Anumpa Achukma/Good
News
Language Loss Can Be Reversed
2006.07
This is a newsletter dedicated to reporting the successes in revitalizing endangered languages worldwide. Share your good news with us by sending us an article about your program or current activity in revitalizing an endangered language.
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Perpetuation
How do we perpetuate our languages? This is what some people are doing.
(1)
Around 5 years ago, a big part of that desire, I think, was
that my wife fell pregnant and having to think about the responsibility of being
a parent I actually went through the things that I valued. And one of the things
was my Maori culture. And I really had this strong desire…that my children learn
Maori as well. And I knew if I didn’t have at least a certain level, base level
of language then it would make it really hard for them to learn.
(2)
I guess
when stringing sentences together, it’s slower for me in Maori because I really
have to sit there and think about what I’m going to say as opposed to just
respond in a natural way. But, yeah, when I have kids. How old am I now? I’m
thirty now, so when I’m fifty and I pop out my first kid, then I guess I will
stop being so lazy.
(3)
Probably
off an on for about fifteen years [actively learning the language] I suppose. I
always kept running away from it because I didn’t really want the responsibility
of learning it because once you learn it come other responsibilities of running
the family functions, speaking on behalf of your family. And not being the
eldest brother, because that’s his job, I didn’t want the responsibility. So I
kept dodging it for many years…My grandmother obviously saw something that was
in me to learn, but as I said I kept dodging it as long as I could, and, then, I
couldn’t run away anymore. I just sort of sat down and started learning. So I
did… If it wasn’t for our Maori woman, who have got a group called the Maori
Woman’s WelfareLleague, they are responsible for keeping the language, I
believe,
(4)
No, we
didn’t really grow up speaking it. I was born in 1950. My exposure to it was
probably a great aunt, who would have been in her eighties when I was very
young, and I recall her talking in a funny dialect--I suppose that’s what I
would call it--and the way that she placed her tongue in her mouth and the
pronunciation of her words. It wasn’t English. It—and I think it was the
southern dialect. We people instead of saying Rakiura, [Maori name
for Stewart Island], which is an “r”, roll the “r”. She would say
lakiula, lakiula, with an “l” instead of an “r”, so
I recall that, and that would have been in the fifties.
I started
school in the fifties, and…the maximum of our exposure to the language would be
in the school concerts, learning the waiata or our songs and action
songs, and we had a teacher who was actually quite interested in encouraging us
to learn our own history, which was unusual for those days.
(5)
So, probably for me, my initial experience was I was brought
up in Maori. My father was a native speaker, and my mother is part Maori as well
but was brought up in a Catholic religious background. So she was more
Pakeha-fied [Europeanized]. So I guess my initial contact with the Maori
language was from a baby, definitely…throughout my childhood we did a lot of
marae stuff.
(6)
When I was younger, I grew up with…my grandparents, and they
were fluent Maori speakers. And they thought…that they’d give their
grandchildren…Maori. And we learnt Maori off them/
(7)
Now, my gran, she’s pretty much the whole reason why we’re
here…. I think when I got to college there was my kura kaupapa, my
secondary school then. So I was just doing maybe couple of papers a week. And
then when I was in university, I thought “Oh, I’ll give this a try,” you know,
because there were—like they had Bachelor’s of Arts in Maori, in te reo
Maori. So I tested through that….In 2000 I graduated with my BA Maori in
Education….And I knew once I got my degree I couldn’t go anywhere else. I could
go to other places and see how they will teach. But other than that,… I’ve got
nowhere else to go but here[back to her own community].
(8)
I’m from Kaikoura….When we were growing up, we never actually
learnt much Maori but were very deeply in whakapapa[genealogy]. So
we learnt our genealogy, our stories, our histories. But the language itself was
some bit we never really learnt. It wasn’t really available. Now my grandparents
spoke Maori. My parents are passive speakers. They understand it, but they don’t
really talk much. Personally, I started learning in 1984 when I attended a
course at Polytech as part of a trade training skill here in town
(9)
I am unregistered part Cherokee from the east coast. My great grand parents settled in South Carolina, and my grandmother with her sisters and brothers finally ended up on Long Island, New York….They never really said do things this way or that ‘cause we are cwy [Cherokee], they just did things. And what I picked up I picked up with the subconcious understanding that we shouldnt let others know we were cwy. My father took me down to the Quallah Boundry a couple a times. He was friends with JT Garret back then, and that’s how I started to learn cwy…. I took cwy 1[Cherokee One}…twice and followed along even from Costa Rica, where I go on vacation. That’s when I started talking to my….I use commands like come here (dahena), go! (wena), want some bread/aquadoliha gado, good/osda
I am living in France with my husband, and I guess because I look so NA people ask questions. So I have decided to learn more about cwy [Cherokee] and let people know true things.
(10)
Well, I mean, now I believe in language revitalization begins and ends in the home although I’m not a mother myself—I don’t have children [this speaker did become a mother after this interview], but if I did, I know that’s what I would push—in the community and in the home. But when I was growing up…there was no intergenerational transmission, so it stopped for three generations….I think they[the community] want language, but we’re also quite isolated…It’s a matter of a lot of us that have gone and learned language as a second language and moving back there to the community and providing some space where children can speak Maori or learn Maori or perhaps setting up a school or a small kindergarten—You know, there’s a number of options.
But I think for a community to start transmitting it to the next generation, there needs to be a core of 5 or 6 people to move back there to actually recreate that, and to create—it’s not going to be a natural, it’s not going to be a natural situation. It’s actually going to be something quite unnatural for perhaps 1 or 2 generations until it becomes more natural and it’s naturally spoken in the home. I think you have to kind of make it happen. I mean I’m quite passionate about that. That’s what I want to do. I really want to go home, and there’s probably a good handful of us that…want this for our community. And I think, I believe that’s the only way to get kind of natural language moving again, colloquial language, language that you buy a loaf of bread with, language that you communicate to your grandparents and your peers. I mean that’s what’s kind of missing ‘cause…a lot of our men have rote learnt speeches that they can stand up and do…—we’ve got ceremonial language, which is quite unusual, considering it’s been gone for three generations.
We still keep these bastions of our culture and our
language alive,…so anything’s possible I believe. If we’ve managed that, then we
can manage…creating a place where children can start speaking it in their
community and in their home.
How do you perpetuate your native language?
I received this from a fellow Fulbrighter.
The article shown
below appeared in the New Zealand Herald today. The Heraldis the largest paper
in New Zealand. The article is about the project I work on - Te Kotahitanga. I
want to share it with you to give you some insightinto my
work.
Regards
Tom Cavanagh
Teachers 'must
change' if Maori pupils are to improve
Thursday September 14, 2006
By
Mike Houlahan
Changing the way teachers work in classrooms is the key to
improving the performance of Maori school students, a leading education
researcher says. Russell Bishop, professor of Maori education at the University
of Waikato, yesterday briefed MPs about the results of the Te Kotahitanga pilot
programme he co-ordinates. Te Kotahitanga aims to create a more interactive
relationship between students and teachers.
The professor's team asked
students about their classroom experiences, and then asked teachers to alter the
way they took classes to try to remove obstacles to Maori students learning.
Teachers were encouraged to spend more time one-on-one with students, improve
their personal relationships with them, and not hold preconceptions that Maori
students were likely to be underachievers. He told Parliament's education and
science select committee that students in the trial have shown a marked
improvement in academic performance.
Professor Bishop has been accused of
being anti-teacher, and a graph he showed the committee - which showed students,
principals and families believed classroom relationships were the major barrier
to learning while teachers overwhelmingly opted for a student's home life -
would be unlikely to endear him to teacher groups.
However, Labour MP
Marian Hobbs, a former teacher, said she had been brought to tears after seeing
film of students recounting how they had thrived after taking part in the Te
Kotahitanga programme.
Professor Bishop was at pains to praise teachers,
who he said were "upset and angry and frustrated" people who really wanted to
make a difference but were stuck in a hierarchical tradition.
"I'm very
hesitant to blame teachers," Professor Bishop said.
"I say that they are
stuck in the wrong headspace but I don't think that they are at fault because
the vast majority of people go into teaching because they are dedicated people
and they care for kids. They want to make a difference."
In this year's
Budget, funding for Te Kotahitanga was extended until 2010. The programme has
worked with 422 teachers in the past two years and has now been extended with
Government funding to cover almost 2000 teachers.
Research on Maori
studying maths found that gains for those learning under teachers who had done
the programme were 50 per cent greater than students under teachers who had
not.
In the New Zealand language Māori, one of the most likely times you will commonly hear the language performed ceremonially is for karakia, or prayers. Many occasions for Māori gatherings may use English but always the meeting will begin or end with a karakia, as will preparations for eating times. Even in all of our government schools you will hear prayers in assembly times or the beginning of lessons. Each and every individual school board decides on the levels of prayers and hyms used in any school.
However, this has recently been under threat from the Ministry of Education. A senior policy manager was about to issue a directive to all schools making it compulsary for all students to “opt in” for karakia times. This means if any school board wished to incorporate any karakia then each and every child’s parents would have to grant permission everytime. This requirement would in effect kill the future of karakia due to the hasstle required. And we couldn’t even sing our national anthem!
There has just been an enormous reaction from schools, parent groups and church leaders that has somewhat embarrased the Ministry who have been taking orders from a government “hell bent” on secularising our society. A great victory for common sense and the independance of our schools. But an even greator victory for the continuation of our sacred language and sacred ceremonies.
Dr A G Stewart
Catch the latest news on
the Comanche language at this website—
http://www.comanchelanguage.org/.
Nahuatl Language and Culture Workshops
Mapitzmitl offers these workshops. You can contact him at pazehecatl@hotmail.com. You can view video footage and photographs of Kalpulli Ehecatl (Community of the Wind) at http://kalpulliehecatl2.blogspot.com.
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George Ann Gregory, Ph.D.
Choctaw/Cherokee
Fulbright Scholar