COMPUTER SAVES TRADITIONS; WINNEBAGO KEEP GRIP ON CULTURE
Byline: Susan Lampert Smith/Wisconsin Dells
The "usge" arrived at the preschool last week and the children of the
Neenchunkgra Head Start knew just what to do with it.
"Usge" (pronounced oon-skay) means whatchamacallit in Winnebago, a
humorous nod to the fact that the Winnebago language hasn't quite caught
up to the technology that is helping to keep it alive.
The children, though, live in both the world of their ancestors and the
world of CD-ROM. They knew that this usge is a computer and that computers
are fun.
They crowded around the screen to watch a cartoon that showed a little
Winnebago boy named Kunuga walk out of his wigwam and begin talking in
Winnebago about what he sees in the forest. At the click of a computer
mouse, a ca (deer) bounds away, and a zik (squirrel) runs up a wazi (pine
tree). The Winnebago words appear on the screen as they are pronounced
by the voice of Kyle White Eagle, a boy from the Wisconsin Dells Winnebago
community.
The computer program is part of a major new effort to immerse Winnebago
children in their language and culture, said Ken Funmaker Sr. New computer
programs are a way of giving the gift of the Winnebago language to a
generation that probably won't get it at home.
It is a gift not to be taken lightly. The Winnebago are known, at least
among tribes of the Upper Midwest, as a people who have kept their language
alive.
Funmaker, a traditional singer and artist who heads the 1-1/2-year-old
program, estimated that there are close to 500 native speakers among the
Wisconsin Winnebago's approximately 4,900 members. That compares with
just 56 speakers among the 3,500 in the Nebraska branch of the tribe (one
died last week) and only one speaker among the Kansas Ioway, a tribe that
has its language roots among the Winnebago. Funmaker said he has been
invited to those reservations, to help those tribes try to reconstruct
language and rituals that were lost.
The Winnebago's hold on their traditions is one good thing that came
from a bad history. Soldiers removed the Winnebago by force from Wiscon-
sin six times, beginning in the 1830s, but the people kept returning to
their homeland. When the government finally relented, Funmaker said, "all
the choice land was gone and we ended up (scattered across) 14 counties."
"You were isolated, you didn't know your neighbors," Funmaker said,
remembering his upbringing. But those small family units kept the language
and traditions much better than tribes on reservations, where boarding
school teachers and missionaries beat and prayed the culture out of the
people.
"We're one of the few tribes in this part of the country that still
remembers all the traditions," Funmaker said. "We've got our culture, we've
got our ceremonies, we're not trying to retrieve it."
Yet that day could come. Funmaker is part of the last generation of
fluent Winnebago speakers, most of them over the age of 50. Most of the
Neenchunkgra school's parents -- the baby boomers born into a world of
television -- do not speak their native tongue at home.
But their grandparents do. And the program is using both traditional
and nontraditional ways to teach the language. Elders, like Corrina
Lonetree, and master language speakers, like Lila Blackdeer, have been
recruited to teach in the tribe's six Head Start programs. All have had
extensive training through the language program.
Before lunch last week, Blackdeer led the children in an energetic
recitation of their body parts.
"Nacawa," she said.
"Nacawa," they replied, grabbing their ears.
After the body parts, they listened to a tape of Funmaker singing the
"Thank You" song, a traditional drum song they'll hear (and sing) during
traditional group meals for the rest of their lives. It's a long song,
with a lot of Winnebago words, that Funmaker translated as "Our brothers
have fed us and we would like to thank them. Our brothers have taken
pity on us and served us food."
While the children won't know all the words, immersing them in more
language than they can learn at once is how they learn. And, Funmaker
said, "When they hear it for the whole year, they'll learn it." At the
same time, they're also learning an important part of their culture:
How to say pinagigi, or thank you.
Beyond teaching the traditional ways, the program is creating its own
books -- so far there is a counting book, a vocabulary book, a coloring
book for small children and a book of slang for teen-agers. Funmaker
said the program, which is funded by about $500,000 from the tribe's
casino proceeds, hopes to stay one step ahead of the current crop of
preschoolers. By the time they are in kindergarten, he said, the program
wants to teach them entirely in Winnebago.
The dream is to have a tribal school system that spans preschool through
community college. The computer programs on the usge are a first step
toward that goal.
Sheila Shigley, who has a master's degree in linguistics from UW-Madison,
is writing interactive computer programs that grab the imagination of
youngsters. The first one, about the little boy, uses artwork designed
by artist and tribal member Chloris Lowe Sr., of New Lisbon.
Shigley said the computer programs work much like the songs.
"The idea is to bombard them with more language than they're expected
to learn," she said, because the children "learn what's in the background --
the way they do when they're learning language -- as well as what's spoken
directly to them."
And, because they're fun computer games and stories, Shigley said the
children will "learn from playing them over and over again,"
The program is innovative enough that the Smithsonian Institution has
invited Funmaker and Shigley to New York in November to demonstrate it at
a celebration marking the opening of the National Museum of the American
Indian.
By then, maybe, the Winnebago speakers will have a better word for the
usge. After all, Winnebago -- known to native speakers as Ho Chunk, meaning
native tongue -- is the language we still speak when we talk about Wisconsin
communities from Wonewoc to Wausau and from Nekoosa to Neenah, all of which
are anglocized versions of Winnebago names. And it is a language that is
modern enough to describe airplanes (wact'a), lesbians (hinukikanak) and
taxi drivers (waikanakhirawahas).
Funmaker said renaming the usge is only a matter of time.
"We'll have to coin a term for it," he said. "Language is alive and
it has to change with the times. But temporarily, it's the usge."