Post by blackcrowheart on Jan 15, 2008 11:47:47 GMT -5
Tribe's matriarchs speak to nation's past
By Emma Graves Fitzsimmons, Chicago Tribune
ONEIDA, Wis. | She remembers speaking Oneida as a child, in the days when
she could still use it to converse in living rooms and corner stores across the
reservation. Almost a century later, Maria Hinton is running out of people
to talk to.
"There is nobody to speak with," the 97-year-old great-grandmother says in
exasperation. "I'm just walking around my house speaking to myself."
Unique for its whispered syllables, Oneida uses only 15 letters and three
symbols to convey a daily life deeply rooted in nature. The words often evoke a
moving image, relying on the senses to illustrate a moment. The word for
bear clan, "oskle7wake," describes the glistening powder color of the animal's
face.
Hinton is one of three elders left who speak this vivid tongue, surviving
matriarchs from the last generation to communicate in Oneida. Most members of
the Wisconsin tribe today know basic vocabulary but can't use it in
conversations.
"There is still an ember left that's burning," said Leander Danforth, the
only fluent speaker under the age of 85. "We can get that ember burning and get
a fire started, or that ember could go out."
In a final push to revive their language, the Oneida people are using a
federal grant to put digital recordings of the elders online and giving eight
people the full-time job of learning to speak the language.
The crisis for the Oneida, whose reservation is a few miles west of Green
Bay, is a Midwestern example of a global struggle. Experts estimate one
language dies every two weeks. At that rate, nearly half the world's 7,000 languages
would disappear in the next century as local dialects are replaced by the
dominant languages of globalization. Along with the language, linguists fear
losing each culture's history and traditions.
The Oneida, farmers who were driven in the 1820s from sophisticated villages
in upstate New York, have long relied on the complex language to convey the
tribe's tumultuous history.
At first blush, the spoken language has a coarse sound as its long word
chains unfold. Then the choppy rhythm becomes soothing under the heavy weight of
each word, which stores a chapter in the great oral tradition of the Oneida.
Each word tells a story. Even nouns act as verbs to evoke a living,
breathing image, said Randy Cornelius, the man responsible for putting the recordings
of the elders online.
Take the word "lotikwaho" for the wolf clan, one of three Oneida family
lines.
"The language is descriptive," he said. "It's like a motion picture going
on. You see the wolf baying at the moon. What a speaker sees is the silhouette
of a wolf."
But during the first half of the 20th century, parents began to prevent
their children from learning the language because it was seen as an obstacle to
success. Many students attended faraway boarding schools that banned
indigenous speech.
These days, many of the 15,000 members of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin --
about a third of whom live on the reservation -- can say greetings and simple
words for foods and animals, but few can speak in sentences.
The language also is used by Oneida tribes in New York and Ontario, Canada,
but each dialect is subtly different. The vocabulary varies and so do
geographic influences since the groups parted ways. The number of speakers is
dwindling in those communities too.
At the end of last year, the Wisconsin tribe's language staff received a
coveted $100,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the
National Science Foundation, which have taken up the cause of documenting
endangered languages. The agencies have disbursed more than $10 million in the
last three years for dozens of projects from Montana and Louisiana to Africa and
Central America.
Several earnest attempts by the tribe since the 1970s to teach Oneida to
young people have failed to produce a fluent speaker besides Danforth, who says
he learned by speaking to elders.
With those opportunities evaporating, Oneida students are trying the next
best thing. In a secluded log cabin on a lake just off the reservation, eight
"language trainees" arrive each morning, coffee in hand, to listen to
recordings of the elders and to recite stories together.
"I wouldn't call it a burden, but it's a big responsibility for this group
to take on this task," said Curt Summers, the youngest of the students at 35.
One of the last remaining elders, 87-year-old Leona Smith, drops by the
language house when she's feeling up to it. On a recent afternoon, the students
flocked to listen to Smith tell stories between sips of tea. The words they
had struggled with all day flowed from her mouth easily as she talked about the
end of the hunting season.
Summers waited patiently for a few moments alone with the elder to ask if
she ever saw a white buffalo -- an excuse to practice with the walking, talking
dictionary.
It's now or never for these questions. A decade ago, more than a dozen
speakers were left, but the elders have died in quick succession, including a
funeral last fall.
"As I get up in there in age, I don't have much time left to teach," Smith
said. "I tell them, 'It's up to you to save the language."'
Unlike her three sisters, Smith never left the reservation and thus never
lost the language she learned at home. As the number of speakers has declined,
she and Hinton find each other at social events to speak in Oneida, forming
their own world among the crowd.
Although the women are now honored as "national treasures," they've had
their share of struggles. Smith supported her family by working in a factory
until she was 73. Hinton once waited tables at a Polish restaurant in Chicago and
returned to the reservation to teach at the tribal school until she was 91.
The pair are wisdom dispensers and mothers at the helm of large families
spanning the country. In private, the women express heavy regret that their
children don't speak Oneida.
"It was considered backward, like you weren't on the path to success in the
white man's world," said Smith's son, Peter, 58. "But then it became a good
thing, a source of pride."
As Smith and Hinton dedicate their remaining years to preserving the
language, they've found the project also keeps them from getting lonely.
"It gives me a good feeling, coming here and leaving the house ... instead
of just staying home in my rocking chair," Leona Smith said.
Over the last two years, the language staff has recorded more than 20 hours
of Smith talking about whatever is on her mind -- the tapes include
monologues on the Green Bay Packers, childhood memories and the weather. The goal is
to capture conversational elements of the language that only the native
speakers can reveal.
"She's almost totally deaf, so we've tried all different kinds of
microphones and headsets," said Inez Thomas, a 52-year-old language trainee who works
with the elders. "Once she starts that free-flowing conversation, I can't keep
up with her."
A few miles away from the language house, Maria Hinton is seated behind a
giant dictionary at her kitchen table wearing a headset and a microphone.
She published the definitive, 664-page Oneida dictionary in 1996 with her
brother, who has since died, but her work isn't done yet. She's almost halfway
through recording the pronunciation of each word, making a talking dictionary
for the future Oneida language Web site.
The Web site will preserve the language for students like Thomas, who said
she was motivated to learn the language by memories of staying awake past her
bedtime to hear her mother speaking Oneida.
"I'd stay up listening to my mother and her friends laughing and just
slapping their legs," she said. "They had so much fun with the language."
The third surviving elder had been visiting the language house weekly to do
similar recordings until she suffered a massive stroke last August. The
94-year-old woman has since moved into a nursing home, and she is partly
paralyzed.
Thomas has visited her there to continue their sessions, but her declining
health has made the work more difficult.
"I hope we can continue on, but we don't know from day to day," Thomas said.
"I'll take whatever I can get. Any of the language we can save -- just a
phrase or two. Every word is precious."
By Emma Graves Fitzsimmons, Chicago Tribune
ONEIDA, Wis. | She remembers speaking Oneida as a child, in the days when
she could still use it to converse in living rooms and corner stores across the
reservation. Almost a century later, Maria Hinton is running out of people
to talk to.
"There is nobody to speak with," the 97-year-old great-grandmother says in
exasperation. "I'm just walking around my house speaking to myself."
Unique for its whispered syllables, Oneida uses only 15 letters and three
symbols to convey a daily life deeply rooted in nature. The words often evoke a
moving image, relying on the senses to illustrate a moment. The word for
bear clan, "oskle7wake," describes the glistening powder color of the animal's
face.
Hinton is one of three elders left who speak this vivid tongue, surviving
matriarchs from the last generation to communicate in Oneida. Most members of
the Wisconsin tribe today know basic vocabulary but can't use it in
conversations.
"There is still an ember left that's burning," said Leander Danforth, the
only fluent speaker under the age of 85. "We can get that ember burning and get
a fire started, or that ember could go out."
In a final push to revive their language, the Oneida people are using a
federal grant to put digital recordings of the elders online and giving eight
people the full-time job of learning to speak the language.
The crisis for the Oneida, whose reservation is a few miles west of Green
Bay, is a Midwestern example of a global struggle. Experts estimate one
language dies every two weeks. At that rate, nearly half the world's 7,000 languages
would disappear in the next century as local dialects are replaced by the
dominant languages of globalization. Along with the language, linguists fear
losing each culture's history and traditions.
The Oneida, farmers who were driven in the 1820s from sophisticated villages
in upstate New York, have long relied on the complex language to convey the
tribe's tumultuous history.
At first blush, the spoken language has a coarse sound as its long word
chains unfold. Then the choppy rhythm becomes soothing under the heavy weight of
each word, which stores a chapter in the great oral tradition of the Oneida.
Each word tells a story. Even nouns act as verbs to evoke a living,
breathing image, said Randy Cornelius, the man responsible for putting the recordings
of the elders online.
Take the word "lotikwaho" for the wolf clan, one of three Oneida family
lines.
"The language is descriptive," he said. "It's like a motion picture going
on. You see the wolf baying at the moon. What a speaker sees is the silhouette
of a wolf."
But during the first half of the 20th century, parents began to prevent
their children from learning the language because it was seen as an obstacle to
success. Many students attended faraway boarding schools that banned
indigenous speech.
These days, many of the 15,000 members of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin --
about a third of whom live on the reservation -- can say greetings and simple
words for foods and animals, but few can speak in sentences.
The language also is used by Oneida tribes in New York and Ontario, Canada,
but each dialect is subtly different. The vocabulary varies and so do
geographic influences since the groups parted ways. The number of speakers is
dwindling in those communities too.
At the end of last year, the Wisconsin tribe's language staff received a
coveted $100,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the
National Science Foundation, which have taken up the cause of documenting
endangered languages. The agencies have disbursed more than $10 million in the
last three years for dozens of projects from Montana and Louisiana to Africa and
Central America.
Several earnest attempts by the tribe since the 1970s to teach Oneida to
young people have failed to produce a fluent speaker besides Danforth, who says
he learned by speaking to elders.
With those opportunities evaporating, Oneida students are trying the next
best thing. In a secluded log cabin on a lake just off the reservation, eight
"language trainees" arrive each morning, coffee in hand, to listen to
recordings of the elders and to recite stories together.
"I wouldn't call it a burden, but it's a big responsibility for this group
to take on this task," said Curt Summers, the youngest of the students at 35.
One of the last remaining elders, 87-year-old Leona Smith, drops by the
language house when she's feeling up to it. On a recent afternoon, the students
flocked to listen to Smith tell stories between sips of tea. The words they
had struggled with all day flowed from her mouth easily as she talked about the
end of the hunting season.
Summers waited patiently for a few moments alone with the elder to ask if
she ever saw a white buffalo -- an excuse to practice with the walking, talking
dictionary.
It's now or never for these questions. A decade ago, more than a dozen
speakers were left, but the elders have died in quick succession, including a
funeral last fall.
"As I get up in there in age, I don't have much time left to teach," Smith
said. "I tell them, 'It's up to you to save the language."'
Unlike her three sisters, Smith never left the reservation and thus never
lost the language she learned at home. As the number of speakers has declined,
she and Hinton find each other at social events to speak in Oneida, forming
their own world among the crowd.
Although the women are now honored as "national treasures," they've had
their share of struggles. Smith supported her family by working in a factory
until she was 73. Hinton once waited tables at a Polish restaurant in Chicago and
returned to the reservation to teach at the tribal school until she was 91.
The pair are wisdom dispensers and mothers at the helm of large families
spanning the country. In private, the women express heavy regret that their
children don't speak Oneida.
"It was considered backward, like you weren't on the path to success in the
white man's world," said Smith's son, Peter, 58. "But then it became a good
thing, a source of pride."
As Smith and Hinton dedicate their remaining years to preserving the
language, they've found the project also keeps them from getting lonely.
"It gives me a good feeling, coming here and leaving the house ... instead
of just staying home in my rocking chair," Leona Smith said.
Over the last two years, the language staff has recorded more than 20 hours
of Smith talking about whatever is on her mind -- the tapes include
monologues on the Green Bay Packers, childhood memories and the weather. The goal is
to capture conversational elements of the language that only the native
speakers can reveal.
"She's almost totally deaf, so we've tried all different kinds of
microphones and headsets," said Inez Thomas, a 52-year-old language trainee who works
with the elders. "Once she starts that free-flowing conversation, I can't keep
up with her."
A few miles away from the language house, Maria Hinton is seated behind a
giant dictionary at her kitchen table wearing a headset and a microphone.
She published the definitive, 664-page Oneida dictionary in 1996 with her
brother, who has since died, but her work isn't done yet. She's almost halfway
through recording the pronunciation of each word, making a talking dictionary
for the future Oneida language Web site.
The Web site will preserve the language for students like Thomas, who said
she was motivated to learn the language by memories of staying awake past her
bedtime to hear her mother speaking Oneida.
"I'd stay up listening to my mother and her friends laughing and just
slapping their legs," she said. "They had so much fun with the language."
The third surviving elder had been visiting the language house weekly to do
similar recordings until she suffered a massive stroke last August. The
94-year-old woman has since moved into a nursing home, and she is partly
paralyzed.
Thomas has visited her there to continue their sessions, but her declining
health has made the work more difficult.
"I hope we can continue on, but we don't know from day to day," Thomas said.
"I'll take whatever I can get. Any of the language we can save -- just a
phrase or two. Every word is precious."