NESPELEM, Wash. – At a recent middle school graduation ceremony, members of the Colville tribe watched and listened as a young tribal member thanked his elder teacher for teaching him his traditions and his language. Then he handed the elder a feather he had beaded.
It was a moment of pride for everyone, especially for Rodney Cawston, manager of the Language Preservation Program.
“That was so overwhelming,” Cawston says. “When I can witness things like that, I can see that our young people are learning about their traditions.”
For the past five years, the Colville people have been making a concerted effort to resurrect the most basic of its traditions, the tribe’s three languages.
As with most tribes, the members who are fluent in their Native tongue are few. Most are in their elder years. Because language is truly the way to access the minds and thoughts of the ancestors, the tribe’s most precious cultural resource is a like clock, ticking away all too fast..
Starting with just one language, the Nselxcin tongue, the preservation program pulled together a group of tribal elders who are fluent speakers. Program administrators trained them to read and write the language and even to use a computer to create teaching materials for classes. Dictionaries were developed and grammar studies.
“A lot of the elders have done their own linguistic study,” says Cawston. “I’ve seen some of them reading books on lexical suffixes and it blew me away. It’s something they wanted to do. They’ve realized they want to be able to pass that knowledge down to future generations.”
Once the first group got going, the second language, Nxaamxcin was introduced. Last year, the Nimipu language program started.
One of the first hurdles was the sheer immensity of the task at hand. Not only was the tribe intent upon reintroducing its languages to those who wanted to learn them, great focus was also being placed on cultural traditions, food and histories.
Elders working with the language program were suddenly bombarded with requests from the Natural Resources program for place names or traditional use sites or documentation of traditional plants for cultural resources management. They even had people contacting them about social systems and traditional methods of child rearing.
Teaching the tribe’s children was often exhausting as well. It was difficult for many of the elders to teach in a methodical fashion something they had learned effortlessly by natural immersion.
“A very unique feature of the program is incorporating non-fluent speakers and fluent speakers in the Language Preservation Program,” says Colleen Cawston, tribal chairwoman. “Although we have some very ambitious elders who go into the schools and teach in the classroom environment, when the language program began, there were young people that were also hired to learn the language and become instructors.”
Another problem has been getting the language and cultural classes accepted into the Washington state school curriculum. Although the tribal language teachers are fluent in their language and cultural ways, for the most part, few have any formal teaching accreditation. As a result, local schools, spanning seven different school districts across the 1.4 million-acre reservation, have adopted different policies toward allowing tribal elders to teach.
Even though the percentage of tribal children in the schools ranges from 15 percent to more than 80 percent of the school populations, there is great hesitation in making exceptions to rules. Some schools allowed the elders to teach. Some have restricted the classes to “optional” status, permitting children to attend only during lunch hours and after school. Other schools will not allow non-accredited teachers in the door.
It is a situation many other tribes across the nation are facing.
“We need to take new approaches to education,” says Rodney. “If we look historically at the education of Native children, it’s appalling. And it doesn’t seem to be getting much better.
“So we need to really look at our approaches to education, especially in regard to our own children. If we teach them their own history, their own culture, it will give them greater self- identity and maybe more of a willingness or wanting to learn.”
To further that goal Colville representatives began meeting with other tribes across the state last fall. The Colville, Yakama, Spokane, Salish and Lummi tribes have been meeting with college administrators from Antioch College, the Northwest Indian College and Wenatchee Valley College to examine potential formats to develop college curriculums to accredit Native language teachers in their specialty.
The group also is developing a program wherein certified Native teachers can gain an endorsement to teach their language and culture.
Although the college certification curriculums are not yet final, Rodney says several people are “working overtime” on all the details. It won’t be long before the tribe has a definite program certification model it can take to the state Board of Education. If all goes well, the first certification classes will start at nearby Wenatchee Valley College next year.
“There are many challenges,” Rodney admits. It’s also something that’s really needed. Our elders hold such a vast wealth of knowledge and a lot of that can only be translated and understood in languages of our own people.”
He says one of the biggest thrills for him was realizing that once you begin studying your native language, you begin seeing how your elders and ancestors really viewed the world around them. And when you know your language, he says, you discover just how different the concepts are between Native and European world views.
He spoke about a recent youth conference on the reservation where one of the young people asked an elder what the tribal word for wealth was, and what it really meant.
To answer the question, the young people were separated from the elders. Both groups were asked “What is wealth?”
“The elder people gave us their views of wealth and what the word means in our traditional languages,” he says. “And wealth to them meant the land and food and the water and everything around them. They were blessed in those ways and they felt they were very wealthy.
” … our younger people … talked about money and cars, CDs and games and everything we have today. … then we brought the two groups together and said, ‘Look at the vast differences in how you look at just one term, wealth.
“It really did make a lot of our young people look at the values and how they’ve changed.”
