Tribes strive to save native tongues

In the Pacific Northwest, some 40 indigenous languages are at risk of disappearing within a decade.

from the May 23, 2008 edition

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In 2005, Johnson shared a $100,000 federal grant with the local museum. She used a portion of the money to buy a video camera, an Apple laptop, and digital recording equipment to help document Kiksht. A few months ago, Johnson found a Mr. Potato Head doll at a garage sale and made a video to teach children Kiksht words for body parts. "Their jaws dropped when they saw it," says Johnson.

Johnson and her grandmother work in a dilapidated white trailer, a couple hundred feet away from brick buildings where hundreds of native American children were once herded into boarding schools and forced to learn English. The federal government routinely rounded up native children – kidnapped, tribe members say – and held them separate from their parents in boarding schools well into the 20th century in a systematic effort to eradicate Indian language and culture. In 2000, an official of the Bureau of Indian Affairs formally apologized for the "destructive efforts" of his agency, including the forced assimilation of native children in boarding schools.

" 'Chau chau asabal,' that's how you would explain toast," says Johnson as she pages through one of about a dozen notebooks. Her grandmother rests in a corner, surrounded by microphones. Johnson laughs as she reads another phrase that came from Thompson, " 'K'aya enluxwan qidau,' which means, 'I don't think that way.' "

Of 45 languages spoken in Oregon before native American contact with Europeans, most are extinct. There are about 20 remaining speakers of Ichishkiin on the Warm Springs reservation.

On a recent morning Arlita Rhoan sat in the middle of a playroom, surrounded by slices of wooden watermelon, building blocks, and paper cutouts of snowflakes. As a teacher of Ichishkiin – part of the reservation's language immersion classes for preschoolers who also receive instruction in Kiksht and Paiute – she told stories and handed out drums. Her 3-year-olds sang "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" and "If You're Happy and You Know It" in Ichishkiin.

In 2003, Dawn Smith, principal of the local elementary school, barred Ms. Rhoan, Johnson, and other tribal instructors from teaching native languages in the school district because she said their curriculum failed to build on itself. "As far as I know they are still working on getting a comprehensive program together," says Ms. Smith.

Other educators have been more encouraging.

On the Siletz Dee-ni reservation along Oregon's Pacific coast, a local high school recently allowed the weekly Athabaskan classes to count toward students' foreign-language requirement. Only five people speak Athabaskan, one of the tribe's original languages.

"We aren't producing fluent speakers yet," says Bud Lane, one of the youngest speakers, who has worked 14 years in the local paper mill. But he's optimistic. He is compiling the language's most comprehensive dictionary of 12,000 words online.

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