Stabilizing Indigenous Languages

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.

The book is organized topically: history and status of indigenous languages in North America and the status of threatened languages worldwide; legislation, language policy, and principles involved in language demise and programs that reverse language loss; the importance of intergenerational transmission of language and how much more is lost when a language dies than just the language; and education, particularly pertaining to language immersion programs.

The book shifts from the poetic voice of Richard Littlebear to the academic prose of Michael Krauss and his continued cautions regarding the state of indigenous languages worldwide. Krauss frames the health of indigenous languages according to the demographic data on the number and age of indigenous speakers. This schema provides for a simple way of estimating if a language is growing, remaining the same, or in decline. Krauss provides four reasons why it is important for indigenous languages to continue: aesthetic, scientific, ethical, and understanding of the world around us.

However, the tone and the sentiments expressed in this volume also include the emotional and spiritual as well as the academic. For example, Damon Clarke illustrates the cultural importance of language transmitted by grandparents and other elders as it shapes behavior and attitudes. Ofelia Zepeda writes of the aesthetic and poetic power of the O'odham language. What we hear from the academic to the concerned speaker of a language is the strength that language provides through identity, culture, story, song, dance, kin relations, and one's relationship to nature.

At the heart of the book, beyond the here and now attachment to indigenous languages, is the concern of language continuity, stabilization, and renewal. The story of language demise is known only too well. This book, like others, describes the historical and political context that has caused the decline of indigenous languages. The legacy of colonialism and racism confronts indigenous groups and languages today. However, the focus of this book is what to do about language loss.

Joshua Fishman's insights concerning language maintenance and language renewal provide a bridge between the poetic and emotional on the one hand and the scientific and academic on the other. Fishman speaks as both a person concerned personally with language loss and as an academic. Fishman's notion of intergenerational language transmission and the importance of kinship and community in this process represents the theoretical as well as emotional threads that connect the various topics and authors. Fishman raises the hopeful example of Hebrew being revernacularized after two millennia. In part he attributes the success of Hebrew to "the few teachers who had learned to speak it.... Children did not live with their parents. They lived in the children's home in a kibbutz with those teachers, the few teachers who had forced themselves to learn how to speak it, not naturally but fluently" (p. 89). He goes on to state that in language renewal you should "start exactly where the mother tongue starts and aim at that." The strength of mother tongue intergenerational transmission is with the intimacy of the family (nuclear or extended) that begins with the first utterance between mother and child. Attached to the language are the emotions, sensations, memories, and nuances that are conveyed through family and community interactions. Fishman then warns that "there are family building, there are culture building, and there are intimacy building prerequisites for language fostering, things that you have to do because no school is going to do them" (p. 91). Two historically contradictory points arise from Fishman's arguments. First, the very processes that have undermined a language - such as modernity, changes in economic conditions, colonialism, boarding school, and most importantly changes in attitude toward a language - must also be renegotiated in order to change the larger cultural scene. Second, although according to Fishman's criteria schooling is not going to build family, culture, and intimacy, it has become a prime place in which language renewal continues. The increased number of school-based language immersion programs, from Navajo to Hawaiian to Yup'ik, all indicate that present realities such as mandatory attendance at schools make schools a prime choice for language immersion work. Having schools become the prime movers in language renewal represents a distinct reversal from schooling's historically assimilationist agenda. Crawford, Krauss, Littlebear, Burnaby, and Watahomigie write in this volume that such programs must be "owned by the community." Today, to reverse language loss may well mean reversing schools' assimilationist role, making them a place in which indigenous language is nurtured. Fishman, in fact, notes the extraordinary work of the Basque community in Franco's Spain as an atypical example of schooling fostering the local vernacular.

In my own experience working in southwest Alaska, schools and communities collaborating to achieve intergenerational language transmission is a real possibility. In fact, in the Yup'ik community and school of Manokotak, the last village in the Bristol Bay region of Alaska where children still come to school speaking Yup'ik, the structure of the school provides the possibility for formal and informal intergenerational language transmission (Harrison, 1986; Lipka, 1989, 1994). This is possible because all the staff and some of the teachers are kin to the students, and three generations are represented in the school. This creates the possibility for language to be used formally in the classroom and informally in the cafeteria, in the halls, on the playground, and in conversations with other adults. However, the schools have simply not organized themselves to see the existing resource within their midst the fluent Yup'ik-speaking community members who are direct employees of the school. The chance to recreate schools as agents of the community, contributing directly to language maintenance, becomes more possible as indigenous teachers, aides, principals, and staff increasingly become part of the fabric of schooling.

Similarly, Richard Littlebear poetically frames this volume in the book's preface when he stresses the importance of remembering the oral tradition and the importance of informal everyday uses of language in the community. He poignantly addresses "the litany of what we have viewed as the one item that will save our languages. This one item is usually quickly replaced by another" (p. xiii). For example, he says, "then we said, `Let's make dictionaries for our languages' and we did and still the languages kept on dying. Then we said, `Let's get linguists trained in our own languages' and we did, and still the languages kept on dying." This litany continues with culturally relevant materials, CD-ROMS, videotaping elders, and all sorts of ways of collecting and making materials. Richard Littlebear seems to share Fishman's sentiment that schooling is a double-edged sword vis-a-vis the community and indigenous languages, often leading students out and away from their local languages and communities (Fishman, 1984). Richard Littlebear's elegant fix is "to reverse this influence of English, families must retrieve their rightful position as the first teachers of our language. . . . But if they are going to relinquish this teaching responsibility to the schools then they must be supportive" (p. xiv).

Here resides a dilemma, the school as the Other and the family and community as the primary place for language continuity and renewal. Yet, could schools become places of intergenerational language transmission both on the formal and informal levels? Could schools and communities consciously reconstitute their relationship, with schools becoming community institutions within indigenous contexts (see Lipka, 1989)? Then, could schools become places in which the process of intimate language transmission is part of a larger process of indigenous enculturation, so that schooling becomes authentic on both the local and societal levels? Or is schooling and modernity in a diametrical relationship with the local community, its language, values, and culture? These are the issues of Stabilizing Indigenous Languages..

In summary, the book is an excellent resource for those interested in learning about language stabilization in an indigenous context from practitioners, community members, and university scholars. The book provides both how to and theoretical insights. Most important, the book connects its reader to a host of people and their work on these important issues. The main weakness of the book is the lack of an integrating or theoretical framework that ties the various issues of language transmission and language renewal together. But Fishman (1991) has written extensively on that elsewhere.

References

Fishman, J. (1991). Reversing language shift: Theoretical and empirical foundations of assistance to threatened languages. Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters.

Fishman, J. (1984). Minority mother tongues in education. Prospects, 14(49), 51-56.

Harrison, B. (1986). Manokotak: A study in school adaptation. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 17(2), lOO-111. Lipka, J. (1994). Language, power, and pedagogy: Whose school is it? Peabody Journal of Education, 69(2), 71-93. Lipka, J. (1989). A cautionary tale of curriculum development in Yup'ik Eskimo communities. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 20(3): 216-231.
Reviewed by: Jerry Lipka University of Alaska, Fairbanks
Copyright National Association for Bilingual Education Spring 1996
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