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The Electronic Drum: Community Radio’s Role in Reversing Indigenous Language Decline | Cultural Survival

Today is International Mother Language Day. I thought I would share this excerpt and link to a story in the latest issue of the Cultural Survival Quarterly as a way to celebrate work being done to help Indigenous peoples stay connected with their Mother Tongues.

Daniel Gomez is a farmer and carpenter who lives in Palín, Escuintla, a Poqomam Maya town in Guatemala and a virtual island in the sea of Spanish-speaking cities and towns that comprise the Guatemala City metro area. Gomez and his wife raised their children to be bilingual speakers of Poqomam and Spanish. They worked hard to ensure that their children (including Cultural Survival staff member Cesar Gomez) all received a university education, while at the same time remaining deeply rooted in Poqomam culture.

Gomez was concerned that the Poqomam language and traditions were slipping away, subsumed by the waves of Spanish language and culture that washed over the people in the form of radio and television from nearby Guatemala City, coupled with the schools’ monolingual Spanish education system. In an attempt to stem the tide, Gomez, together with other citizens of Palín, established two community-based

institutions: a bilingual school that gave equal weight to Poqomam and Spanish, and a radio station that did the same. The idea was simple: students would become bilingual in the classroom, and their bilingualism would be reinforced on the local airwaves. The success of Gomez’s story is one of many inspiring examples of a grassroots effort to reverse the trend of an Indigenous community’s language loss.

 

Read the whole article at www.culturalsurvival.org

Daniel Alarcon: Storytelling Across the Fluid Cultural Borders of the Americas - COLORLINES

Great story about Daniel Alarcón. The 35 year-old Peruvian-born novelist based in Oakland, California has a new project: “Radio Ambulante,” a Spanish-language podcast offering human interest stories from around Latin America and the United States. The article highlights the importance of radio in areas without high-speed Internet access, as well as the difficulties of representation for the Latino community for whom the radio is a popular communications medium:

“Political boundaries are real, but cultural boundaries are a lot more fluid,” Alarcón told the audience, before adding that with an estimated 55 million Latinos living in the United States, “the U.S. is also a Latin American country.”

In an American landcape in which, at best, Latinos are often described as a homogenous block of people with the mysterious power to sway political elections, Radio Ambulante offers something entirely different. It’s a show made by and for a diverse Spanish-speaking audience, one in which the varying experiences of millions of people are taken as obvious, not an epiphany.

Alarcón got the idea for the show after the BBC sent him on assignment to do his first radio story in Perú back in 2008. In recounting the experience at Mother Jones, he remembered it as “beautiful,” a welcome change of pace to the months he’d spent touring for his award winning novel “Lost City Radio.”

“We did interviews in English and in Spanish, and a lot of the Spanish tape wasn’t used in the end,” Alarcón told Mother Jones. “I had the sense of, ‘Well, wait. What about those other voices?’ I think that’s when I first had the idea of creating a space for this kind of narrative nonfiction radio in Spanish, so we wouldn’t lose these voices.”

via colorlines.com

Related articles

Radio Ambulante: The new Spanish show that is overhauling Latin-American radio

Lakota: The Revitalization of Language and the Persistence of Spirit

Great article by Jason Coppola at Truthout today about Lakota language revitalization...lots of links in the article to websites featured in this blog on other occasions...

New programs to teach and restore the lost language and cultural heritage of the Lakota Sioux offers hope for the children who live on reservations where dire poverty, suicide, unemployment and substance abuse have become a way of life.

For more than a century the Lakota language endured a deliberate and systematic attempt to eradicate it.

As a tool of colonization, the killing of language was a means of severing indigenous people's ties to their culture, history and spirituality.

Read the full article at truth-out.org

Language Gathering website will profile and connect Indigenous language revitalization efforts underway globally

Cultural Survival launched its new Language Gathering website today. A project of Cultural Survival's endangered languages program, the site is not only a tribute to Indigenous languages, but a platform connecting surviving Indigenous language communities of North America and the many hundreds of community-based language projects they’ve inspired. The project hopes to expand this permanent resource over time to profile and connect the recovery and revitalization of Indigenous languages that are now underway around the world.

Check out this trailer for KîMÂCHIPENA: Let's Come Together, about the Sauk people and their efforts to save their language....

 

 

See also:

Cultural Survival's Our Mother Tongues website.

February 21 Is International Mother Language Day!

February 21, 2012 is International Mother Language Day, or Mother Tongue Day, first observed by the international community in 2000 expressly to promote linguistic diversity and multilingualism—this year’s theme is “Mother tongue instruction and inclusive education.” 

Cultural Survival has put together a list of five things you can do to celebrate Mother Languages around the world.

For example, I just signed a petition on behalf of Miranda Washinawatok, a 7^th grade student from the Menominee Nation in Wisconsin who was punished by teachers and coaches at her parochial school for “attitude problems” after teaching fellow Menominee students how to say “hello “ and “I love you” in the Menominee language, an endangered tongue spoken in North America for thousands of years.

Check out Our Mother Tongues for videos, and send an e-postcard to your Tweeps or Facebook friends!

We Still Live Here - Ās Nutayuneān airs tomorrow on PBS

Premieres tomorrow, November 17, 2011 on PBS series, Independent Lens. Check local listings.

In this clip, Jessie Little Doe describes her initial resistance to working with a white linguist:

 

 

Check out more great clips at the Independent Lens YouTube channel.

Coming to PBS on Nov. 17th: We Still Live Here - Ās Nutayuneān

Great film coming this week on the PBS series, Independent Lens:

Cultural Survival's Endangered Languages Program invites you to explore American Indian language revitalization efforts nationwide in preparation for the November 17 national broadcast of the triumphant story of the reawakening and return home of the Wampanoag language. We Still Live Here - Ās Nutayuneān, starring the Wōpanāak Language Reclamation Project, airing nationally on PBS's Independent Lens series, will introduce viewers to the descendants of the tribal communities who first met the English Pilgrims nearly four centuries ago in what would become New England.

Here's a great clip from We Still Live Here - Ās Nutayuneān:

 

I spent more than an hour the first time at the interactive website constructed around this project, Our Mother Tongues...highly recommended!

Related Links:

Independent Lens series

Local Listings for We Still Live Here - Ās Nutayuneān

ITVS page for the film

 

Ariel Dorfman: Words from the other side of death

Back in October I found an amazing article -- Salvador Allende Has Words for Barack Obama from the Other Side of Death -- by Ariel Dorfman, the Chilean American novelist, playwright, essayist, journalist and human rights activist. Dorfman begins his article like this:

For the last decade, I have been haunted by voices from the other side of death. In this way, back in 2003 I transcribed the words of Pablo Picasso after a tapestry version of his famed painting Guernica at the entrance to the Security Council was covered over at the U.N. just before then-Secretary of State Colin Powell was to present the Bush administration case justifying an invasion of Iraq.  From the depths of ancient Mesopotamia, I transcribed the words of Hammurabi, the exalted prince of Babylon, as he reviled Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld for laying waste to his ancient land. And in that same year I found that Christopher Columbus, too, had words for the new warriors/conquerors of the twenty-first century, while the poets William Blake and Franceso Petrarca asked Laura Bush how she could sleep with the man responsible for so many deaths.

Before finding this article, I was not aware of Dorfman or his work. As I read on, I found his way of bringing history forward to shed light on repeating patterns in the present to be very moving and thought provoking.

Exploring some of the links to other articles Dorfman has written brought me to one that speaks directly to the theme of this blog. In a 2003 article at Tom Dispatch, Tom Engelhardt has a great article -- Christopher Columbus, and Capt. John Whyte meet in Iraq -- on history, wars and loss of culture.

He includes instructive words from the past spoken through Dorfman in his article Christopher Columbus has words from the other side of death for Captain John Whyte, who rebaptized Saddam International Airport as his troops rolled into it. Here are the first few lines:

I know something about names, Captain.

Those who conquer must always have a name ready.
Even before the sword, before the gun.

I saw the island and called it San Salvador.
San Salvador because we had been saved.

I did not ask the natives
they were friendly, they were almost naked, they were brown
under the tropical sun
I did not ask them what they called that place themselves
I did not ask them what they called their home

Later, Columbus speaks to Whyte of the penance for actions that severed people from their mother tongues:

all the words you did not think to use
Captain John Whyte
all the names you did not know
not even your own
white barakah
barakah related to barak blessing

you will have to learn
pronounce as I have had to pronounce
word for word

the arabic you did not care to know
like the Nahuatl I never knew
like the Cherokee I never knew

you will have to learn

starting with the hundred words
that pour forth from Allah

Both articles are worth reading in their entirety. You can explore more of Dorfman's work at his website.

 

Boarding School Issues Tackled at May 2011 Conference

I have some unposted links that I will add as I change the face of this blog a little. Here's an excerpt and link to an article on the Boarding School Healing Symposium hosted by the American Indian Law Clinic at the University of Colorado Law School in May of 2011:

Deeper reconciliation may come from language and cultural restoration, some conference participants said, among them Levina Wilkens, of the Yakama Nation Elder & Language Program, who spoke at length in her Native language to illustrate the alienation children felt who were not allowed to speak their language and who were among strangers.

She said many people don’t know their own tribal history and “you have to go on the Internet to find out who your ancestors are,” urging people to know their land and its history, because “they took our identity.”

via indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com

Navajo Nation - Blackfire: Journey of Action (video)

Here is a sample of some more awesome voices -- Navajo Nation, Blackfire: Journey of Action -- speaking out to protect their sacred lands: