s. These missionaries, who presided over reservation churches and taught in the reservation schools, often altered the Lakota vocabulary to fit their belief systems. "We had some beautiful words like wacekiye — hat means he or she is welcoming or embracing a relative," he says. "They took that word and changed it to prayer. When you pray, you bow or kneel and worship a supreme being, just one power. If that is all you know from childhood, you forget your relatives with that word. They took a word like unmasike — 'I have a need' — and changed it to 'I am helpless, pitiful.' If you have what I need, I say unsimale yo, meaning 'Help me with this need, I will move forward with your help, and here is what I will give you in return.' They took those words and changed them, so that now when I say unsimale yo, I am saying, 'Have pity on me, have mercy on me.'"

White Hat hopes not only to preserve the language but also to restore its original, intended meaning. "We are going to launder our language," he says. "We are going to clean it so that we can bring that energy, that life, that spirit, back into it. So that we can respect and honor all creation as a relative. Above all, we are going to be proud and responsible. We have a very simple statement of our philosophy: Mitakuye oyas'in. Mitakuye is 'relative,' oyas'in is 'everything.' We are related to all creation, and the language is based on that. This is what we are trying to do today."

The cause to save Native languages is gaining momentum, and hope, from new generations of Lakota speakers. More than 130 years after Chief Sitting Bull called the Sioux to gather at Little Bighorn, the tribe has once again come together to save its culture. Tusweca Tiospaye, a Native nonprofit organization devoted to the preservation, promotion, and strengthening of the Lakota language, hosted the first annual Lakota/Dakota/Nakota Language Summit in Rapid City, South Dakota, in November 2008. The theme of the summit was "Uniting the Seven Council Fires to Save the Language." The Great Sioux Nation, which is divided into seven bands or "seven council fires" known as the Oceti Sakowin, last gathered at Little Bighorn to try to address the continued encroachment by whites on Lakota lands and the government mandate that all Indians report to reservations or be considered "hostile." Now a self-imposed mandate to save their language has brought the Seven Council Fires together once again.

Lakota, like most Native languages, is alarmingly close to being lost. On the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, home of the Oglala Sioux Tribe and the second-largest reservation in the United States, only 26 percent of the Lakota population claims to have any Lakota language ability, and the average age of fluent speakers is 65 and rising. According to Mike Carlow Jr., the summit organizer and founder of Tusweca Tiospaye, things have reached a critical point. A former Lakota-studies teacher in the Pine Ridge Reservation schools, Carlow points out that in many reservation schools students receive as little as 20 minutes of Native language education a week. His travels to various reservations for language conferences further revealed that language loss is a problem affecting all tribes. "I realized that we were facing the same fight to keep language alive," he says. "We were struggling independently when we could be much stronger together." Carlow's goal is to encourage schools to set aside more time for Native language instruction. "Studies show that children who speak multiple languages behave better in schools and have higher test scores," he says. "I would like to see Native languages incorporated in every classroom for every class — math, social studies, English, art."

Carlow himself learned Lakota from his "grandmothers" (his father's mother and her sister), both fluent speakers. "They instilled in me a sense of pride in who I was and my culture," he says. "As I grew up, I carried that pride with me." The summit itself was a celebration of the language. Starting a year in advance, Carlow invited linguists, Native language experts, and educators at the top of their respective fields to participate, including White Hat, who was a featured speaker. More than 400 individuals attended, and every Sioux reservation and reserve was represented — from tribal members to chiefs to tribal chairs — in addition to tribes from throughout the United States and Canada. "With all the different people that came to the summit, there was an energy there," Carlow says. "You could see that it instilled a deeper sense of pride and motivated people to go home and incorporate what they learned in their own work." With that energy and widening sense of purpose, Carlow hopes to see the language come full circle — that young people who have learned Lakota as a second language will teach their own children Lakota as a first language.

That's Lakota music to the elder White Hat's ears. "All the methods of learning the language are out there now," he says. "The students just have to want to learn it and make a commitment."

This year's Lakota/Dakota/Nakota Language Summit will be held November 12–14 in Rapid City, South Dakota. For more information on the summit and Tusweca Tiospaye's work to combat language loss, visit www.tuswecatiospaye.org.

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THE AGE OF UNENLIGHTENMENT

The annual report to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs from the 1890s shows we've come a long way.

• REPORTS OF AGENTS IN MONTANA, REPORT OF FORT BELKNAP AGENCY, AUGUST 1891
The children should be taken to the schools at the earliest age possible, to prevent them from acquiring Indian ideas, habits, manners, or language, all of which have to be overcome and suppressed, thus retarding their progress and increasing the labor and difficulty of teachers. The younger a child begins to learn our language the more easily and perfectly it is acquired. The filthy habits and customs of the Indian camp are not easily overcome after years of practice, and the older the child the more persistent it is in speaking and clinging to the Indian tongue. The census just taken shows 183 female and 195 male children under 6 years of age. If provision could be made to take these children now, and keep them from camp, their training and education would be simple and easy.

• REPORTS OF AGENTS IN OREGON, REPORT OF SUPERINTENDENT OF GRAND RONDE SCHOOL, AUGUST 1891
The progress, especially of the elder ones who already understood English, has been very encouraging. Several of the pupils, however, were new from their homes, in which case the lack of civilization and want of knowledge of the language rendered them doubly a charge; but these obstacles gradually succumbed to the patient endeavors of teacher and matron. It is gratifying to notice how even eager our Indian children are to give up their native dialect, the pleasing result being that at the close of school every child could converse in English without any need of taking refuge to "jargon."

• REPORT OF THE COMMISSIONER OF INDIAN AFFAIRS, OCTOBER 1891
The process now going on by which nearly 20,000 Indian children are gathered into English-speaking schools, where they are taught by English-speaking people, where they learn the correct use of the English language, and come into relationship with American life and American thought, and have begotten within them new hopes and desires and changed ideas of life, is certain to work a revolution in the Indian character and to lift them on to a higher plane of civilization, if it can be allowed to operate long enough.

Excerpted from the Sixtieth Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to the Secretary of the Interior, 1891.

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TECHNOLOGY TO THE RESCUE

First there was the iMac, then the iPhone. Now there's the iRez, a next-generation handheld device that promises to help save endangered languages.

Don Thornton, founder of Thornton Media, Inc. (TMI), first became aware of a new voice technology developed by the government soon after 9/11. Called the Phraselator, it was a handheld device intended to help soldiers communicate with civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq. Thornton realized that the technology had an application for Native language revitalization. He finally obtained permission to use the advanced technology, and by 2008 he was working with more than 100 Indian tribes and First Nations to record Native words and phrases and translate them into English. One of the first Indians to program the device was Thornton's grandmother, Lucinda Robbins, a master speaker of the Cherokee language.

TMI recently launched two new Native language learning products at the National Indian Education Association Conference. The iRez Language Pal is a smaller and more affordable version of the Phraselator. Able to hold up to 85,000 phrases and words, the iRez can be used to record and translate audio and video files in any language.

Even better news for kids — and for preservationists who know the younger generations are the key to reviving a dying language — TMI has also released a 3-D language video game called RezWorld. To proceed through the game, players must interact with virtual characters by talking into a microphone in a Native language. The game also teaches cultural protocol and manners — if you ask the virtual characters for help in a culturally inappropriate way, you won't get far. Due out in mid-2009 are the TMI Language Pal, a less expensive version of the iRez, with greater capacity and the ability to accommodate multiple languages and dialects and play hours of video, and a one-level version of RezWorld in Cherokee available by download.

For more about how Thornton Media Inc. is using technology to help save endangered indigenous languages, visit www.ndnlanguage.com.

— K.W.

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YOU SAY HAU, I SAY HELLO

Try a few Lakota phrases with the glossary below.

• Listen: Find audio links to pronunciations here

HAU (how) — Hello
HAU KOLA (how ko LA') — Hello male friend
HAU MUSHKAY (how moosh kay) — Hello female friend
PILAMAYA (pee LA' mah ya) — Thank you
TOKESKE YAUN HE? (Doe KAYSH' kay ya OON' hey) — How are you?
WASTE (wash DAY') — Good!
HAN (huh) — Yes
HIYA (hee YA') — No
DOKSA AKE WAUNKTE (doke SHA' ah KAY' wah OON' ktay) — Goodbye
• Note: There is no literal translation of goodbye in Lakota; this means "I will see you again on earth or in the spirit world."
ANPA — Daylight
ANPECOKANYA — Noontime
ANPETULA — A lovely day
ANPETUTAHENA — Before the day is done
TWACINTOKANGNAGNAHAN — Day dreaming
WAKAN TAKAN KICI UN — May the Creator/ Grandfather/Great Spirit/God bless you

See the St. John's Indian School website for additional Lakota phrases, along with audio files of native Lakota speakers, at www.stjo.org.

Filed under: Western, Native Life