Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Posts Tagged ‘Mohawk’

Native Speech at School

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on April 12, 2024| 4 Comments »

Photo: Riley Robinson/Monitor Staff.
Kawehnokwiiosthe teaches the Mohawk language to students from both sides of the US-Canada border at the Akwesasne Freedom School, St. Regis Mohawk Reservation, northern New York.

Today many languages are in danger of dying out as the elders who speak them die off and young people don’t learn them.

Fortunately, in some places there are efforts to educate new speakers. Consider this Mohawk language school at a reservation in upstate New York.

Sara Miller Llana writes at the Christian Science Monitor, “Students and teachers, as well as some parents, sit on two wooden benches running the length of the hallway of their school, organized not by age or grade but by their clans.

“They take turns reading from the Ohén:ton Karihwatéhkwen, which translates from the Mohawk language to ‘Words before all else.’ These words, which recognize all life forces in creation, mark the day’s start at the Akwesasne Freedom School.

“But the 60-odd students here wouldn’t understand these lessons if it weren’t for this little schoolhouse at the United States-Canada border that for decades has been fighting to preserve Mohawk language and culture. ‘This makes us who we are, and if we don’t have this, who are we going to be?’ asks teacher Kawehnokwiiosthe, whose name in English means ‘She makes the island beautiful.’ …

“Kawehnokwiiosthe turns to her young pupils, who introduce themselves by their clans – Wolf, Bear, and Eel – and state that they are wisk, or age 5. Every class in K-8 that students take is full language immersion.

When a child asks a question in English, Kawehnokwiiosthe responds in Mohawk.

“Most parents pay tuition with a quilt sold at an annual auction in August. The school is run as a co-op, where parents do the cleaning (along with the students) and the maintenance work. Students come from American and Canadian sides of the border, but the school has never accepted funds from either government, says Alvera Sargent, who heads the nonprofit Friends of the Akwesasne Freedom School and is one of the last first-language speakers of Mohawk.

“That makes her precious, says Waylon Cook, former teacher and now project manager of the school’s nonprofit arm. ‘We treasure our first-language speakers,’ he says. … ‘If you lose [Mohawk], you can’t go to France like you could to learn French. There is nowhere else to do it but here.’ More at the Monitor, here.

Meanwhile, in the state of Washington, there’s an effort to bring Native language teaching into public school, too.

Lauren Gallup wrote at Northwest Public Broadcasting, “A number of Washington state public schools are partnering with tribes to bring Indigenous languages into classrooms in an effort to rectify the marred history of Native American boarding schools.

“Rachael Barger is a teacher on special assignment with Bethel School District, one of the districts partnering with the Nisqually Tribe to bring its Southern Lushootseed language into the classroom for a small subset of students. 

“5% of Bethel’s student population identifies as American Indian, Alaskan Native, two or more races or Hispanic and Native. Barger serves over 200 Title VI Indian Education Program students for the district. Title VI is a federal program that aims to meet the specific needs of Native American students. 

“The tribe and district have partnered, so far, to bring the language classes to two elementary schools for students who qualify for Title VI. Bethel School District had 461 qualifying students this last school year, which is around 2% of its student population.  Barger said those students were excited to learn the language because it felt unique to them. …

“The tribe’s partnership with the Bethel schools is part of the Nisqually Language Resource Center which started two years ago.

“ ‘It makes — it chokes me up,’ said Catalina Sanchez, research coordinator for the center. ‘It’s just something new that we’ve always needed in our community. So I’m proud of us for finally getting our own program in our schools and in our community.’

“The language work being undertaken by the tribe is part of broader efforts to expand and uplift culture and identity for the tribe. 

“ ‘You’re starting to see everything kind of awakening right now here in Nisqually,’ said Willie Frank III, chairman of the Nisqually Tribe. …

“Frank said he thinks it’s a perfect time to focus again on the tribe’s cultural traditions. ‘What I was taught was to tell our story, and, you know, keep building our people up,’ Frank said, ‘and that’s what we’re doing with all this great work in here. I think about the art, the culture and the language; that’s going to be something that sustains us.’ ” 

More at Northwest Public Broadcasting, here. No paywall for either article.

Read Full Post »

A New Way to Save a Language

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on June 9, 2023| 5 Comments »

Photo: Conférence PPL 2022.
Brian Maracle shares his technique for teaching the Mohawk language at Canadian conferences such as Multidisciplinary Approaches in Language Policy and Planning (LPP or in French, PPL).

I love learning about other languages and sometimes pick up tidbits through my volunteering with ESL teachers. But languages in danger of dying out are especially interesting to me. If they die out, we lose too much about the ways others see the world.

Today’s story is about a technique for teaching a particular endangered language.

Ian Austen wrote at the New York Times from Ontario, Canada, “When Brian Maracle returned in his mid-40s to the Mohawk community near Toronto that he had left when he was just 5, he didn’t have a job and knew almost no one there.

“But perhaps the biggest challenge facing him was that he neither spoke nor understood much Kanyen’keha, the Mohawk language. More than a century of attempts by Canada’s government to stamp out Indigenous cultures had left Mr. Maracle and many other Indigenous people without their languages.

“Now, 30 years later, Mr. Maracle has become a champion of Mohawk, and is helping revive it and other Indigenous languages, both in Canada and elsewhere, through his transformation of teaching methods.

“ ‘I never studied linguistics, don’t have any teacher training, my parents weren’t speakers,’ he said in his office at an adult language school he founded about two decades ago in his community, the Six Nations of the Grand River territory, southwest of Toronto. Yet, linguistics academic conferences now feature him as a speaker. …

“From the 19th century into the 1990s, thousands of Indigenous students were taken from their homes, sometimes by force, and placed into Canada’s residential schools system. There, they were forbidden from speaking their languages and from practicing their traditions in what a national commission later characterized as ‘cultural genocide.’

“The system failed to entirely eradicate Indigenous languages, but its effect was nevertheless devastating for the 60 Indigenous languages found in Canada.

“Today restoring Indigenous languages has been a component of Canada’s push for reconciliation with its Indigenous people. … Four years ago, the government passed the Indigenous Languages Act, which formally recognizes the importance of these languages and requires the allocation of money — more than 700 million Canadian dollars to date — for teaching them.

“But none of that was around when Mr. Maracle arrived at Six Nations, and the program that was available, he found, was ill-suited for adult students.

“ ‘Indigenous languages are extremely different from English,’ said Ivona Kucerova, the director of the Center for Advanced Research in Experimental and Applied Linguistics at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. ‘But typically what you see is that the local Indigenous language teaching methodologies are designed to teach Western languages.’

“Mr. Maracle said the problem with his first, unsuccessful lesson was that the instructors, generally Mohawk elders without training as language teachers, were tossing out ‘whole words.’

“ ‘They just expected by dropping a word on you and saying it louder that you’d somehow figure it out,’ Mr. Maracle said. ‘They didn’t understand how the language really is structured.’ …

“Mr. Maracle found the answer about 25 years ago in the office of David Kanatawakhon-Maracle, no direct relation, a lecturer at the Western University in London, Ontario.

“ ‘There were little bits of paper all over this big table,’ Mr. Maracle recalled. The lecturer told Mr. Maracle words he had been longing to hear: ‘He said: “I think I’ve got a new way of teaching the language.” ‘

“There were about 60 slips of paper on his office table, and they ‘were the Rosetta Stone of all the things that you need to be a competent beginning speaker,’ Mr. Maracle said.

“Kanyen’keha is a polysynthetic language, where a single word can function as an entire sentence. Those words are made up of morphemes, small elements that change their meaning depending on how they are combined. …

“Understanding that these elements were the key to unlocking the language was the breakthrough Mr. Maracle needed to attain fluency. But other students at the school he helped start in 1999 were still struggling. It became apparent that someone needed to build a curriculum and teaching program around the morphemes, including a color-coded system for grouping them, which Mr. Maracle did through trial and error.

“One essential discovery was figuring out that learning Kanyen’keha requires ‘looking at the world with Mohawk language eyes,’ he said. In comparison with other languages, Kanyen’keha relies heavily on verbs.

Objects are generally described by what they do. The word for ‘computer,’ for example, roughly translates as ‘it brings things up.’

“ ‘We don’t teach you how to say “pencil,” “chair,” ”shoe” for six months,’ Mr. Maracle said. ‘Because the language is a verb-based language, the names of things are less grammatically important.’

“Prof. Kucerova, the director of the linguistics center in Hamilton, regards Mr. Maracle as a linguist despite his lack of formal training. She said tests showed that his students emerged with a university-level fluidity in two years.

“ ‘I have never seen anyone else bring adult learners to that level of language, to be able to speak at this level after two years,’ she said, adding that Mohawk ranks with Arabic in terms of difficulty for English-speaking students. ‘That’s really astonishing.’

“ ‘I became literally mesmerized by the extent of his work,’ Prof. Kucerova said. ‘He’s figured out this improbable, but linguistically extremely smart, method of delivering this radically different language to adults.’ ”

More at the Times, here.

Read Full Post »