Tribe Revives Language on Verge of Extinction
By KIRK JOHNSON
New York Times
August 04, 2012
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2012/08/04/us/siletz-language-with-few-voices-finds-modern-way-to-survive.xml

SILETZ, Ore. - Local native languages teeter on the
brink of oblivion all over the world as the big
linguistic sweepstakes winners like English, Spanish or
Mandarin ride a surging wave of global communications.

But the forces that are helping to flatten the landscape
are also creating new ways to save its hidden,
cloistered corners, as in the unlikely survival of
Siletz Dee-ni. An American Indian language with only
about five speakers left - once dominant in this part of
the West, then relegated to near extinction - has, since
earlier this year, been shouting back to the world: Hey,
we're talking. (In Siletz that would be naa-ch'aa-
ghit-'a.)

"We don't know where it's going to go," said Bud Lane, a
tribe member who has been working on the online Siletz
Dee-ni Talking Dictionary for nearly seven years, and
recorded almost all of its 10,000-odd audio entries
himself. In its first years the dictionary was password
protected, intended for tribe members.

Since February, however, when organizers began to
publicize its existence, Web hits have spiked from
places where languages related to Siletz are spoken, a
broad area of the West on through Canada and into
Alaska. That is the heartland of the Athabascan family
of languages, which also includes Navajo. And there has
been a flurry of interest from Web users in Italy,
Switzerland and Poland, where the dark, rainy woods of
the Pacific Northwest, at least in terms of language
connections, might as well be the moon.

"They told us our language was moribund and heading off
a cliff," said Mr. Lane, 54, sitting in a storage room
full of tribal basketry and other artifacts here on the
reservation, about three hours southwest of Portland,
Ore. He said he has no fantasies that Siletz will
conquer the world, or even the tribe. Stabilization for
now is the goal, he said, "creating a pool of speakers
large enough that it won't go away."

But in the hurly-burly of modern communications, keeping
a language alive goes far beyond a simple count of how
many people can conjugate its verbs. Think Jen Johnson's
keypad thumbs. A graduate student in linguistics at
Georgetown University, Ms. Johnson, 21, stumbled onto
Siletz while studying linguistics at Swarthmore College,
which has helped the tribe build its dictionary. She
fell in love with its cadences, and now texts in Siletz,
her fourth language of study, with a tribe member in
Oregon.

Language experts who helped create the dictionary say
the distinctiveness of Siletz Dee-ni (pronounced SiLETZ
day-KNEE), or Coastal Athabascan as it is also called,
comes in part from the unique way the language managed
to survive.

Most other language preservation projects have a base,
however small, of people who speak the language. The
Ojibwe People's Dictionary, for example, which went
online this year, focuses on one of the most widely
spoken native languages in Canada and the Upper Midwest.

The 12 other dictionaries financed in recent years by
the Living Tongues Institute, a nonprofit group, in
partnership with the National Geographic Society - which
helped start the Siletz dictionary project in 2005 and
now uses it as a blueprint - are all centered on
languages still in use, however small or threatened
their populations of speakers may be. Matukar Panau, for
instance, an Oceanic language of Papua New Guinea, has
about 600 speakers remaining, in two small villages.

Siletz, by contrast, had become, by the time of the
dictionary, almost an artifact - preserved in song for
certain native dances, but without a single person
living who had grown up with it as a first language.

There were people who had listened to the elders, like
Mr. Lane, and there were old recordings, made by
anthropologists who came through the West in the 1930s
and 1960s, but not much else. Mr. Lane wants to
incorporate some of those scratchy recordings into
future versions of the dictionary.

What can also bridge an ancient language's roots to
younger tribe members, some new Siletz learners said, is
that it can sound pretty cool.

"There are a couple of sounds that are nowhere in the
English language, like you're going to spit, almost -
kids seem much more open to that," said Sonya Moody-
Jurado, who grew up hearing a few words from her mother
- like nose (mish), and dog (lin-ch'e') - and has been
attending with a grandson Siletz classes taught by Mr.
Lane.

"They're trailblazers, showing the way for small
languages to cross the digital divide," said K. David
Harrison, an associate professor of linguistics at
Swarthmore who worked with the Siletz tribe and the
other partners to build the dictionary. Professor
Harrison said he went to Colombia recently, talking to
indigenous tribes about preserving their languages, but
when the laptops opened up, the Siletz dictionary, with
its impressive size and search capabilities, was the
focus. "It's become a model of how you do it," he said.

When settlers were streaming west in the 1850s on the
Oregon Trail and displacing American Indians from
desirable farmland, government Indian policy created
artificial conglomerates of tribes, jamming them into
one place even though the groups spoke different
languages and in many instances had little in common.

The Siletz people were among the largest bands that
ended up here on this spit of land jutting into the
Pacific Ocean. By dint of their numbers, their language
prevailed over other tribes, and their dances, sung in
Siletz, became adopted by other tribes as their cultures
faded.

"We're the last standing," Mr. Lane said.

But the threat of oblivion was constant. In the 1950s,
the tiny tribe was declared dead by the United States -
a "termination" from the rolls, in the jargon of the
time. The Siletz clawed back - clinging to former
reservation lands and cultural anchors in songs and
dances - and two decades later, in the mid-1970s, became
only the second tribe in the nation to go from
nonexistence to federally recognized status. The
Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians now have about
4,900 enrolled members and a profitable casino in the
nearby resort town of Lincoln City.

School was also once the enemy of tribal languages.
Government boarding schools, where generations of Indian
children were sent, aimed to stamp out native ways and
tongues. Now, the language is taught through the sixth
grade at the public charter school in Siletz, and the
tribe aims to have a teaching program in place in the
next few years to meet Oregon's high school language
requirements, allowing Siletz, in a place it originated,
to be taught as a foreign language.

___________________________________________

Portside aims to provide material of interest to people
on the left that will help them to interpret the world
and to change it.

Submit via email: [log in to unmask]

Submit via the Web: http://portside.org/submittous3

Frequently asked questions: http://portside.org/faq

Sub/Unsub: http://portside.org/subscribe-and-unsubscribe

Search Portside archives: http://portside.org/archive

Contribute to Portside: https://portside.org/donate