Stabilizing Indigenous Language

Stabilizing Indigenous Language

Cantoni, G., (Ed). (1996). Stabilizing Indigenous Languages. Flagstaff, Arizona: Northern Arizona University, Center for Excellence in Education, pp. 240.

We hear old people talk in their language and we can learn what they are talking about....The way we had to learn was in this kind of place, isolated like this place, hear the old people telling their old time stories, sharing, hearing old people singing in their Native language. We are away from that. They could tell these stories in their Native language, we are away from that. We are here to see if we could change our course. (Elder speaking at the Academy of Elders meeting, July 1996, Old Minto, Alaska)

The elder's refrain that we are away from the elders' language is stressed by Richard Littlebear in the preface to Stabilizing Indigenous Languages. He poetically writes about the simple act of hearing old people talk in their language so that we can learn it and use it. He cautions the reader not to assume that by producing CD-ROMS, recording elders "before it is too late," or training indigenous linguists, that languages will come back. He suggests something far simpler yet so much more difficult to achieve: the simple act of one generation talking to the next generation in their language and in their context. The book is an outgrowth of symposia "to lay out a blueprint of policy changes, educational reforms, and community initiatives to stabilize and revitalize American Indian and Alaska Native languages" (p. vi). Two conferences were held at Northern Arizona University's Center for Excellence in Education, and a third one was planned for late 1996. Representatives came from 21 states, two U.S. territories, and Canada. The book is part of an ongoing process of community people, linguists, teachers, school board members, and scholars who are concerned with language stabilization. The contributors to this volume are the same individuals, groups, and school systems involved in bilingual education. Yet the simple utterances of a mother to a child or an elder to a child in the vernacular language have proved to be increasingly elusive as indigenous languages in the Americas and elsewhere continue to decline. This presents a dilemma: can schools, once and sometimes continuing to be a cause of language demise, alter their historical role of assimilation and become an agent of the community by meeting the goal of intergenerational language transmission? Can communities simultaneously withstand the pressures of modernization while the number of speakers and culture bearers is in decline and organize themselves to foster intergenerational language transmission? This is what Stabilizing Indigenous Languages is all about. [continue ]