Teaching Oregon Native Languages

Conclusion

147 Conclusion NowisthetimetoassistOregonNativesinrevitalizingtheirlanguages. Since beginning work on this book, we have lost more elders who had helped keep the languages alive. There are tribal members all over the state who have devoted much of their time and energy to breathing life back into Oregon Native languages, but they need the support of the wider community. School administrators and teachers must learn what it means to revitalize a language and they should provide stepping stones, rather than road blocks. Tribal councils need to understand the importance that language revitalization holds for many of their members. Language renewal and self-respect often go hand in hand. Universities should publicize the fact that Native language study fulfills the requirement to study another language as much as any of the standard European languages that are commonly taught. In addition, universities should institute programs that will help train the next generation of Native language teachers. A steady source of funding for Native language programs would be very useful, but financial resources are actually less important than human resources. At the center lie the people whom we interviewed for this project, people who spend their energy healing the ties of broken linguistic transmission. Their job can be made easier if Oregonians of all cultures express our support for the revitalization of Oregon’s first languages. In so doing we show our respect for the various cultures who cared for this land for countless generations. Natives and immigrants alike should be aware of the colonial history of genocide and oppression that has influenced conditions today. The Native population of the state was decimated by new diseases.The survivors were deprived of their land and forced together on reservations. Christian missionaries and the U.S. government attempted to wipe out Native cultures by denigrating Indian ways while implementing a dominant foreign culture. In the process, Indian people were marginalized and discriminated against. Their languages were thought to tie them too closely to their earlier way of life and so the very way they spoke was targeted for destruction. Through the separation of children from their parents and grandparents, cultural transmission was disrupted and many of their stories were no longer told. The way that we think about language has a tremendous influence on which and how many languages we learn. Elders still living today can attest to the multilingual Native past. Over time, this 148 Conclusion multilingualism morphed into English monolingualism, helped along by a variety of policies and other political moves. Since 1990, policies that support the teaching of Native languages have been passed, but not without resistance from a growing movement to support English as the official language of the country. We would never argue against the necessity of knowing English in this country, but English hardly needs legislative support. What we have seen is that legislative support of English usually means the withdrawal of support from all other languages that actually need it. This manner of thinking views languages as competing with each other, rather than supporting each other and contributing to expanded mental capacity and cross-cultural understanding. We need to honor those individuals and families who continued speaking their languages and generously shared them with researchers in the past and with students today. Scientific interest in Native languages and cultures produced a written record, but researchers did not focus on the perpetuation of these languages and cultures, only their documentation. These documents must be read within the context of their collection, that of salvage linguistics. Many tribal language activists today find this documentation to be useful, others feel marginalized by the arcane scientific vocabulary that further distances them from the language of their ancestors. Tribal language programs have been working hard to record elders and create documentation for future generations, but the task of archiving these materials for easy access overwhelms many. An answer may lie in the digitalization of records. This holds promise for a more equal dissemination of material that for generations has been tucked away in archives far from where the data were collected and far from the people who have a personal interest in using these languages. Very young children do not have to be taught a language; they simply learn what they hear spoken regularly around them. This is why pre-school immersion has been so successful in languagerevitalization programs around the world. Children’s linguistic apprenticeship cannot stop, however, when they enter public school. As easily as languages are learned at that young age, they can be...