ANDES - Thirteen tiny graduates in red and blue caps and gowns gather
around a large white screen in the 4-H building here.
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
do you say gold?"
do you say red?"
do you say spotted?"
is either the future of the tribe's language or a futile dream.
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
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.
the survey findings:
percent of people 70 and older still spoke Lakota.
percent between ages 60-70 still spoke the language.
an estimated 40 percent of Oglalas could still speak it.
percent of people younger than 18 could speak their native tongue.
average age of speakers was 35.
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.
there is no set path toward language salvation, and efforts in the
state use widely different approaches that are often underfunded
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.
native language is vital to preserving a unique world view, he says.
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.
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."
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."
Lakota, the syntax is object, subject, verb, "The dog Jane sees."
There is no subtle implication the dog exists only because Jane
have got to look at life on this planet as inherently more valuable
if we have those ideas available to us," Meya says.
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
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."
languages were under attack in South Dakota from the time tribes
were conquered in the 1880s and forced to submit to government assimilation
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.
1954, the identity to be Lakota was very strong," Meya says.
all began to change when Indians who entered the wider world to
fight World War II began returning home.
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.
cash economy started on Pine Ridge. That's when so many things came
back from the outside world."
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.
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."
native languages relevant to the 21st century is crucial if they
are to survive as living languages, says Meya, the Indiana linguist.
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."
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.
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.
the simplest example of a bound morpheme in English is the sound
"s." Attached to the end of any noun, it signifies the plural.
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.
what the French do all the time. Everything is brought into French.
There are no Anglo words at all," he says.
use different strategies
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.
education was the favored method of Lakota language instruction,
according to a survey conducted among Cheyenne River parents in
1999 by Marion Blue Arm.
always feel we are giving up English if we teach Lakota," she says.
not the case.
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."
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.
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."
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.
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.' "
to act is limited
the state of language restoration, things are better than they were,
says Roach at Cheyenne River.
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.
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.
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.
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.
catch is, there is virtually no funding in the current budget.
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."
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.
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."
he adds that when it comes to fighting for funding, he must take
into account what the tribes want and need.
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
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.
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.
were arguing in Dakota.