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A little bit of good news, read on:

From Native News

Indian language teachers to be certified, State board allows native-language speakers to teach in public schools

Richard Roesler Staff writer


OLYMPIA _ Sindic Jimmy didn't know it until the end, but he had a heavy
responsibility to bear.

A Nooksack Indian in northwest Washington, Sindic Jimmy was the last fluent
speaker of the tribe's original language. He spent many of his final days
dictating hundreds of hours of the ancient language into tape recorders.

He died in 1977. All that's left to guide Nooksack language teachers and
students today are those recordings, some tapes of another tribal elder
dating back to the 1950s, and some decades-old field notes made by
linguists.

The situation's almost as bad for other tribes. In 1995, the tribes on the
Colville Indian Reservation surveyed their people, and tallied up 281 fluent
speakers. By last April, elder deaths had pared that to 51, and it's now 43.
In northwest Washington, the Lummi have just one person left who grew up
speaking their language. She's 85 years old. The Makah lost their last one
in September.

On Friday, tribes and tribal linguists cheered a rare bit of good news. The
state Board of Education unanimously agreed to grant special teaching
certificates, in lieu of conventional teaching credentials, that would allow
native-language speakers to teach in public schools.

The language teachers would still face background checks and some other
routine training. They'd still be hired by the local school district. But
they wouldn't have to go to college to earn a teaching credential, as most
teachers do.

"Who could be more qualified than the people who speak the language? And who
has more of a stake in seeing that it's presented accurately?" said Brent
Galloway, a Saskatchewan Indian Federated College linguist working to
preserve the Nooksack language.

Getting Indian-language teachers into public schools was an emotional issue
for tribal members, who say their languages are intertwined with who they
are as a people. At a hearing Wednesday, some tribal members wept as they
described watching their ancient languages on the brink of extinction.

"It's more than just the language or the culture it's a way of being in the
world," said Martina Whelshula, a member of the Colville Confederated Tribes
who lives in Spokane. Her people's language, Okanogan, is a swooshing,
flowing language dotted with tiny pauses. To non-native speakers, it's hard
to tell where one word ends and the next begins. She said there are words
that convey feelings and nuances hard to translate into English, such as an
Okanogan greeting that asks how people are in their heart and abdomen. There
are ways of speaking that convey extra respect, or special relationships.

"Through our history, it's the thing that has kept us together as a people,"
said Margie Hutchinson, a member of the Colville tribes' business council.
"And it's being forgotten."

On Wednesday, Hutchinson and other tribal members from the Colville
reservation felt a painful reminder that they're racing time. Charlie
Quintasket, 94, a well-known elder from the reservation's Arrow Lakes
people -- and one of about two dozen fluent speakers of Okanogan -- died.

Speaking native languages was officially discouraged -- often with a
spanking paddle -- in government and church schools for Indians during much
of the past century. Hutchinson's mother spoke the native language, but
Hutchinson was taken to Catholic boarding school 30 miles away when she was
7.

"We weren't allowed to speak it there, so no one did," she said.

Today, with only a handful of Indian-language classes in the state's public
schools and community colleges, it's hard to get Indian children to learn
their tribal languages, Whelshula said. After-school language classes, she
said, must compete with sports, TV and pop culture. It's far better, she
said, to include the language as part of the regular school day.

"I see it as teaching the other half of the child," said 72-year-old Pauline
Hillaire, a Lummi. "The kids are going to school all these generations and
learning only to be white. But the whole child needs to be taught."

About 27,000 Indian students are in public schools statewide. Spokane and
Okanogan counties each have more than 1,100 Native American students, while
Stevens County has more than 600.

Some state education board members voiced worries about a potential conflict
with federal "No Child Left Behind" legislation, designed to ensure that
teachers are qualified. Board President Debbie May said Friday that she's
confident those hurdles can be overcome.

"This enhances student learning for all our kids, which is what we're all
about," board member Linda Lamb said.

After the vote, Hillaire thanked the board five times and sang a song of
gratitude in her native language.

"I hope it echoes in your ears for a while," she said.

Preserving language

Bea Charles was among the first generation of the Lower Elwha Klallam tribe
to attend public school, where she was forbidden to speak her native
language. Breaking the rule meant a rap across the knuckles or worse, and
put-downs such as, "You sound like you have a mouth full of mush."

Tired of the beatings and the ridicule, Charles began speaking English even
at home, prompting her great-grandfather to ask, "Have you become white?"

Now those memories have inspired Charles, who is 83, to sit for hours at a
folding table, reviewing prefixes and suffixes, transitive and intransitive
verbs and passive and active voices. Although she hated school when she was
young, she isn't complaining now, because her work is central to a
decade-old project to revive -- and, for the first time, write down -- the
Klallam language she grew up speaking.

"Our language is part of us, our way of life," Charles said. "It's who we
are. If we don't save the language, we've lost a part of us."

The memory of tribal elders such as Charles, guided by a professional
linguist, has resulted in Klallam video games, lessons on CD-ROM and, for
the past four years, "heritage" language classes at Port Angeles High
School. What's happening here on the Olympic Peninsula is just one of
several efforts nationwide to document, and create new speakers of, scores
of indigenous languages that are facing extinction.

After a century of open hostility toward these languages, the federal
government is helping to foot the bill. But the task is daunting: Of about
175 indigenous languages still spoken in the United States, about 20 are
being passed on to another generation. The pressure to converse in English,
the worldwide language of commerce, also isn't abating.

But to some, losing ancient languages is no sign of progress.

"A language is an emblem of social identity," said linguist Timothy Montler,
who has devoted much of the past decade to preserving the language of the
Klallam. "It represents many generations of complex social structures and
interactions. It's a shame to let something as beautiful and complicated as
a human language disappear."

The federal government tried to make native languages disappear starting in
the 19th century. "In the difference of our language today lies two-thirds
of our trouble. . . . Their barbarous dialect should be blotted out and the
English language substituted," a federal commission on Indian affairs
concluded in 1868. "Through the sameness of language is produced sameness of
sentiment, and thought."

This policy of assimilation was enforced, often brutally, at government-run
boarding schools where native children were sent to receive religious
indoctrination and learn the language and culture of white people. It wasn't
officially reversed until 1990, when Congress passed the Native American
Languages Act, which declared that Indians had a right to "use, practice and
develop Native Languages."

But the change -- along with millions of federal dollars to support language
preservation -- may have come too late.

In this northwest corner of Washington, the Lummi have just one remaining
speaker. The last fluent speaker of Makah died in August at age 100. As far
as anyone can tell, there are only three or four remaining speakers of
Klallam, which is one of the large family of Salish languages that were once
prevalent in the upper Northwest and British Columbia.

Even in California, which has speakers or semi-speakers of about 50
indigenous languages, the future seems grim.

"The trouble is that there is not an indigenous language where children are
learning, and all the fluent speakers are over 60," said Leanne Hinton, a
professor of linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley who has
written books and essays about California languages. "All of them are in
their last stages of existence unless something is done. Documenting the
language is absolutely vital because . . . even when trying to revitalize
them, you're not able to produce speakers as fast as speakers are dying."

Leaders of the Lower Elwha Klallam tribe, with 950 members, saw the
deterioration firsthand.

Once the tribe populated thriving villages on the Canadian and U.S. sides of
the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Now, it is spread across four reservations,
including one in Canada. The only known speakers of Klallam live on this
reservation outside Port Angeles. Created in the 1960s, it spans 1,000 acres
and houses about 950 people. There is an enormous sense here, as on many
reservations, of what has been lost: fishing rights, culture, language.
There also are continuous struggles against alcoholism, diabetes and, among
Klallam youth, poor achievement in the public schools.

The resentment is palpable. Many tribal members mention an incident last
year in which a teenager and two 11-year-olds ended up in handcuffs after
one of them threw an empty plastic soda bottle toward a garbage can on a
school bus and hit the driver instead. The handcuffing was an example, many
believe, of how the larger society perceives people of Native American
descent as inferior.

"We're invisible," said Gloria Rapoza, 76, who grew up on the reservation
but later moved away. "People think we live in teepees."

Building pride in the language and tribal customs, such as basket weaving
and canoe making, is a way to regain a portion of what has been lost, tribal
leaders said. That's why they contacted Montler, the linguist, in 1992.
While working on his doctoral thesis a decade earlier, Montler had
approached the tribe for help in documenting their language but had been
turned away.

"There wasn't a sense of urgency, and the people weren't so old," said
Montler, 53, who teaches at the University of North Texas.

For a decade, Montler has spent weeks at a time, sometimes entire summers
away from his family in Texas, sitting with the elders, translating old
stories and jotting down new words. But one of the hardest parts of the job
has been creating a written record for a language that had always been oral.

"At first it was hard to accept that it was going to be written, because it
was always an oral tradition," said Linda Laungayan, 42, one of five
cultural specialists the tribe has hired to learn the language and spread it
to others.

But with so few Klallam speakers, there was no other choice.

Although much of the writing system is based on the Roman alphabet, Montler
said, the language has more variations on the quality of vowel sounds and
many more consonants. There are numerous "ejective" sounds (such as
clicking) for which symbols had to be created. Word by word, Montler has
developed dictionaries, reference guides and computer games.

He has plumbed the technical aspects of the language, but he is enjoying the
process of going beyond pure academics into the hands-on work of trying to
make a language live again. "At some point, you have no choice," he said
during a recent two-week visit to the reservation. "It just draws you in."

The hope is that Klallam will draw in the children.

The tribe provides weekly training sessions for adults, which draw sparse
attendance. But the real focus is on the schools. Five people have been
trained as cultural specialists who go into the schools, beginning with Head
Start, to teach children songs, then words and the beginnings of grammar and
speech.

Perhaps no one in the tribe is as linked to the effort as Jamie Valadez, who
helped get the language program started and now teaches Klallam at Port
Angeles High School.

"We realized that we needed to train young people about the culture and
language," said Valadez, 43, whose grant proposals have resulted in $700,000
during the past decade.

On a recent day, Valadez flipped through flashcards with her classes, told
the teenagers stories and played word games. In one class, she even
incorporated a version of the television game show "Jeopardy," with students
saying things such as, "I'll take nouns for $100" and "Verbs for $500."

Although the students often play games in class, the language restoration
program is a serious matter. Valadez was elated in January when the
Washington State Board of Education agreed to grant special teaching
certificates that would allow speakers of indigenous languages to teach in
the public schools. As part of a three-year trial, the speakers won't have
to earn teaching certificates, but they will secure approval from a panel
selected by the tribe.

Many of the state's other tribes are looking to Valadez to see how her tribe
got started. Still, the language remains fragile. There are no fluent
speakers yet. Hardly anyone on the reservation can yet recognize or
pronounce even basic Klallam words. The ones they want to reach most --
children -- are sometimes lukewarm about the prospect of learning Klallam.

Ralisa Lawrence, 16, a student at Port Angeles, said even many of her native
peers "don't see it as useful." But for a language that has been dormant for
decades, progress is measured in small steps.

"We may never get to be fluent," Valadez said. "But it's going to be alive
as long as people use it."

Public school to teach Cherokee language

http://www.news-star.com/stories/042903/edu_50.shtml

LOST CITY, Okla. (AP) -- An American Indian language that was once
banned in schools will be the only language used by an eastern Oklahoma
kindergarten class next fall.
A Lost City kindergarten class will be the state's first public school
class taught only in Cherokee.
"The main benefit is for the language to be used and to instruct
children in school for the language and culture to exist in the future,"
said Superintendent Annette Millard.
The Cherokee County school district is made up of one elementary school,
where 65 of the 100 students are members of the Cherokee tribe.
Millard expects about 12 students to enroll in the first class but said
grades will be added if parents want the program expanded.
The Cherokee Nation is providing the funds for the teacher's salary and
that of a teacher's aide.
The tribe has been working to revive the language. Currently, only 10
percent of tribal members are highly fluent in Cherokee.
"My father's first language was Cherokee, and at the Sequoyah boarding
school, he had his mouth washed out with soap every time he spoke
Cherokee," said Principal Chief Chad Smith.
"It's personal for me to see the language come back and flourish," said
Smith, who describes himself as a "marginal" speaker in Cherokee.
About 64 percent of tribal members do not speak or understand Cherokee.
The tribe offers two language immersion classrooms for 3- and
4-year-olds at its early childhood programs in Tahlequah. It plans to
expand the program through the sixth grade.
"You have to plant a seed for language fluency," Smith said. "The best
place is with children. For 50 years, there was this wrongful myth that
children speaking Cherokee could not learn.
"With the success of the program, students will become better leaders,
more well-rounded individuals and perform academically better being
bilingual," he said.
Public schools will benefit, too, said Millard.
"The language acts as a catalyst to teaching and learning," she said. "I
feel it is important to their language and culture. If we don't take
steps to preserve their language, they may not have a language to pass
on to their children."

A 'foreign' language
Lakota Rare class seeks to reclaim culture, keep kids in school



Monday, May 12, 2003 - Beverly Granger cries as she thinks of all that was
lost because she couldn't speak to her grandmother in Lakota - and all that
is being regained now that her son Robert is learning the language in a
course at Denver East High School.

"I feel very privileged," said Robert, a 17-year-old junior. "There're not
many places to learn Lakota. Plus it's my language, which gives it more
meaning. I'm hoping to teach it to my children."

This is not an after-school club, but a bona fide language course sanctioned
by the Denver Public Schools curriculum department. Students get
foreign-language credit - an irony that Rose Marie McGuire, head of the
district's Indian Education Program, couldn't help noting.

"It's not a foreign language. It's an indigenous language," she said.

Instructor Gracie RedShirt Tyon Foote is McGuire's counterpart in Jefferson
County schools, and she comes to Denver four times a week to teach the
class, which is in its first semester. She and her students are not only
preserving history but making it, according to educators involved in
American Indian culture. Nationwide, few K-12 schools offer Indian
languages.

"Usually it's French or German or Spanish or any of those popular European
languages. But you never hear, especially in the inner city, anyone teaching
a native language. I think it's amazing," said Suzette Brewer, spokeswoman
for the American Indian College Fund, which is based in Denver and supports
34 tribal colleges across the country.

"That's wonderful news," said Albert White Hat Sr., a Lakota language
professor at Sinte Gleska University, a Lakota college in Rosebud, S.D, and
the author of the textbook used at East. "Public schools don't generally
teach that unless they're on the reservation."

For a century, Brewer said, Indian children were sent to boarding schools
that discouraged them from speaking their native languages - or worse.

"They basically had their languages beaten out of them," said Brewer, a
Cherokee.

The boarding-school movement allowed two-thirds of Indian languages to slip
into extinction and instilled a dislike of school that still harms Indian
students, Brewer said. Indians nationwide have worse dropout rates than any
other ethnic group, she said.

That's true in Denver. In a district where two-thirds of its students
graduate from high school - already low by state and national standards -
only 46 percent of Indians do, according to DPS figures.

RedShirt Tyon Foote's class is part of an Indian Focus Schools system meant
to improve those numbers. A quarter of DPS's approximately 850 American
Indian students go to three elementary schools and one middle school, in
addition to East and the Career Education Center, that offer support
services and activities.

Some are recent arrivals from reservations and accustomed to tiny rural
schools, McGuire said.

"Many times our kids get lost. They're just not used to an urban high
school," said McGuire, who is a Dakota. (Dakota, Lakota and Nakota are
members of the Siouan language group. Speakers of each tongue can understand
speakers of the others, McGuire said.)

Students who are reserved in other classes come alive in Lakota class,
McGuire said: "You'll see more participation. They're more sure of
themselves, more connected."

Like Robert Granger, Nathan TwoEagles-Downing, a sophomore, is a Lakota
looking to reclaim his roots.

"I always wanted to be able to communicate with my grandpa," he said.

Other students belong to different tribes with unrelated languages, but
they're glad to be learning any Indian language at all. Freshman Brandon
Ruiz is an Apache, but his elder, or mentor, is a Lakota, and now he's
beginning to understand some of his elder's language.

A few students aren't Indians at all, just intellectually curious.

"Spanish and French, they seem so common. I try to learn new things,"
sophomore Debby Romero said.

Mastering Lakota means recognizing that language can change entire
societies, professor White Hat said. Many Lakota words took on new meanings
when Christianity came on the scene, and today's students are trying to
rediscover their original meanings.

The phrase "wakan tanka," for example, meant "every creation," but
missionaries translated it as "great spirit."

"That's a description of the Christian God," White Hat said.

It didn't fit the Lakota philosophy, which held that all people, animals and
natural phenomena were relatives, worthy of respect and cooperation but not
worship, he said.

"In our department here, we are doing what we call laundering the language,"
White Hat said. "We have to go back to the original meaning of the word and
how that addresses the Lakota philosophy, the Lakota way of thinking. We
found that the language is very challenging, very complimentary, very
honoring, and really kind of a progressive type of thinking."

Using White Hat's text, RedShirt Tyon Foote is teaching the students at East
High that in Lakota, language and relationships are inseparable.

An example: To show respect and preserve household peace, brothers and
sisters traditionally did not speak to one another. "Living in tipis,
avoidance was practiced to give people their privacy because it's a one-room
home," she said.

"The class is so much more than just language," RedShirt Tyon Foote added.
"There are social rules, philosophy, the culture, history, misinterpretation
of different words when it was written down by missionaries."

A frequent stumbling block for students is that men and women use different
word endings. Brewer said Lakota speakers find Kevin Costner funny in
"Dances With Wolves" because he speaks female Lakota.

While most Lakota today live in South Dakota, it is appropriate for Denver
to play a role in the renaissance of the Lakota language, Beverly Granger
said. Lakota routinely traveled through Colorado, where they formed
alliances with Cheyennes and Utes, she said.

And, in modern times, Denver has emerged as a center of American Indian
culture.

Granger said she fled the violence, alcoholism and poverty of the Rosebud
reservation at 19, lived for many years in Nevada, and only felt her
homesickness ebb when she came to Denver in 1989 and saw the annual Denver
March Pow Wow.

For the first time, she said, she saw Indians of different tribes doing
something other than bickering.

"Everyone was dancing together. It was an intercultural pow wow. I just sat
there and cried," she said. "Denver's just a good place to be for American
Indians."

Native Americans in California are working against enormous odds to save
their ancestral languages before the last speakers die, a Berkeley
linguist told American scientists Feb. 18 at their annual meeting in
Atlanta.
Progress is being made with an apprenticeship program to teach
indigenous languages to younger members of native groups, but it is a
race against time, said Leanne Hinton, associate professor of
linguistics.
"It's like trying to stitch together the fragile threads of a precious
cloth that is coming apart in your hands," said Hinton of the language
preservation program.
A woman who may have been the last speaker of Northern Pomo, native to
Sonoma and Mendocino counties in Northern California, died in January in
the midst of teaching a younger member of the tribe her language. She
was almost 90. Many other Indian languages in the state have only one or
at most a handful of speakers still alive, all of whom are older than
60, said Hinton.
Hinton spoke recently in Atlanta at the annual meeting of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science.
The good news is that some languages will be saved, thanks to a
Master-Apprentice Language Learning Program run by a Native-American
network, Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival, with
Hinton's help.
Beginning in the summer of 1993, the program has enlisted teachers and
apprentices in 10 languages that are on the verge of extinction. This
represents about a fifth of the 49 native American languages remaining
in California.
The program's aim is to keep a language alive by teaching it to at least
one younger member of the group who is then encouraged to set up
language training for children of that tribe.
In many cases, there is only one master-apprentice pair per tribe--an
elder who is the last speaker and a younger relative who agrees to work
closely with the elder and learn not only the ancestral language, but
the cultural traditions that go with it.
"This is very fragile work," said Hinton. "Oftentimes, the elder whose
language was ignored for years must be convinced that this is a sincere
effort, while the apprentice must dedicate a large portion of his life
to the relationship, putting aside other career and educational goals."
The model that keeps the California teams going is that in less than 20
years, native Hawaiians have saved their language and culture from
extinction. Now there is a generation of Hawaiian children who really
know their ancestral language, said Hinton.
So far, good progress has been made with Karuk speakers in Humboldt
County. When the program began, there were only 12 Karuk speakers left
in the world, all elderly. Now four young Karuks speak it fluently.
"Even two or three new fluent speakers in a generation can extend the
life of a language by 50 years or more," said Hinton.
Terry Supahan, one of the Karuk apprentices, works with his wife to
teach the language to Karuk children in school, hold summer language
camps and perform ceremonial dances.
Supahan is spending 20 hours a week learning the language from his
elderly blind aunt and according to his own account is keeping one step
ahead of the children.
The move to save these languages was given impetus in 1990 by passage of
the Native American Language Act, which reversed the federal
government's centuries-old drive to obliterate Indian languages and
cultures.
The act gives Native American languages special status and pledges
government help in saving them.
"It was very nearly too late," said Hinton of the legislation. "But
still it is important."
She said that even if many of the languages do not get passed on, the
effort to preserve them will have a positive impact on the self- esteem
of Native American children.
"With previous policies, Indian children formed identities that were
damaged," she said. "They became people who were ashamed of their
heritage.
"Whatever happens to the dream of reconstructing communities of native
speakers, we will at least have the languages documented on tape and
videonand we will have kids with strong identities," said Hinton.
Groups in the Master-Apprenticeship program are:
o the Karuk in Humboldt County, Northern California
o the Tolowa, near Cresent City, California
o the Wintun, Northern California
o the Pomo near Stewert's Point, California
o the Yowlumni around Porterville near Fresno, Central California
o the Tule River near Bakersfield, Central California
o the Wukchumni, near Woodlake, California
o the Quechan, along the lower Colorado River
o three Kumeyaay teams, near San Diego, California
From: http://www.kumeyaay.com/news/news_detail.html?id=2245

Learning late in life

Former boarding school student teaches lessons from a culture whites
tried to extinguish
EAGLE BUTTE - Frieda Condon was only a fourth-grader when adults
abruptly took away her language.
Fifty years later, Condon is in what she calls the early years of her
final stage of life. She plans to spend that last stage doing two
things. One is growing in wisdom learned from others.
The other is teaching the Lakota language, traditions and culture she
learned in childhood.
"I don't have to be ashamed of being Indian any more," the 58-year-old
Condon says. "Back in boarding school days, I was taught to be ashamed
of who I am, to forget my language, forget my culture, forget my
relatives, forget my parents.
"Everything that was me was taken away. But they never really took it
away from me. It's always been in here. Now I can bring it out and be
happy with my identity, who I am."
For this descendent of survivors of the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre, her
happiness is a devotion to traditional Lakota ways, enhanced by her
connection to a nontraditional culture. It's a familiar goal for aging
Indians in South Dakota, many of whom are rediscovering the language and
traditions that were suppressed during their youth.
Condon's father's family had embraced the white man's culture. Her
mother's side kept its Lakota ways.
She didn't learn the Lakota teachings, she says a half century later.
Instead, she lived them.
"They didn't sit us down, 'OK, all you grandkids, my takoja, come and
sit down because I'm going to teach you this today,' " she says. "They
just lived it, over and over through the stages."
Condon was 9 months old when her mother died. An aunt took her in, and
she was raised at Bridger, on the southwest edge of the Cheyenne River
Indian Reservation.
In elementary school, a much more painful change occurred. Condon's
grandfather, Robert Blue Hair, sent his granddaughter to boarding school
in Chamberlain.
"For many years, I thought he didn't love me, that's why he sent me
away," she says. "Later on, I realized that he sent me away to learn the
English language, to learn their ways, to get educated. Later on, I
thanked him for it."
Before she arrived at boarding school, Blue Hair taught his
granddaughter her first English words: "macaroni, macaroni, beans,
beans."
But during her first weeks at school, knowing little more English than
the names of those commodities, Condon lost her voice. It was her first
experience with the balancing act that faces many Native Americans, she
says.
"We have to live in two worlds, two cultures. We have to balance that,"
Condon says. "Sometimes I feel like our world is unbalanced. We're kind
of unbalanced. We have to walk in harmony, walk in peace."
By the time she had finished eighth grade, however, she had been so
assimilated in the once-foreign world that she cried when she left the
school. She tried another boarding school, this time at Stephan, but in
10th grade wrote to her father to come get her. If he didn't, she
threatened, she'd run away.
Condon lived in Bridger again, tried a Bureau of Indian Affairs school
and finally settled into the high school at Wakpala.
An early marriage ended in divorce after 10 years. She married Keeler
Condon, and they raised first her children, then his, before starting a
family together.
And school became a part of Condon's life once again. Only this time,
she pursued higher education with a passion, taking classes toward four
degrees from 1976 to 2002.
That path took her last year to the Takini School at Cherry Creek, eight
miles from her home.
There, as part of her Teacher Corps obligation, Condon will spend two
years teaching the pupils who are seeking to find their own balance
between two worlds.
"When we teach our kids, it's not through book learning, not through
reading and writing," she says. "It's oral and through demonstrations,
so our kids get to hear, see and feel, even smell sometimes."
With gold hoops in her ears and dark hair resting in waves on her
shoulders, Condon doesn't look much like "Grandma," the title her
youngest pupils have affectionately bestowed upon her. They also call
her "Teacher," her favorite salutation.
She first taught in a classroom in 1997. She was one of nine who
obtained the first Lakota studies teaching certificates.
Both the federal and tribal governments support the teaching of Lakota
in schools, says Raymond Uses The Knife Jr., vice chairman of the
Cheyenne River Sioux.
"I'm very happy that the schools today are teaching at least one hour of
Lakota language to our Lakota students," he says.
Uses The Knife Jr., 47, says when he went to boarding school more than
three decades ago, he had to leave his language behind. He still is
learning it today.
Condon wants that relearning period to end. That includes not only the
language but the culture and traditions.
Her grandparents never spoke of the Wounded Knee Massacre to her. She
thinks they still grieved for their slain relatives, and she wants
healing for others and for herself. She once allowed herself to wallow
in self-pity, Condon says. Now, as a teacher, she tries to bring out the
positives.
She tells her students about the four stages of life: childhood, teenage
years, adulthood and the years as an elder. That's her current stage,
she says.
Four is an important number to the Lakota, Condon says. They have the
four seasons; the four directions and their values: the West and
respect, North and courage, East and generosity, and South and wisdom;
and the four colors: red, white, black, yellow.
"Whether you're black, white, red or yellow, you need to be proud of who
you are," Condon says. "I teach my kids, my grandkids, to respect people
of all colors."

Children fluent in Lakota

EAGLE BUTTE - In about a year, Martha Garreau thinks, her children will
be more fluent in the Lakota language than she is.
An enrolled member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, the 31-year-old
Garreau grew up hearing little of her native language.
Her elders, many of whom had been forced to stop speaking Lakota at
boarding schools, hesitated to teach it to children.
And, growing up in a nontraditional family, Garreau felt a disconnection
with her culture.
"The only time we learned anything traditional is if we joined an Indian
club, which they had when I was in middle school," she says.
But the activism of the early 1970s, including the occupation of Wounded
Knee in 1973, spurred a revival of Indian pride and culture. Garreau,
like many of her generation, intends to pass a different legacy to her
four children.
Jaycen, 16, and Bradlee, 9, will learn Lakota in the same rooms at the
Cheyenne Eagle Butte school where Garreau once attended classes.
Garreau's two youngest children - Serena, 3, and Isabel, 1 - will pick
the language up quickly from their older siblings and the numerous
cousins they have in Eagle Butte.
"Everywhere from Head Start to 12th grade, the Lakota language is
introduced in the classroom," Garreau says. "We didn't get to learn a
lot of the language. We know certain words we use every day, but we
can't speak in sentences."
Distant cousins Julie Garreau and Martha Garreau share more than a last
name. They grew up in the decades when Lakota language, culture and
traditions received little respect or were disregarded.
"You hear some of the elders talk about, to make it easier, they didn't
teach their grandchildren or their children because it was easier on
them to not have to go through being told not to speak Lakota or
practice their religion or whatever," Julie Garreau says. "I think we,
to a certain extent, feel robbed. We didn't learn, and you know, it gets
harder and harder as you get older to go back and try and learn that
again."
Julie Garreau is director of the Cheyenne River Youth Project in the
Billy Mills Youth Center in Eagle Butte. Since April, Martha Garreau has
worked there, too, as assistant director.
The walls of one room are lined with hand-lettered displays bearing
common words listed in English and Lakota.
S'a (red) is printed in its proper color, followed by zi sa (orange) and
s'sapi (purple). On another wall, the days of the week are listed:
anpetu wakan means Sunday and anpetu tokahe is Monday. Posters on a
third wall count up to 10: wanji, nunpu, yamini ...
Martha Garreau graduated from Cheyenne Eagle Butte High School in 1991.
She spent one year at Flandreau Indian School after the birth of her
oldest daughter because it had a dorm for single mothers.
After high school, she enlisted in the Army and returned briefly to
Eagle Butte in 1999. She moved back to Arizona to marry a man she had
met in the Army and came back to Eagle Butte again in April.
She learned during her years off the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation
that many people's perceptions of Native Americans haven't moved past
John Wayne movies.
More troubling to her were people's expectations.
"When they find out I'm Indian, they expected more from me, that I would
know my language and know a lot more than I did," Martha Garreau says.
"When I left home is when I learned a lot more about myself and where I
came from."
Baptized in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, she
attended church as a child. "My mother is now Christian," Martha Garreau
says. "I'm not involved in any church now. I don't really believe in
religions."
She does feel spiritual and believes that when a person prays, he or she
should pray as one with the Creator.
Christianity doesn't always agree with Lakota ways, Julie Garreau says.
"You might find a few parents who are very Christian who don't want
their kids learning about the (Lakota) ceremonies," she says. "They
don't believe it fits in with what their belief system is. I think a
majority of them think that learning the traditions, learning the
language, those are good things because it's part of who they are."
People must recognize the need for change, Martha Garreau says.
"It's OK if nontraditional people decided to become Christians," she
says. "That's just change in their life, and in the end, we all go to
the same place. So change is a good thing for everybody."
Garreau wants her children to learn the traditions that weren't part of
her childhood home. Jaysen's father also is a Cheyenne River Sioux.
Bradlee's father is white; her youngest children have a Filipino
heritage.
Bradlee, paler in hair and skin than his mother, has been teased
sometimes since the family's return to Eagle Butte.
"I just tell him, you're still Indian," Garreau says. "The color of your
skin makes no difference. It's what you feel inside."
Her children have found a sense of belonging in Eagle Butte, Garreau
says. Part of it that their grandparents, most of their aunties and
uncles, and many cousins live there.
But it goes beyond that, she says.
"My two little ones, they have opened up to a lot of people here," she
says. "Their whole personality has changed since we've been back."
Everywhere Bradlee goes, he finds someone who's family, she says. He
likes that.
His mother understands that feeling.
"Growing up on a reservation is different than growing up in any other
society," she says.
"Now I'm home, and I feel happy and just a sense of calm in my heart,
and I feel more at peace here."

Lakota Language Graduates

LAKE ANDES - Thirteen tiny graduates in red and blue caps and gowns
gather around a large white screen in the 4-H building here.
The 4- and 5-year-old students in the Yankton Sioux Tribe's language
immersion class of 2003 watch a videotape of themselves, made several
days earlier. On the tape, the kids eagerly shout out answers to
questions.
"How do you say gold?"
"Mazaskazi."
"How do you say red?"
"Ska."
"How do you say spotted?"
"Gleshka."
Here is either the future of the tribe's language or a futile dream.
South Dakota tribes have embarked on a quest to reverse the rapid
decline of the Lakota, Nakota and Dakota dialects of their native
language. Before World War II, these were the vernacular on most
reservations, the languages tribal members learned at home before they
learned English.
But a survey conducted by Oglala Lakota College in 1993-94, the latest
data that's available, shows what has happened at Pine Ridge Indian
Reservation and, by extension, to all tribal languages in the state.
Among the survey findings:
• 90 percent of people 70 and older still spoke Lakota.
• 80 percent between ages 60-70 still spoke the language.
• Overall, an estimated 40 percent of Oglalas could still speak it.
• 1 percent of people younger than 18 could speak their native tongue.
• The average age of speakers was 35.
The goal at Pine Ridge and elsewhere is to make tribal languages
commonly spoken. Tribes hope to preserve language as vital instruments
for conveying the nuances of Indians' concepts of themselves and their
relation to the world. It's a goal that must be met before a critical
mass of speakers ages and dies.
But there is no set path toward language salvation, and efforts in the
state use widely different approaches that are often underfunded and
controversial.
The Oglalas at Pine Ridge are being assisted by the Indiana University
American Indian Studies Research Institute, which is acting as a
linguistics technical consultant, says Will Meya, who runs IU's Lakota
Language program.
A native language is vital to preserving a unique world view, he says.
"It is hard to appreciate, if you are monolingual, that there really is
a way of thinking, articulating and conceiving of ideas that is inherent
in another way of speaking," he says.
"Some linguists compare language to a biological species. Within the
grammar and vocabulary is sort of a genetic code that has evolved for
thousands of years and is unique."
The fundamental Lakota idea that everything is interrelated is conveyed
in the syntax of the Lakota language. European thought assumes an
individual stands separate from the world and makes value judgments
about it. This is seen in basic English syntax: subject, verb, object,
"Jane sees the dog."
In Lakota, the syntax is object, subject, verb, "The dog Jane sees."
There is no subtle implication the dog exists only because Jane sees it.
"We have got to look at life on this planet as inherently more valuable
if we have those ideas available to us," Meya says.
The first Lakota immersion program began in 1997 at Loneman School on
Pine Ridge. Meya's assertion that language is integral to culture
resonates with Leonard Little Finger, the school's Lakota studies
director.
"One of the most important areas of language is the spiritual side,"
Little Finger says. "Our elders say our tongue was given to us by our
creator so we can speak with our creator."
Tribal languages were under attack in South Dakota from the time tribes
were conquered in the 1880s and forced to submit to government
assimilation policies.
Isolation, though, served as an effective antidote. Reservations far
removed from the dominant society were reservoirs of native speakers.
Despite consistent pressures at boarding schools and elsewhere to turn
Indians into imitation whites, native languages survived well on South
Dakota's reservations until the past 50 years.
"Before 1954, the identity to be Lakota was very strong," Meya says.
That all began to change when Indians who entered the wider world to
fight World War II began returning home.
"Lakotas resisted language change and remained true to their culture
much longer than many other tribes," he says. "When so many of the young
Lakota males went off to war, it changed so profoundly. They saw the
rest of the world for the first time and also realized the vastness of
what was up against them, the dominant society.
"The cash economy started on Pine Ridge. That's when so many things came
back from the outside world."
'Battling English'
Little Finger, 65, is from Pine Ridge. Like many of his peers, he
learned Lakota as a first language. He illustrates the profound
difficulty in bridging the gap between aging fluent speakers and the
children who proponents hope will carry on their tongue.
"In my life, I grew up where everyone spoke the language. It was just as
natural as could be. I didn't have to read a book to learn my words. I
heard it and spoke it," he says. "I look now, and those people are few
and far between. We can still carry on a conversation, but I carry them
on primarily with people my own age. It is rare I speak with youth. I
try to say words in Lakota, and they look at me with saucer eyes."
Making native languages relevant to the 21st century is crucial if they
are to survive as living languages, says Meya, the Indiana linguist.
"We're battling English," he says. "We're competing against things like
satellite television and all the things the dominant English language
has to offer. We're competing just for students' attention. Part of the
strategy is to create as much material for them as possible to make it
relevant."
Jerome Kills Small, who has taught Indian languages at the University of
South Dakota for 13 years, does detect in them a necessary attribute of
a living language, the ability to create new words. Like every language,
they have bound morphemes, an arbitrary pairing of sound and meaning
that is the building material of words.
"If you can put syllables together you can create and describe a new
noun. If a first-language speaker heard it, they would know exactly what
that word is," Kills Small says.
Perhaps the simplest example of a bound morpheme in English is the sound
"s." Attached to the end of any noun, it signifies the plural.
Even as tribes race to create a new generation of speakers, their native
languages need gatekeepers to ensure tribal language morphemes and
existing words are used to make new words in the 21st century, rather
than letting English creep into the lexicon, Meya says.
"That's what the French do all the time. Everything is brought into
French. There are no Anglo words at all," he says.
Tribes use different strategies
There are two types of language-restoration programs on reservations. At
Yankton and Pine Ridge, the goal of immersion classes is to conduct them
almost totally in the native language. Cheyenne River's Good Child
Program - Cinci Wakpa Waste - seeks to teach Lakota and English together
in grades K-12.
Bilingual education was the favored method of Lakota language
instruction, according to a survey conducted among Cheyenne River
parents in 1999 by Marion Blue Arm.
"Parents always feel we are giving up English if we teach Lakota," she
says.
That's not the case.
"If you truly have immersion to the third grade, there are all these
studies that show English will come back anyway. They will learn that
and pick it up like nothing," says Blue Arm. "But people don't believe
that. They believe that if you are not teaching English intensely from
the beginning, the students will be at a disadvantage."
Rosie Roach, a former elementary school principal, is the administrator
of language programs in Cheyenne River schools. Immersion has run afoul
of not only leery parents but recalcitrant teachers, she says.
"We do get a small amount of resistance from parents. We get a lot of
resistance from teachers," she says of language immersion. "Most of the
teachers in our systems are non-Indians. Research shows our Native
American children can really progress if they have their language and
culture. Yet when we look at that as teachers, we don't do anything with
it. We continue to teach in the same way we've been teaching the past 50
years. That has to change."
Cheyenne River has put an innovative twist on bilingual instruction. It
has started to pair fluent Lakota speakers in classrooms with certified
teachers. The idea is to bring both language proficiency and teaching
proficiency together. That level of professional support stands in stark
contrast to Lavena Cook, who teaches the Yankton's language immersion
classes at Lake Andes.
"I knew my language. But I don't know a thing about teaching. I did
everything in my life but teach children," says Cook, 54. She was
working as a postal clerk in Marty last year when officials with the
tribal-language immersion program prevailed upon her to take over the
class. "I said, 'I'll try. I'll do it for six months, and if I'm not
doing a good job, you can let me go.' "
Time to act is limited
Whatever the state of language restoration, things are better than they
were, says Roach at Cheyenne River.
While interest in restoring native language is strong now, the
opportunity to do so is relatively short. Meya points to the aging
native language speakers. "We only have 20 years, if that, to use the
speakers of today as teachers to train a generation of speakers," he
says.
Meya, Little Finger and Roach all say the federal government could play
a major role in providing funding for language teachers and producing
native language curricula. Meya talks about $5 million a year for 40
years for the Pine Ridge project alone.
Sen. Tim Johnson of South Dakota is a co-sponsor of the 2003 amendment
to the 1990 Native American Languages Act. He also is the most prominent
official Meya solicits for federal aid.
The amendment he is co-sponsoring encourages the development of language
nests, organized language programs for children 7 years old and younger
and their families. It offers schools a chance to qualify as
language-survival schools to receive funding.
The catch is, there is virtually no funding in the current budget.
"We are trying to devise new, more effective ways to provide for Native
American language survival. This is one step in that direction," Johnson
says of the amendment. "There is not a lot of money to be had that is
focused exclusively on Lakota language preservation."
Meya points out the irony that what federal money is available tends to
go to the most threatened languages, rather than ones like Lakota, that
have enough speakers to have a chance of survival.
Johnson agrees: "A language like Lakota, that still has a significant
number of fluent speakers, has a better long-term chance at being
preserved in a meaningful way and not just as an academic subject but as
a language that is utilized in daily life."
But he adds that when it comes to fighting for funding, he must take
into account what the tribes want and need.
"Their funding requests tend to focus more on basic human needs, school
funding, nutrition, Indian Health Service, law enforcement, roads and
water," he says. "I know language preservation is important. But that's
not an area they have made central to their appropriations requests."
So there are people such as Cook, the nonteacher, with no help or
experience, trying to save the Yankton's Dakota by cobbling together her
version of immersion. The students probably heard more English than a
linguist would like to see in an immersion program, they learned more
vocabulary than sentence structure, and the class concluded with no
exam, no formal assessment of success.
But Cook recounts a telling little triumph, an example of language truly
restored. One day, she intervened as a pair of her tiny students were
squabbling over a toy.
They were arguing in Dakota.

Cherokee in Kindergarden

Lost City, Okla. (AP) _ The kindergarten teacher speaks to her class in
Cherokee, telling the children to pull out their mats for nap time.
She calls our their names in Cherokee, telling "Yo-na," or Bear, to
place his mat away from "A-wi," or Deer. Soft Cherokee music lulls them
to sleep.
Their parents were mocked for speaking Cherokee. Their grandparents
punished. But Cherokee is the only language these children will speak in
their public school classroom.
Lost City is the first public school class to immerse students in the
American Indian language in Oklahoma. Another public school class is
being planned by the Eastern band of Cherokees in North Carolina at
Swain County High School.
Cherokee Nation Chief Chad Smith spoke to educators at a meeting last
year and told them the language is dying.
Fewer than 8,000 of the 100,000 Cherokees in Oklahoma can speak the
language fluently and most of those who can are over 45.
Smith's father was punished for speaking Cherokee in Sequoyah High
School, located at the seat of Cherokee government in Tahlequah.
"If you spoke the language, your mouth was washed out with soap," Smith
said. "It was an effort to destroy the language and it was fairly
successful."
Assimilation policies once discouraged the use of the native language in
schools, he said. Harry Oosahwee, the tribe's language projects
supervisor, said he was mocked and ridiculed for speaking his first
language in his public school.
Annette Millard, the school superintendent, spoke to Smith at the
meeting and was determined to do her part to preserve the language.
She runs a school that sits on 40 acres off a winding country road
outside the small town of Hulbert. Sixty-five of the 100 students are
members of the Cherokee tribe.
"It is important to them that they are able to learn about their culture
and language and speak as much of it as possible," she said.
"The language is going to be gone if we don't do something and the best
people to learn are kids in the developmental stage of kindergarten."
She offered a classroom for the immersion class and started learning the
language along with her staff.
The Cherokee Nation has paid the salaries of the teacher and an
assistant in hopes that the younger generation will renew the culture of
their ancestors by learning the disappearing tongue.
"My grandma speaks Cherokee to old people," said kindergartner Matthew
Keener, who goes by "Yo-na" at school.
Those students not in the immersion class are exposed to Cherokee as
well.
The school has a weekly "Rise and Shine" assembly where all grades begin
with the greeting, "o-si-yo," and discuss the word for the week. One
recent week, the word was truthfulness, or "du-yu-go-dv."
Millard calls students by their Cherokee names and remembers to
encourage them by saying "o-sta" with a smile. All the students from the
pre-kindergarten to eighth grade level know that means "good."
Her office is adorned with Cherokee words and pronunciations posted on
objects like the telephone and her desk chair. She bought software to
print the Cherokee alphabet, which was codified into 85 symbols, each
representing a syllable, by Sequoyah in 1821.
Millard says she has learned to appreciate the gentle rhythm of the
language and its earthy roots.
She finds the word "cattle" harsh sounding in English. When she stands
out in her cow pasture and calls them "wa-ga," she said, "it's like
they'll almost turn and look at me."
The Cherokee Nation would cease to exist without its language, Oosahwee
said.
"We have our medicine, our plant life, our universe and the language the
Creator has given us," he said. "Our medicine doesn't understand other
languages but Cherokee. All this is interconnected."
Ten children are currently enrolled in the class. Their Cherokee
language instruction will continue. Next year, the immersion class will
be held for first grade, and the students will continue with these
classes as they move through the school.
The hope is that they will speak Cherokee at home to their parents.
After three weeks of school, Lane Smith, or "A-wi," told his mother that
he was going outside to play.
Since he spoke in Cherokee, she wasn't quite sure what he was saying,
but she is now starting to relearn the language she knew at age five.
"My family has asked Lane what he has learned today and they are
learning right along with him," she said. "I plan to have him keep going
with the language."
Chief Smith hopes the Cherokee Nation has acted in time.
"The vessel that holds the culture," he said, "is the language."
___
On the Net:
Cherokee Nation: http://www.cherokee.org/

New CD-ROM Aimed at Preserving and Sharing