>This post just reminds me of something. It is crazy that academics demand a
>degree to teach things like Indian language, when the fluent speakers are
>the elders of that nation. So these programs have to get someone who can't
>teach something to teach it because of the paper, and then they are over the
>people who know something who work for the ones who don't. Crazy.
I agree, in part, with the general sentiments here about the ridiculous
notion that we require a piece of paper signed by someone who knows nothing
about what it is we say we can teach, before we can do what we said we could
do in the first place. Having said, that, however, I also have to admit to
walking down that very path myself at present.
As for applying this directly to language studies, however, I largely
disagree with the viewpoint. I've heard stories about Native language
programs from friends on reservations from Alaska to New Mexico to South
Dakota and have myself taken classes in Nez Perce traditional way, in
community sponsored classes, and at the college level. I have corresponded
with the former head of Berkeley's department of Asian Languages who
specialized in studies of Nez Perce language and am currently applying
considerations of English linguistics in narrative construction to exploring
a Nez Perce elder's own transition from Nez Perce to English as a respected
story-teller. I am by no means a fluent speaker, and consider myself just a
baby in my understanding of Nez Perce language. But I would be hard put to
privilege any one of the learning environments over another. It seems more
to me that the difference was primarily in the questions we addressed.
An old friend from Sitka once told me about how one elder, seeing that the
language was being lost to younger generations, began taking a group of kids
aside after school and teaching them language on his own. This initial
effort prompted (I think through jealousy--one of the few examples of
beneficial jealousy I can think of) the parents of the kids to want to learn
the language as well, so the next thing you know, classes are established at
the local college. When I went to visit her in 1987, I visited both the
college courses and the large after-school community-sponsored 'traditional'
school for kids. The memorial potlatch, for the elder who began all of this,
was held nearly entirely in Tlinget, and alot of the time it was those
initial students who were leading the rest of the group. The whole thing was
pretty exciting to see.
Got sidetracked....
What I meant to say was that in the college courses I took, they were
team-taught by a college professor of anthro and an community elder. The
prof of anthro largely covered transcription techniques and directed our
application and practice of grammar, the elder focussed upon pronounciation,
vocabulary, conversation, and revealing the basics of usage. Currently the
course is team taught by two Nez Perce tribal members, one of whom is a
former, long-time student of these same classes.
I believe that there is a very important reason to include people versed in
more general linguistic concerns, whether they be Indian people or not,
alongside of people fluent in the language itself, or even specialists in a
particular language. In the case of many Native languages, the number of
people studying that language is relatively small. The importance of
language to identity is known to both tribal elders and academia. For this
reason alone, continuing study of Native languages is of utmost importance.
Exposure to larger linguistic concerns and ways of approaching language has
provided not so much a new way of viewing Nez Perce language, but a new
language which allows me to see what others are looking at in other
languages so that I can try to see how useful it is in looking at Nez Perce
language. For me, it is this process of applying these concerns to Nez Perce
language and literature that fosters a new way of looking at language.
And I don't want to overlook the factor that someone saying something just
plain wrong has in helping me to come to grips or to look at what I thought
I knew in a new way. For me, books on Nez Perce culture are alot like
that--I think that 90% of them are just plain wrong. But seeing how much
they differ from what I believe I've been taught forces me to better refine
the way I express what it is that I thought I was told.
Anyway, I guess I am most inclined to think that all efforts at teaching or
studying Native languages are more important than the all too common
silence. Has anyone yet figured out what the ratio of courses in the
so-called 'Modern Languages' to Indigenous Languages is in North American
Universities and primary schools? And how about 'foreign language
requirements' in BA's MA's and PhD's? Now there's an interesting question, eh?