Something that both enamored, and disturbed me when it came to reading Dawnland Voices is my realization that outside of this class (and the other classes that I have taken with Professor Rojas) I have had very little exposure to Native life and culture. Besides a few units during elementary school, and brief history lessons during high school we never were able to experience events from a Native Indian point of view. I found that I was often seeking out those Eyewitness history books that were full of pictures or looking forward to annual trips to the museum seeing as they basically acted as my exposure to native culture outside of the few things we learned. Throughout all of the texts published in the book, one of the most profound accounts of Native life came from Andrea Bear Nicholas and her explanation of the importance of native languages to native groups.
The erasure of one’s language may seem insignificant in the face of genocide, but I think that loss of one’s language is a form of cultural genocide. I know that many tribes rely on oral traditions/story telling to keep certain aspects of their culture alive. When all that one may have when they must grapple with assimilation and finding an identity, is their language, severing this linguistic connection means losing the very essence of one’s being. It’s the very reason that slaves were not allowed to speak their native language or keep their natural born names, seeing as their language acted as a cultural tether. Speaking personally I know that language is integral to my own understanding of identity. I immigrated from Trinidad (an English speaking country), however our dialect of English features words and phrases that would leave the average English speaker confused. While I understand this version of English, my younger brother struggles to understand the content of conversations and fails to understand jokes or references, and this definitely affects his understanding of his own identity. Although he identifies my mother and I as Trinidadian, he considers himself an American and often claims that he can’t “speak our language.”
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This is so moving, Carleisha. My younger brother and I have a parallel relationship Spanish as the one you describe with English. He retained less, I much more because of our relative ages when we returned to the United States. I have been thinking a lot about the language reclamation projects we have read about and briefly discussed via Leah’s reflection on her own language studies in relation to the my own difficulty in teaching my children Spanish. In a way it isn’t comparable — but I think of the frustration I feel when they can’t communicate with my great aunts (whose hold on English slips as they get older), and try to imagine it in a much wider scale community endeavor. I had an intense reaction to visiting a charter school recently where near 70% of the children come from home where Spanish is spoken. There are bilingual signs every where in the school with motivational and culturally affirmations quotations in side by side translations. Yet the children are not allowed to speak Spanish at school in order to learn throughly that English is the language in which they must succeed and navigate. It was striking to see in such clear ways the function of the school as a place of assimilation, where one way of being is disciplined, and another is cultivated.