It was a week full of language immersion for the Buffalo Post. (My story on the new Salish language dictionary comes out Monday on Missoulian.com) This quote from Carole Ross, Mohawk language instructor at the St. Regis Mohawk Reservation caught my eye. Really wise words: “Our language is a gift from our Creator, if we don’t learn it. We cannot hear the voices of our ancestors.”
Read the full story about embracing technology to teach Native languages at Indian Country Today.

Tags: buffalo post, Language preservation, native lang, native languages, St. Regis Mohawk

Peter Hill says he knew two words of Lakota – tipi and hau – when he moved to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota.

Now he teaches the Lakota language. As Kayla Gahagan of the Rapid City, S.D, Journal tells it, here:

Two words to fluency was a long, hard fight, he said. It took seven years, books, dictionaries, living with a Native family and a desire so intense it bordered on obsession.

“I looked under every nook and cranny,” he said. “It was an uphill battle.”

The mastery of the language as an outsider gives him unique authority in the classroom.

He has no problem urging his high school students to learn a language they have a historical, spiritual and ancestral connection to, when he took the initiative to learn it on his own without any of that.

Hill, who now teaches at Red Cloud Indian School, moved to Pine Ridge and taught social studies. He thought he’d pick up the language simply by living on the reservation. But, he says, “Kids who are fluent speakers are a rarity, a diamond,” he said.

Still, he persevered, saying that learning the language was especially necessary because of his status as a visitor.

And, he says, there’s another reason: It’s critical that people both learn Lakota, and share it.

“The language is so critically endangered I’m almost in denial about it,” he tells Gahagan.

This is Gahagan’s second story recently about the Lakota language. Read our post about her previous story about efforts to preserve Lakota, here. It has a link to a video where you can learn Lakota words.

Gwen Florio

Tags: buffalo post, Gwen Florio, Lakota, Native American news, native languages, Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, Red Cloud Indian School

Do these words mean anything to you? Cws. cotokr.

Unfortunately, the words — meaning, respectively, “father” and “to stand” — aren’t recognizable to present-day members of the Unkechaug Tribe, either. That’s because neither the language of the Unkechaug nor the Shinnecock, both of whom live on Long Island, has been spoken in more than two centuries.

Now Stony Brook university on Long Island is helping the tribes to revive their lost languages, according to this story by Patricia Cohen in today’s New York Times.

They’re relying on sources as diverse as a vocabulary list drawn up by Thomas Jefferson when he visited New York in 1731 and interviewed three elderly women — the source of the two words above. The idea is to help tribal members become proficient in their own languages:

Chief Harry Wallace, the elected leader of the Unkechaug Nation, said that for tribal members, knowing the language is an integral part of understanding their own culture, past and present.

“When our children study their own language and culture, they perform better academically,” he said. “They have a core foundation to rely on.”

The Long Island effort is part of a wave of language reclamation projects undertaken by American Indians in recent years. For many tribes language is a cultural glue that holds a community together, linking generations and preserving a heritage and values. Bruce Cole, the former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, which sponsors language preservation programs, has called language “the DNA of a culture.”

At the University of California, Berkeley, the Breath of Life program has seen people whose heritage includes 25 languages in its workshops. The people who created that program are looking to start a similar one in Washington, D.C. And at the Myaamia Project that’s a joint effort between the Miami Tribe and Miami University in Ohio, director Daryl Baldwin has helped his children become fluent.

That’s really important. As Cohen reports:

Of the more than 300 indigenous languages spoken in the United States, only 175 remain, according to the Indigenous Language Institute. This nonprofit group estimates that without restoration efforts, no more than 20 will still be spoken in 2050.

Gwen Florio

Tags: Berkeley, Breath of Life, buffalo post, Daryl Baldwin, Gwen Florio, Henry Wallace, Indigenous Language Institute, Language preservation, Long Island, Miami Tribe, Miami University of Ohio, Myaamia Project, National Endowment for the Humanities, Native American news, native languages, Shinnecock Nation, Stony Brook University, Thomas Jefferson, University of California, Unkechaug

It’s a safe bet that the students at the Ruth N. Bond Elementary School in Kirtland, N.M., know a whole lot more Navajo than ya’at’eeh, the word for hello.

As Alysa Landry of the Farmington, N.M., Daily Times writes here, the school has 150 students enrolled in its Navajo bilingual classes, and eight more on a waiting list. That works out to nearly all of the students in kindergarten through third grade.

Bond is the only school with a waiting list for Navajo in the Central Consolidated School District, which covers 3,000 square miles and has a 90 percent Navajo student population, Landry reports.

“Really the only way we can enroll more students is if other students transfer out of the school or their parents pull them out of bilingual classes,” said Veta Glover, who is certified by the state to teach bilingual education. “I hate to turn kids away.”

The school is looking for more people to teach Navajo.

Carol Thomas, an assistant in the Dine Education Center in Window Rock, Ariz., says the Native American Language Culture Certification program allows tribally certified teachers to also receive state teaching certificates.

The need is urgent, says Glover. “From kindergarten through third grade, we learn everything: how to introduce yourself, the colors, the numbers, clans, the culture. If Navajo isn’t being spoken at home, they need to be here to be exposed to it. That’s what I really want for them.”

Gwen Florio

Tags: Central Consolidated School District, Dine, Dine Education Center, Gwen Florio, Language preservation, Native American Language Culture Certification, Native American news, native languages, Navajo, Ruth N. Bond Elementary School