LOGOS

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:

 

Drop the I-Word: I Am Determined - COLORLINES

New project at Colorlines for the Drop the I-Word campaign: Immigrants in their own voices speak about impacts of the "i-word":

There is nothing more powerful than learning first hand about the personal experiences of immigrants who are affected by the i-word, or of non-immigrants bearing witness to the impact the racial slur has on our communities. So today we launch our “I Am” storytelling project, in which people from all walks of life relate experiences, demand respect and reject criminalizing language as a way for media and others to describe their neighbors, children, families and themselves. Dara Craven, the first to share her story, inspires us to all be determined to get rid of the i-word and the dehumanization and hate it generates.

via colorlines.com

Beyond Gladwell and maybe beyond activism as many of us know it...

Since January 25th I've been thinking that some link to the people's uprising in Egypt would be a perfect way to update this blog. I finally found one (via Twitter) in a post at The Awl by Maria Bustillos. Here's how she begins:

There was a lot wrong with Malcolm Gladwell's super-ballyhooed piece, "Small Change," in the New Yorker last October. In it, he suggested that the Civil Rights movement in the U.S. took place without Twitter or Facebook, because they hadn't been invented yet. Now that the same questions have come up again with respect to recent events in Egypt, Gladwell hopped right onto the New Yorker blog to complain some more about how not-important Twitter is.

I remember reading Gladwell's article last fall. While I appreciated his recounting of the lunch counter protest in Greensboro, North Carolina, in February of 1960 (not that far from where I was attending 8th grade in Chapel Hill), I did not resonate with his accounting of social networks in the context of social activism. And I totally missed most of the subsequent discussion around Gladwell's take on it.

Here's where Bustillos's reaction to Gladwell's reprise of his social network critique in relation to the Egyptian uprising really grabbed the heart of my attention:

It is really hard to believe that a famous communicator like Malcolm Gladwell wouldn't understand instinctively what it means to people simply to be heard. That goes double for people who are suffering in a just cause. It is strengthening to speak and be heard, and most strengthening of all to hear words of support in return, even (and maybe in this case, especially) from very far away.

This idea has come up for me as one of extreme importance on several fronts. It has a lot to do with why I started this blog.

In my practice of psychoanalysis and my volunteer work in grassroots social and environmental justice, I have become acutely aware that we humans can share our lived experience very precisely simply by speaking it. Such acts of speaking -- even if only to ourselves -- have power that is transformational, power that can heal. But if our suffering has arisen in relationship with another person, or a group or a nation in which we are marginalized and oppressed, I think we can only be whole again if we can speak our truth and know that someone has heard us...really heard us.

Just out of curiosity, I did a 2 Google searches using "Malcolm Gladwell on social networking" and "social networks and activism" to see what would come up. Clearly, I missed most of the discussion after Gladwell's "Small Change" article and his round 2 offering last week. Looking through the search results, it was interesting to see the variety of specific "slipping points" (or maybe "splitting points"?) over the role of social networks to global protest.

In my review of 50+ articles and many comments attached to them, I did find a few that seemed headed in a direction similar to that of Bustillos.

More than a year ago at the HuffPost blog Technology as Anthropology, Jose Anotonio Vargas wrote of the world's response to the Haiti earthquake:

The Web is flat. And in a world made smaller by the Internet and new technologies, we become each others' witnesses -- one text, one tweet, one Facebook status update, one YouTube video, one Wikipedia view and edit at a time.

In his post last December, Bearing Witness, One Tweet at a Time, Vargas comes back to this theme in sharing a link to an article on a homeless man who became an advocate for the homeless:

Take Eric Sheptock, a former crack addict and now homeless advocate who is the subject of a remarkable story in today's Washington Post, written by Nathan Rott. It's one of the most insightful and nuanced articles written about social media this year -- a must-read for anyone who questions the value of social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

And the great piece Vargas posted today -- Egypt, the Age of Disruption and the "Me" in Media:

In other words, it's not the tools, it's the people. But the key difference is, unlike the printing press, radio and television -- largely top-down mediums controlled by a relatively small group of people -- the Internet as a communications and organizing tool places the power squarely on the individual. The individual has a voice. The individual can be heard. The individual can fight back. Which altogether redefines our sense of community -- "I" easily grows to "we" online. You don't need to be an American to realize that Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, among others, are rebooting the first three words of the U.S. Constitution for our hyper-connected, borderless era, redefining the meaning of citizenship across the globe. Online, "We the people ..." takes on a whole new meaning.

Last Friday, Simon Mainwaring countered some of Gladwell's ideas in his post, Egypt, Malcolm Gladwell and Social Media as a Life or Death Proposition:

Despite Gladwell’s disinterest, the courage of protesters in China (over the suppression of the Nobel prize winner Lui Xiaobo), Yemen, Tunisia, Egypt and Jordan, to face violence and then share their story using social media is important because of the infinitely scalable connectivity it enables.

After briefly outlining how social media enables the empowerment of activists, Mainwaring says:

By offering these six levels of engagement, social media provides a complex and deep infrastructure perfect for the activist processes of social transformation—which include information acquisition, knowledge development, transfer and sharing; ideation and thought leadership; empathy and emotional connection; and the spread of credible ideas that inspire cognitive dissonance. These tools are accessible to everyone, available 24/7, infinitely scalable, real time and free.

The opportunities that blogs, interactive online media and social networks have given me to speak are pretty awesome, but opportunities to hear and to bear witness have been profound as well. I don't think Gladwell hears me, and I think his concept of activism is way too tight.

I found some other articles that challenge Gladwell's social network ideas, and speak to possibilities for something beyond activism as many of us know it. Here are the links:

What Gladwell Gets Wrong: The Real Problem is Scale Mismatch (Plus, Weak and Strong Ties are Complementary and Supportive) (Zeynep Tufekci)

It's not the public internet, it's the internet public (Dave Parry)

Social Networking in Iran: standing witness, one for another (Leonard Pitts, Jr)

Note to Malcolm Gladwell: Social Media Matters (Kirk Chayfitz)

Beyond Spiritual Activism: Creating a Just and Sustainable Movement for Change (Be Scofield)

Primero Hay Que Aprender Español. Ranhou Zai Xue Zhongwen. - NYTimes.com

This is really weird: just yesterday I came across some interesting Twitter pages that had tweets in Spanish, and I got a really strong inspiration to dig out all the old high school Spanish that's somewhere in a dusty brain file. I guess I was thinking it would be so awesome to be able to read and tweet back in Spanish, expanding my network to include folks who tweet in another language.

Today, I found this OpEd published a few days ago by Nicholas Kristoff at the NYT. He takes issue with the rush of Americans to learn Chinese and recommends Spanish first for several reasons:

Look, I’m a fervent believer in more American kids learning Chinese. But the language that will be essential for Americans and has far more day-to-day applications is Spanish. Every child in the United States should learn Spanish, beginning in elementary school; Chinese makes a terrific addition to Spanish, but not a substitute.

Spanish may not be as prestigious as Mandarin, but it’s an everyday presence in the United States — and will become even more so. Hispanics made up 16 percent of America’s population in 2009, but that is forecast to surge to 29 percent by 2050, according to estimates by the Pew Research Center.

As the United States increasingly integrates economically with Latin America, Spanish will become more crucial in our lives. More Americans will take vacations in Latin America, do business in Spanish, and eventually move south to retire in countries where the cost of living is far cheaper.

via www.nytimes.com

I found the article by chance when I looked the "most emailed" list while reading an article on the flurry of immigration laws in various states:

Legislative leaders in at least half a dozen states say they will propose bills similar to a controversial law to fight illegal immigration that was adopted by Arizona last spring, even though a federal court has suspended central provisions of that statute.

The efforts, led by Republicans, are part of a wave of state measures coming this year aimed at cracking down on illegal immigration.

I just posted a piece at Earthbytes that looks at such issues in relation to biodiversity and reflects on a great editorial in the Guardian on threats to biodiversity:

As we head into 2011, the question of why diversity matters is pretty much in our face

You’ve Got to Have (150) Friends - NYTimes.com

The critical component in social networking is the removal of time as a constraint. In the real world, according to research by myself and others, we devote 40 percent of our limited social time each week to the five most important people we know, who represent just 3 percent of our social world and a trivially small proportion of all the people alive today. Since the time invested in a relationship determines its quality, having more than five best friends is impossible when we interact face to face, one person at a time.

Instant messaging and social networking claim to solve that problem by allowing us to talk to as many people as we like, all at the same time. Like the proverbial lighthouse blinking on the horizon, our messages fan out into the dark night to every passing ship within reach of an Internet connection. We can broadcast, literally, to the world.

via www.nytimes.com