By DOMINIKA MASLIKOWSKI, The Daily News

In a small modular home surrounded by a dirt parking lot, Joe Scerato works to preserve an endangered language spoken for centuries by the Mojave Indians. His crowded office at Aha Macav Cultural Preservation is filled with pottery wheels, beads and fabric used to sew ribbon dresses. Currently, he’s the department’s director and its sole Mojave language instructor.

When he was growing up, Scerato’s foster parents spoke Mojave exclusively in their home. It was all he heard on the reservation - the language was a part of the tribe’s culture, something that preserved their identity and made them unique.

But now - over the course of Scerato’s lifetime - Mojave has gone from a familiar sound that was often heard to a dying language spoken mostly by a few tribal elders. It’s rarely taught to children. And as the years pass and more elders die off, the language risks being wiped out completely.

“Now you can go to a person’s house and you don’t even hear one word, unless it’s an elder,” Scerato said. “Things became more accessible and there’s people moving away and coming back (who) are not being a part of the language.”

Scerato estimates up to 60 members of the Fort Mojave Indian Tribe understand Mojave fluently and about 20 percent of the Tribe speak it at some level, but the fluent speakers don’t always practice the language and sometimes reply in English when they’re addressed in Mojave.

“I would hope that some of the older people that understand it would start speaking it because a lot of those people are grandparents,” Scerato said. “We’re getting further and further away from the language itself.”

The cultural preservation department offers three classes a day in basic Mojave for children age 5-16 during its summer program. But although language classes have been offered for the past five years, there are fewer available now than before. Since instructor Betty Barrackman’s recent death there are no more evening classes and classroom space in the modular home is limited.

In his language classes for children, Scerato has students working out of coloring books with the Mojave word and its English translation written below pictures of foods or animals. He listens to their pronunciation and, once the students learn enough words, he uses their vocabulary to build sentences. They take the copied booklets home to practice.

“We try to help them with some of the history of the tribe so when they go somewhere they have a knowledge of their culture and the reservation so they know who they are,” he said. “It’s our identity.”

He says younger children grasp the language much faster, while teens or adults are often embarrassed when they can’t say a word. The biggest challenge is the rolling Spanish R sound that’s hard to pronounce for someone who hasn’t taken Spanish in school or grown up speaking Mojave.

Because the language is passed down orally and has no alphabet, Mojave words are written phonetically using the English alphabet. Some words for items the Mojave people didn’t have, like apples, are based on how elders pronounced the English word (appuleh), while others, like orange, are named after how the fruit sounds when it’s eaten (scho ‘cow.)

It’s not known how old the language is or how many words it contains, Scerato said, because it once had three different dialects when the Mojave Indians lived scattered along the Colorado River in the 1920s and ’30s. The dialects merged when the Mojave people began living in one concentrated area on the reservation. Now, Scerato says he can go to Peach Springs, Yuma or different rancheros in California, and the dialects are similar enough to Mojave for him to understand.

A linguist once developed a dictionary of the language in the 1990s, but Scerato said the book is questionable because some dialects have different versions of the same word. But the dictionary does have merits, Scerato said, because it lists words for things like wood chips or insect types that were common in older times but have passed out of modern vocabulary. It’s reading the forgotten words of his ancestors that gives Scerato a sense of the past and connection with history.

“You get almost a feel of what it was like,” he said.

Preserving the language hasn’t been easy for the tribe. Other tribes like the Hualapais, who live north of Kingman near the Grand Canyon National Park, have preserved their language because they’ve had the advantage of being isolated. There are no nearby towns and there’s little need for interaction with those outside the tribe. But the Mojave Indians live near Bullhead City, Laughlin and in Needles. Scerato said their daily needs don’t center around tribal lands and the language is slowly disappearing.

“It’s like we’re losing a part of our history and our tradition,” he said. “Once you lose the language, you’re assimilated into the general population. You don’t have uniqueness anymore and you’re speaking English or Spanish like everybody else.”

Yet Scerato remains hopeful. He’s encouraged by compliments he’s received from parents who send their children to his language classes. One said their child carries his coloring book with Mojave words everywhere and practices them all the time.

“(Parents) are glad their kids are coming,” he said. “They wish they had those classes growing up because their parents didn’t speak Mojave in their home.”

KEEPING LANGUAGES ALIVE

Scerato isn’t alone in his efforts to preserve an American Indian language - he’s joined by grass-roots organizations, university departments and language institutes who also fight to keep indigenous languages alive and protect cultural identity.

The Yuman Language Family Summit is an annual gathering that brings representatives together from Colorado River Indian Tribes to discuss ways of preserving their languages. There are discussions on programs that pair Mojave children with tribal teachers and ways to create an environment for language immersion.

“We have to have the language used every day and spoken so people can pick it up,” said Lucille Watahomigie, summit participant and director of education for the Hualapai Tribe. “It doesn’t have to be taught. It can be acquired just by being in the environment where the language is used.”

At the University of Arizona, the American Indian Language Development Institute works to train language teachers on how to use immersion and modern technology to encourage younger people to learn their language. This year, the institute hopes to focus on grant-writing for indigenous populations and skills in documenting languages for preservation.

The university and the Colorado River Indian Tribe have a collaborative grant to document both Mojave and Chemehuevi, both considered extremely endangered, and to train tribal members in linguistics, data collection and archiving.

Susan Penfield, the principal investigator on the grant, says dying American Indian languages are part of a larger world language crisis where by best estimates the planet loses one language every two weeks.

And when a language is lost, she said, so are the warehouses of knowledge that are carried in its expressions, words and phrases.

Linguists estimate there were once between 750 to 1,000 indigenous languages spoken in what’s now the United States, says Philip Klasky, professor of American Indian Studies at San Francisco State University. Today, about 50 of those languages remain and 80 percent are no longer taught.

“We all, as human beings, interpret the world around us through language and each language does this in a unique way. Losing even one language does not just impact the speakers of that language but hurts all of us and destroys - particularly in the case of native languages where there is no written record - huge volumes of knowledge and systems of cognition,” Penfield said. “Imagine how much information is included in a set of encyclopedias and realize that every language holds at least 10 times that much knowledge.”

Klasky said Native American languages are a rich library of information on stewardship of the environment, animals and the medicinal purposes of plants. They’re also carriers of a tribe’s identity that hold untranslatable concepts and words with no equivalents in the English language.

“When you lose a language you lose all this incredible knowledge,” Klasky said. “Who knows how many medicines exist in these languages that we may lose?”

Klasky has been working with the Mojave Indians for the past 17 years and continues to aid the tribe in preserving their sacred songs, which he says are essential in passing down language.

As director of the Storyscape Project, Klasky aims to protect ancestral lands and preserve and revitalize endangered stories and songs.

In 2000, Klasky helped Llewellyn and Betty Barrackman, late elders of the Fort Mojave Indian Tribe, to transfer reel-to-reel tapes made in the 1970s to digital format. Now the stories, songs and languages of the tribe are preserved in University of California archives at Berkeley and Davis.

A year later Klasky recorded Llewellyn Barrackman as he translated Mojave creation songs into English.

The creation songs - a 525-song cycle - include practical maps used by the Mojaves to cross the desert, stories of the death of God Mutavilya and journeys of legendary figures. In the recordings, Barrackman first describes the song in Mojave, sings it in proto-Mojave (a language older than the spoken version) and then it is translated into English.

“You can make that comparison, you can see the roots of words and understand the words being spoken,” Klasky said. “For many indigenous languages, where there are fewer and fewer speakers left, these tapes are invaluable.”

THE NEXT GENERATION

Watahomigie says out of 2,000 Hualapai tribal members, about 60 percent understand the Hualapai language and 30 percent speak it fluently. But younger members hardly speak it anymore, and they’re the ones Watahomigie targets to keep the language alive.

The Hualapais, along with two other tribes who speak similar languages, recently offered a five-day language camp in the Hualapai mountains attended by nearly 80 children from beginners to fluent speakers.

There was no English spoken - or at least as little as possible - in an attempt to immerse the students in the language and get them to pick it up through listening to their elders and teachers.

“The language is a gift that was given to us. We feel that when you have a gift you don’t disrespect it and leave it laying around. You take care of it,” Watahomigie said. “A lot of our youth who don’t have their culture are lost. They don’t know who they are, they don’t know their past or their history or their lineage. We feel the most important aspect of a person is their identity because when they have that they have the self-respect.”

The camp offers crafts in the afternoons and evening activities like pow wows and traditional dances. Tribal elders stay in cabins while children camp out in traditional tents.

There are daily language lessons before lunch and talking circles where each person says what they’re thankful for. In the mornings, the children are woken up before dawn and follow their elders along dirt trails to greet the sunrise from the mountain tops.

“(Our tribal council is) looking for healing, looking for ways to combat our drugs and alcoholism,” Watahomigie said. “This is one of the most important things that they want us to preserve - the language and culture.”

Tri-State Online // Mohave Daily News

Posted on July 28th, 2007 by admin
Filed under: Language