Opening Our Eyes and Ears to Language

Boozhoo! Welcome to a new semester for the TLAM class. Boozhoo is one of the few Ojibwe words that I have learned since the TLAM class started a couple of weeks ago, and I hope to learn more of the language as we work with the Red Cliff Band on their library.

LANGUAGE – A LEGACY WORTH FIGHTING FOR

Language and storytelling have been the focus of our past week’s studies. We learned some startling facts about the state of the worlds’ languages.

• Of the approximately 7,000 languages in the world, HALF of them are expected to become extinct over the next century [1]
• There may have been about 500 unique languages in North America before 1492, but today there are only 180 languages, and 160 are likely to disappear in the next generation because only the elders speak the language. [2]
• Much of North American language loss was due to the Boarding School Era where American Indian children were taken from their homes, separated from their families and culture, and punished for speaking their languages.[3]

Language is a powerful and essential vehicle for culture. Within our words are encoded our values, identities, social roles, and humor. The loss of a language is more than losing words and grammar structures, it is the loss of culture and the character of a people.

When faced with such bleak estimations, we have to look to where there is hope.

Hope can be found through the language revitalization projects happening across North America, and in the individuals who carry the stories and share their language with others.

On Tuesday, some TLAM students attended a lecture by Monica Macaulay, a Professor of Linguistics at UW-Madison who has been working with the Menominee Tribe since the 1990’s.

Over the past twenty years, she has documented many original language speakers, helped to create dictionaries, and provided in-service trainings with the language teachers in the Menominee school systems.

Throughout her talk Dr. Macaulay emphasized, that linguists can’t save languages, only communities can save languages. But linguists can help, and so can libraries and archives.

Libraries can partner with communities to provide needed language materials and raise awareness about local languages to the broader community.

The University of Minnesota Library created an online dictionary The Ojibwe People’s Dictionary (http://ojibwe.lib.umn.edu/) complete with pronunciations, & it is available for anyone to use.

Archives preserve documents that have been used to revive sleeping languages. The Miami language of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma was thought to have died with their last fluent speaker in the 1960’s, but by finding key historical documents in a university archive, David Acosta was unable to unlock some key structures in the language, which helped to further the revitalization process.[4]

But the real work of language revitalization lies with the individuals and communities devoting their time and minds to learning these languages. Below is a powerful video of Ron Corn and his daughter, Mimikwaeh, about how he is passing on the Menominee language to his children.

Living Language from Wisconsin Media Lab on Vimeo.

SOUND AND THE POWER OF STORY

Traditional storytelling is another very important vehicle for culture and language.  I am grateful to all of the people that have taken the time to record and translate traditional indigenous stories so that an English speaker like me can read and learn from the stories that come from the places that I live, but there is much that is lost both in translation from one language to another, one cultural context to another, and also in the conversion from an oral story to a written one.

For this reason, it was vey special to be able to attend the American Indian Studies program’s 18^th Annual Evening of Storytelling earlier this month where four wonderful storytellers from across Indian Country came to delight listeners. Nancy Jones, Sequoya Guess, Sunny Dooley, and Larry Beardy all told stories  including some aadizokaanan, which are Ojibwe stories that can only be told when there is snow on the ground.

Traditional stories are designed to be repeated, experienced again and again over a lifetime. They gather new meanings and insight each time we hear them. Eber Hampton refers to this building and evolving understanding through repetition as bringing “new meaning in each turn of the spiral.”[5]

As Nancy Jones told us the story of Nanabozho and the Spirit of Winter in Ojibwe, her son Dennis translated the story for us in English. When she began to speak in the voice of the Spirit of Winter, he broke character and paused translation to tell us that as soon as he heard that voice he was transported back to being 7 years old again. Such is the power of story to wrap time back on itself, creating a spiral of experience and knowing.

When Sequoya Guess took the stage he told his story entirely in Cherokee before giving an English translation. Even without knowing any Cherokee, his story about his grandmother’s encounter with a raven mocker left me with goosebumps. Beyond the words, his timing, tone and presence wove a story that wrapped us all up in it, and I literally saw people jump in their seats during one of the scariest parts. This is what is missing when we read stories instead of hearing them performed by a masterful storyteller.

It was an honor to hear these stories in their original tongue, to experience the musicality of the languages, the sounds and rhythms that make each unique.

For an overview of some of Wisconsin’s languages see this interactive website by the Wisconsin State Journal: Down to a Whisper: State’s native languages threatened with loss (http://host.madison.com/app/interactive/language/)