Indigenous languages: ‘Silent Spring’?
I had to repost this article by Patrick Springer (pspringer@forumcomm.com The Forum – 09/14/2003) because it’s a superb reminder about who we are and where we come from, particularly if we claim to be indigenous peoples. — Jodi Rave
The death of Melvina Everett was a loss that transcended personal grieving for the Arikara community on North Dakota’s Fort Berthold Reservation.
Auntie Melfine, as she was affectionately known, was the last elder who visited White Shield School to speak fluent Arikara for students learning the language.
Her death last year was much like the ruin of a living library, an irretrievable loss, in the view of language expert Michael Krauss.
“A language is an intellectual archive,” he said. “Every time we lose a language, it’s like dropping a bomb on the Louvre,” the renowned art museum in Paris that houses the Mona Lisa and Venus de Milo.
Krauss is a linguist who might be compared to Rachel Carson, the environmentalist who sounded a warning in her 1962 book, “Silent Spring,” about the role of pesticides in killing birds and other animals.
In 1992, Krauss famously forecast the extinction of more than half of the world’s 6,800 languages within the next century.
Krauss, a professor emeritus at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks, issued that grim prediction to an audience of fellow linguists. He intended it as a call to action for a profession he thought had done little but watch as language after language passed into oblivion with the death of its last fluent elderly speaker.
“I don’t see any reason to change my prognostication,” he recently told The Forum. “There’s not been, to my knowledge, serious dispute that it’s been way too optimistic or way too pessimistic.”
Reinforcement of the crisis came from a Census Bureau estimate in 1993 that more than a third of American Indian languages had fewer than 100 home speakers.
In the 11 years since Krauss made his prediction, the list of extinct languages has grown. A few years ago, the number of languages was estimated at 7,202, compared to the latest estimate of 6,809 — and many of the survivors have become increasingly frail.
Endangered languages around the world are disappearing at the rate of 10 a year, according to an estimate by UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.
Today, language experts believe 155 of the 175 native languages still spoken in the United States are considered moribund, fading toward extinction because children grow up speaking only English.
Native language speakers (pdf)
The core test
Some of those fighting for survival are close to home.
The languages of the Three Affiliated Tribes of the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota — the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara — all are endangered, spoken by dwindling numbers of primarily elderly speakers.
No fluent speakers of Arikara remain after Everett’s death, linguists believe, and only one of a handful of elderly Mandan speakers is considered highly fluent. The Hidatsa language, spoken by perhaps 150 to 300 speakers of varied fluency, is the strongest.
In his worst-case scenario, Krauss predicted that up to 90 percent of the world’s languages will, like Arikara, lose their last fluent speaker within the next century — a loss of cultural diversity he calls greater than the more publicized loss of biological diversity.
“Each language is the codification or the archive of different cultures on earth,” he said. “Languages have encoded within them vast amounts of valuable information.”
Darrell Kipp, who heads the Piegan Institute, a program to preserve and promote native languages that is based on the Blackfeet reservation in northwest Montana, compares a native language to a tall redwood tree, the product of years of growth and development.
“A language is alive and has a life and a soul to it,” he said.
Tribal identity is bound up in landscape and language. The Blackfeet of Montana, for instance, never left their homeland, and lived for centuries on the east side of the Rockies, north of the Yellowstone River.
The landscape there is dotted with formations, plants and animals that carry Blackfeet names. Those places and creatures are featured in Blackfeet stories and songs; mere mention of them is a shorthand reference with deeper meanings for a native speaker, Kipp said.
Calvin Grinnell, who works in cultural preservation for the Three Affiliated Tribes, said language is increasingly seen as the touchstone to native culture.
In the past, identification as an American Indian often was tied to blood quantum; the more native blood a person could document, the more “Indian” he or she was, Grinnell said.
Now, as native blood lines continues to thin through generations of intermingling with other tribes or non-Indians, and when native religious practices are adopted by some “New Age” spiritualists, blood quantum is seen as less important.
Instead, fluency in the ancestral language has become the core test of identity, said Grinnell, who is predominantly Hidatsa.
“To me, the language is the basis for the culture,” he said. Learning the language is the foundation for a deeper understanding of a tribe’s culture and religion.
“By and large, the language is indeed becoming the flashpoint for how Indians define themselves,” Grinnell said. “Being an Indian or whatever tribe you are is a state of mind. It’s an attitude.”
How a language dies
Often, a unique way of thinking is contained within words or phrases in a language. For instance, Krauss said, the French have a phrase with no exact English corollary: Toute l’heure, essentially meaning, “in a very short time.’’
Those subtleties of ideas and expressions can be lost in translation.
“You can’t just construct a machine to convert Lakota to Arikara,” Krauss said. “So the diversity here that we’re talking about is much more profound. It’s the mental equivalent of DNA.’’
A mixture of corrosive influences — economic, political and social — over many decades have continued to erode native languages.
Most influences are unintentionally damaging, such as the relentless pressure of pop culture. Britney Spears, Eminem and Sponge Bob all vie for mass audiences delivering lines and lyrics in English.
Even disease can play a big role in the demise of a language. In the case of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara nation, the languages began dying off during disastrous smallpox epidemics in the 1700s and 1800s.
An 1837 plague spread rapidly, killing more than 17,000 Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara after a steamboat carrying several sick passengers docked at Fort Clark, located by a Mandan village near today’s Stanton, N.D.
War and conquest also contributed. Krauss estimates that since the year 1500, around the time Columbus reached America, the number of languages has shrunk by almost 15 percent. Most were displaced by Spanish and, primarily in North America, English and French.
More insidious, though, were decades of U.S. government policies aimed at assimilating American Indians into mainstream culture, with strong pressures to abandon native traditions, especially language and religious practices.
Chief among those policies were off-reservation boarding schools, which harshly forbid the use of native languages for decades, beginning in the late 19th century and continuing into the mid 20th century.
The most notorious boarding school, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, was established in 1879 and closed in 1918. During that period, 76 students from the Three Affiliated Tribes attended Carlisle, but hundreds of others attended other boarding schools over the years.
Several generations were taught to put aside the language spoken by their ancestors, a rigid rule often reinforced with a strap or a paddle. Teachers stressed that fluency in English was the best path to success, with no tolerance for bilingual fluency in ancestral tongues.
Many tribes began to embrace bilingualism during the 1970s, a time of American Indian activism that included a return to traditional native languages and religions.
Continuing threats
In 1990, Congress passed the Native American Languages Act, which reversed decades of repressive practices by proclaiming official government policy to “preserve, protect, and promote the rights and freedom of Native Americans to use, practice and develop Native American languages.”
So far, only token funding has been awarded to implement the act, critics have said.
As a result of the law, however, the continuing threats to native languages are more subtle. Krauss worries that the “No Child Left Behind” education initiative could further weaken native languages. The initiative’s reliance on testing means reservation schools will focus on English, at the expense of the tribe’s language, because funding is tied to English performance.
For Krauss and other linguists, the effort to save native languages from extinction is personal as well as professional.
One of the Native Alaskan languages Krauss has worked to save is Eyak, which he began studying more than 40 years ago when he was starting his career.
At the time, there were just five fluent Eyak speakers, two of them extremely elderly. One of the younger speakers was a 43-year-old woman — already old in the eyes of Krauss, then 26.
She had a bad cough, which Krauss thought bode ill for the future of Eyak. But the woman, Marie Smith-Jones, now 85, outlived his expectations.
She’s still coughing, still speaking in Eyak. But her last breath will be the end of Eyak as a living language. Another library will be lost.
“God bless her, she’s of sound mind and body,” he said. “I have therefore been deprived the privilege of witnessing the total extinction of the language.”
That’s one prediction he’s happy to have botched.
On the Web:
Northern Arizona University offers resources on indigenous languages:
Ethnologue, a compilation of the world’s languages by linguists, is the authoratitive source on the state of endangered languages around the globe:
Native Languages of the Americas, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving and promoting native languages, offers lots of Internet links: