WASHINGTON – Maintaining languages that are spoken by a dwindling number of speakers can be lonely and isolating work for individuals, which is why Suzan Shown Harjo considered the encouragements of the occasion a leading feature of a Native language summit in Washington June 4.
”I thought it was awfully good, because it brought together so many people who have been doing good work,” she said after the summit. Gatherings of Indian people from across the land create a collective wisdom that get people ”beyond yourself” and into the work again with the energy of many, she added.
Harjo, of the Morning Star Institute in Washington, helped to open the proceedings with a reference to the history of her own Muscogee Creek Nation. The Muscogee were actually mashed into a tribe made up of multiple tribes that were mostly force-marched to Oklahoma Territory during the infamous Removal Era of the 19th century. The result is that approximately 40 dialects and languages, including Euchee of Siouan linguistic stock, are spoken now within the nation. But few speakers remain of the different single dialects and languages. The Muscogee Creek are not unique in their linguistic history, she said.
Sounding a cooperative note, she said that Bear Butte in present-day South Dakota was a spiritually important locale to perhaps all of 60 historical Plains tribes. At Bear Butte, warriors laid their weapons on the ground, setting aside anything that did not have to do with the purpose at hand. Harjo said the message was worth remembering in a setting where many people have done different work in the realm of Native language.
The audience of almost 100 people from Native communities nationwide – and for that matter, Canada and New Zealand – then heard from an array of speakers who described best practices in language revitalization; advertised the resources of the federal government, nonprofit grant-making organizations, universities, libraries and tribes; and shared stories of war and triumph from the struggle to save Native languages and cultures.
Richard Littlebear, president of Chief Dull Knife College in Lame Deer, Mont., on the Northern Cheyenne lands, related a personal history with an all-too-familiar ring to it in Indian country – education at a BIA boarding school, training as a high school English teacher, ”all angled towards promoting English, and for a long time that’s the way it was. I said, ‘No, we don’t need Indian, Native American languages, we don’t need Cheyenne. We don’t need another language. All we need to know here is English.’
”Finally about 1980, I started making this, what I would characterize as a slow-motion epiphany, into becoming an advocate, a very strong advocate, of our Native languages. Because all through my educational experience, it seemed to me like somebody had been lying to me about my own language, and about where I came from and what my identity was as a Northern Cheyenne person. … It seems like I must have learned a new word, because I’ve been using ‘slow motion’ a whole bunch here lately. But it seems to me like back in 1492, a slow-motion massacre started. It gained in intensity in the late 1800s in the northern Plains territory, where they were actually killing us. The massacres were happening. Now, it has slowed down a little bit. But the massacres that started in 1492 are still happening today. They are hitting right at the heart of us, of who we are, because they are attacking our languages and our culture. The slow-motion massacre is occurring in curricula, it’s occurring in media, it’s occurring in the books that we read, it’s occurring in the loss of our languages. And if we do not do anything to stop this, then we are accomplices in the slow-motion massacre of our languages, and of our culture. We’ve got to do something about this.”
For the first time June 4, Ryan Wilson said, a grass-roots advocacy brigade of the same mind had come to Washington. Wilson, president of the National Alliance to Save Native Languages, committed the alliance to organizing and sponsoring the summit. During a transition between speaker panels, he surveyed the wide array of people in the National Museum of the American Indian’s Rasmuson Theater and said most of them would be visiting congressional members and staff on Capitol Hill June 5. There they would make the case for continued funding of the Administration for Native Americans’ Native language grants program, as well as for a full appropriation to the Esther Martinez Native American Languages Preservation Act of 2006, with its all-important provisions for Native language nests and immersion-learning courses.
”That hasn’t happened before,” Wilson said.
Reference guide launched at summit
WASHINGTON – At a June 4 summit devoted to revitalizing Native languages, the National Museum of the American Indian, Morning Star Institute and the Administration for Native Americans unveiled a reference guide to the establishment and accessing of Native language archives and repositories.
The nearly 300-page publication, also available on DVD, is the result of a year and a half’s research and collaboration between Morning Star’s Suzan Shown Harjo, Helen Maynor Scheirbeck of NMAI, an advisory group and many other Native and non-Native contributors. It contains a report on how to build a repository of Native language materials, either virtual or physical. The publication, ”Native Language Preservation: A Reference Guide for Establishing Archives and Repositories,” is available from ANA at (202) 690-7776.
