Main Street, Wyoming; 419; Shoshone Language

Main Street Wyoming is made possible in part by grants from Kennicott energy proud to be a part of Wyoming spirit you're in the uranium exploration mining and production industry and by the Wyoming Council for the Humanities and ridging lives of Wyoming people through their study of Wyoming history values and ideas. At schools on the Wind River Indian Reservation instructors of Shoshone in Arapahoe languages are attending to teach young people the words of their old people. If they succeed they will be reversing a trend that began with missionary and government schools near the turn of the century. When Indian students were punished for using their native tongues it's no easy task. English spread through the mass media of television and radio is swallowing up languages all over the world. What chance does a small culture in Wyoming have of keeping an ancient language alive in. Welcome to Main Street Wyoming.

It's been said that to learn another language is to acquire a second personality because a different way of saying things implies a different view of the world when it comes to Native American languages that's even more true. They don't share the same Indo-European roots that English and other European languages do. Today we're going to talk about the language of the Eastern Shoni a language that is virtually unknown to people outside the tribe. With me today. Our Lynnette theme hold a member of the Shoshone Tribe who works at Fort Washington school and writes for The Wind River news. Welcome that. Thank you. Also here is Audrey ward. She's a show any member of the Shoshone culture board and the sponsor of a word I know I can't pronounce. The beat you now you say it right leg Indian club at Fort Washington school. Welcome under. Thank you. Also here is roughly to stump a member of the Shoshone Tribe from Crow heart and chairman of the Shoshone language certification program. Welcome. Thank you very much. And and Slater a professor of anthropology at the University of

Wyoming. She's a linguist who's worked on undocumented languages around the world and is currently working on a shiny grammar under the under a grant from the National Park Service. Welcome to Main Street. Thank you. I want to start by asking about who today is making use of the Shoshone language word is being used within families government schools. Audrey I'd like to start with you on that question. Well all I know is that there are some a few fluent speakers left there's not very many of us left anymore. And if they're successful in this grooves they are using the Shawnee language. And we've been doing it at for the school since nineteen eighty eight and we have been doing it for about three years because of the change of. Administration. But we are doing it with song and dance using the Shawnee language. With our rabbit we are in a club and the language that I know is fluently used at our general meetings.

And it's good to know that there's not very many people that are speakers anymore. We have a handful that is about. There are over a dozen I think and there are some three or four generations that don't speak it at all. Where do the speakers presenters speakers of a language tend to be older people in the truck. Well yes I would say they would be like 70 year olds and 80 and then some 60 year olds and 40 and 50 but the children that were born in the 50s if they were fortunate to have a mother and father that's book has shown me fluently they were their speakers. But anyone after that they their languages the English language is their first language. Lynette you may be an example of that as a younger person. What do you find among your peers people who speak. She sure. Well as we well as Audrey said there's very few people who

are familiar with the language and who really don't understand it. Myself I grew up in a home where it was spoken. My father and my mother were both very fluent showing language speakers as well as my grandmother. And so. Growing up in that atmosphere I was exposed to it a lot until I got older and I left the RAZ And you know you know if you don't hear it every day then you kind of it kind of slips away. So it's unfortunate for myself that although I did have the exposure it wasn't there was no continuum. As I moved away from here it roughly did you find that's true in terms of the age breakdown that we tend to have older speakers. And then a few younger is there kind of an empty space in between I think there's a gap there. Yeah quite a wide gap in fact. It's like Lynette said you know that there's. Times when you do leave home and then you tend to forget a lot of that. Like a lot of boarding schools and things like that you meet so

many different tribal members you know from different tribes that you know our defeat in you know you just don't have anybody to talk your language or to mess around with you know. Let's talk a little bit about the language itself. And I think we're going to get into linguistics here in just a little bit. The roots of the Shoshone language what do we know about where it originated and how it developed. I can't tell you where it originated it's a new no Aztec and language and there are red and eastern Shoni really represent the western most reaches of that language groups the Shoney's in fact distantly related to Aztec and if you look at a map. Related languages are languages related to the Shoshone go down through the Great Basin in the and into the desert area of California and then further on down. So there are there are a fair

number of Udo Aztec and languages and a common misconception that people have they think well if they show anything Arapahoes are on the same reservation that somehow the languages must be the same and are similar and they're totally unlike each other. They're not related to one another. As far as anyone knows at all. So one day and Arapahoe is Algon can show me a single Aztec and you get some sharing though of language we tribes live in proximity and since tribes in general tend to socialize and intermix do get some exchange of words were a rapper who are a Cherokee word or some other word would show up at the wrong times a day. Yeah. Yeah. Out any time two language communities have interaction with each other there is the possibility for the words to be borrowed for there to be

interference from one to the other. I think that was was mainly true of the older generation because you know it was harder for them to talk to one another in the English language and since there wasn't very much of that spoken on the reservation and so the older people really learned one another's language. And we do have. I rather hope people that do so speak very fluently the Shoshone language and vice versa. Are there are there other languages that are active living languages. Maybe in the Southwest or maybe even further south that are closely related to surely you know other tribes we would visit where we would hear a language similar to surely yes. Give me an example where we had a hired gun and I shot back. You can see it's hard to know just how where the language sits now in terms of its decline and by decline I really mean

the lack of fluent speakers but could could I get a little history maybe you could start this off roughly to how the language how we lost flute speakers how it declined in that sense telling us fluent speakers and to show me how and how the language became less commonly used within the tribe. Well I think the schools at the very beginning government schools you know banned your Shoshone speakers from speaking your own language and then a lot of it was education you know and you had to go away to school to attend other schools and. Intermarriage is from the Indian into the white and into different tribes. Where there were times was there a period when older generations felt it was useful not to speak the language to younger simply as a way of helping

them to assimilate into an English speaking culture. I think it depended on the families what they thought at one time there was a trend. Who are some of our own people and didn't want to be known as Indians. And so therefore they banned their children and themselves from speaking Shaunie. Maybe you can give us a say an academic perspective but is there a sense in the field of linguistics of what it takes how long it takes to lose a language if it isn't being used that a language can be lost in a single generation but a more common scenario is for the people who are speakers of a language to use that. Their children then are exposed to a second language and the children are bilingual. Then in the third generation they they pass on the second language rather

than the native language. And this is happening now all around the world. I can think of a lot of examples for eggs from Africa and in three generations you can see what I'm thinking of is the language or about that that children who are whose grandparents are still alive are speaking English and not your body. This is this happening literally before as in other words when old people pass away as they do who are fluent speakers do it to literally lose some of the language in order. Yes and No. And I you know like myself when I get when I was growing up I only knew one language and that was just a show me. I never learned to speak English until I got into school in the government school. And then it was like living in two worlds because we had to speak English in school and show me at home

and. Well like Ruthy to said well you know we are losing our language and a lot of the older people are all gone. And so I guess it's up to our generation to try to really you know to restore that language as best we know how and. Rather the children that I work with they. They like me to write it for them in the way they understand it better. Than I can say it for them. So this is where I think that if we can work it out some way that we would be able to teach it in the schools. And there's one misunderstanding I think about our language is that they made a motion in general council at one time that would teach the Shoshone language in the schools to this has shown me

and and this has shown me speaking people be the teachers and that's when they develop the certification committee because they would be the people to say what she or he is a fluent speaker. And at one time in nineteen sixty or seventy we had a gentleman that came here that wanted to teach our children their language and the general council turned it down. And if they did not turn that down we probably would have had some more fluent speakers. And this was done by a man and it's him. And she has her thesaurus and it's been very useful. So I think you know in all phases we could revive it some way. Well let's talk a little bit about that because that that's an issue historically. How exactly the tribe wants to deal with its language. And there have been some general counsel. Motions to deal with this in different ways.

What are some of the ways that one goes about preserving a language I mean it hasn't been in the past. The desire of some tribal members to kind of keep the language secreted within the tribe and I understanding that correctly or incorrectly. Well at one time they didn't want anybody else to learn our language because they they said one remark that was made in the general council was that if we talk our language and that white man over there is going to know what we're talking about and we don't want that and we don't want to sell our languages what they said. And. So it went from there and on and. And then you know different people have different ideas about the language. And. Like the tribes you know I don't understand what you mean by that because you say the tribes as meant tribes seizure. And. Because I think individually we all have that go is to

kind of revive the language no matter how we apply it in schools or in the community. And the thing is that I found out is our biggest critics are the parents in the schools and we have to get permission from those parents first before we can do this. And their one remark always is. Why do they want to teach our children in this booth. They should teach them at home and we have some people that had two parents mother and father that both speeches show me they did not take the time to teach their children and now they're trying to revive the. Jewish only language you know that. That's one case within the schools where yes and within the community and when they should have been busy teaching their children this is surely language and I don't know. If it will ever be a success because it's been since Rupert weeks was a life he started all this and he's the one that

commode the certification committee because people who are you know using our language for foreign language course. And he said he wanted people to really truly identify that they are really fluent speakers so they established a certification Committee. And that's why mother was on that committee at one time and they had three rap a hose and teach a Shoney's on that committee. And there were only two certified people that wanted to teach that language. Can you tell me roughly a little bit about the certification committee as it exists today. Yes. We are a committee that was like Ah he said you know set up by the shiny business and general council and we take the time to take applications from fluent speakers that are in the process of teaching the children in schools

and they have to make an application to our community which is viewed and the person that is asking for this has to have an interview and if they pass with flying colors then we send their application on into Cheyenne. And then of course you know has to be accompanied by a letter from the school. As to who they're working for and what grades are teaching and all the criteria that they have to have. And what what is the grammar project that's ongoing. Well we're trying to develop baseline information about the structure of the language and that includes such things as the ordering of elements within a sentence. Shoney's and English are different in that regard. The internal structure of words

Shoni has what. It has a very complex morphology. They way words go to a unit smaller than words go together to form words. And in our work we've discovered that for example one of the things that's important in Shoni if you're moving something or doing an activity there's a lot more specificity of how you do it. If you do it with your hand you do it with your arms. There's It simply is organized differently from English. And we're trying to get some documentation of just how the structure of it works and we talk about words like morphology and we're dealing at one end of language study the other end is communicating this to young people and I think what I'd like to get a little of the flavor of now

Audrey would be the methods that you use to convey the language to children who may not be native speakers may not be fluent in that I had created my own middle. Like basic's numbers and colors and. Their bodies body and the family. Family tree. And we seem to have a lot of fun with that. And. Well in the first place they have to. Sort out who use their their. Numbers. Basics I forgot that word again but it was you know just constant continuously until they learned and then later on in the area they kind of. Put those words together. And then pretty soon they have a sentence. And right now we are doing a song and dance

with language and I find that this really really just captures as students because they love to sing and so they has eight of their own words in their music and. And dance to it and. And I think if this is what it takes that's what will be the technique for teaching differs and true from language to language but I would call it. Learning a foreign language they used to practice what they called immersion where you simply were bombarded with nothing but that language. You do them in the classroom you do it with children. Yes I do. Well the first thing we do like when to go in our classroom we take our vows we do our Bibles and then they repeat and play games with that. And then pretty soon they're studying their basic numbers and colors and so forth and so on. And. And then at some time during the class we

go into history. Where did the language come from and and what tribes. And groups and so forth you know and I said we have neighboring tribes that speak our language too and they said well sometimes they go over the mountain and they hear the people talk over there. They recognize a word and so I think you know I reach them that way some somehow even if I'm not may be the perfect route. The young ones the really young ones. Grammar school age kids with 18 to 8 Are you interested. Yes. And believe it or not is they are not Indians and are surely children. They care less. That originally meant. Where they they just don't seem to have the interest the whole as a non-church only person. And. I guess the reason is that you know rather the parents they they

they say that some of the teachers are not saying the word right. We're not doing it right that's not the right way to say it. So the child comes back and he's you know he feels bad because he says well I'm not saying it right. My grandfather or grandmother said it was not right. And the grandparents are the young grandparents now they're not the 70 year old grandparents they're like 40 and 50 year old men can't say this to their students. Let's get some more perspective on this one that maybe you could talk a little bit about. The interest level in the language. Well. From what I just said it's quite the contrary for myself and for the children that I've been exposed to. I have a 7 year old daughter and you know she from preschool age or actually from when she was very very little was spoken to and given directions and she's shown me and it wasn't something that she was discouraged from learning or knowing it was just part of everyday

life. So that's one thing that I think that people need to realize is that they need to be shown the interest in preserving that and that's where I'm coming from is you know I feel I'm in my 20s and there's not very many people. You know my 82 you can give a simple command to who will understand. Or if you're standing in you know in a public place and you don't want somebody to know what you're saying you know I can't look at one of my friends be the highest value was that I ended up just covert back there but you know I mean it's just it's fun to be able to see somebody and. You know and be able to talk to them. You know it's very hard when you don't have anybody your age to say that is is there a hunger though among people your age to learn the language and try to get an idea of where the interest level is you know as it is. Because like I said it's not only just for face value it's because you want to know it from myself within myself because that's part of my culture.

You know I'm sure Shelly and I want to be able to have explore every aspect of that and then that when the question is how hard is this if we're talking about a loss of a couple or three or even four generations. We didn't get the language then we have some young people coming up who want the language. How hard is it to teach young people who aren't getting it in the home a language like surely you know I'm trying. Well let me put the hard stuff first. There are some. There are some some factors that legislate against it. One is technology has changed you've got all of the new stuff that we have to deal with and every language can invent words but we're looking at a language that wasn't spoken under these circumstances so when we're talking about 20th century life there are some demands on the language that weren't there in an earlier time and a decision

has to be made about how do you want people to be conversational. Are you trying to save the language for ceremonial for private cultural purposes those are those are real considerations. But my own experience with the group of Shoni students at the university who wanted me to help them last semester was that eager. Yes I absolutely have to agree with what Lynette has said. And. My idea was that if one knows how to ask a question that big it gives you the opportunity to get information from a speaker so we focused on asking basic sentence length questions with the appropriate answers and by the end of the semester. People certainly weren't fluent but we could go for a class hour without speaking English and it can be done and and I think there are young people that really do want to learn it. Yeah and it's not necessarily you know

it should be taught in the home yes. I have to agree with that. And the only resources that we have are elders and that's one thing that I really think needs to be stressed to people my age and younger people who are interested in preserving the language is that they need to make the effort individually to contact and seek out those people who who have the knowledge who have the language and acquire that through them. We're getting close to the end of our time here but I want to ask a very basic question Ralph Alito are you hopeful that the language can be revived brought back to life put back into use more. Well in the face of all this onslaught of television and everything else that we get these days. I don't really base my feeling on that. My approach to preserving the language is that regardless what happens or who's wanting to learn or anything I want the

material there for anybody that's going to be interested in having it. And that's my only reason for being a part of the the group that's in the process of preserving the language. I want to there for future generations to be able to hear it regardless whether they can speak it or not but to be able to hear it in identify that they are Shoshone and that they can learn if they really want to look to the future we're going to have to close now. Thank you all very much. Long before non Indian settlers named the peaks of the Wind River Mountains or dubbed a river the sweet water the Shoshone Indians had seen these landscapes and given the names the naming of things is a powerful act. The effort to say this is the only language is more than just linguistics. It's an attempt to keep alive a community with a unique view of the world. Thanks for joining us on the street Lammy.

Main Street Wyoming is made possible in part by grants from Kennicott energy proud to be a part of Wyoming's future in the uranium exploration mining and production industry. And by the Wyoming Council for the Humanities and ridging lives of Wyoming people through their study of Wyoming history values and ideas.