In my brief respite between classes, I came across this article [via Google Alerts] about H.R. 4766, the Native American Languages Preservation Act. Most of the article details how this resolution would mandate roughly 500 hours per year of Native American language immersion for kids seven and younger. The author counters that this would hinder the learning of English, a valid point but one that could be remedied by offering a test-out option for who are already fluent. But that wasn’t what caught my eye. Towards the end of the article appeared the following:
Advocates of H.R. 4766 are apparently unaware of how difficult it is to learn to read an unwritten language. Many Native American languages remain unwritten, yet this legislation urges government grants for “the development of Native American language materials, such as books.”
[...]
The Carter administration’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) in the then-new Department of Education ordered an Alaska school district to give Eskimo children bilingual-reading instruction, despite the undisputed fact that no written version of the children’s language existed.
OCR’s solution? The school district was required to pay for the creation of a written language for these children and then teach them to read it.
So let me get this straight. You want to teach Native American children the language of their ancestors, thereby ostensibly preserving their heritage, while implementing a writing system that their ancestors never used? Sounds a bit like proselytizing. “Do speak your language, yes, but here is our alphabet and our stylistic rules.”
Many Native American languages never developed a writing system because they lived in environments where written media (such as paper, bark, or animal skin) would not last for long. This is the reality of Native American culture, and to emphasize true cultural heritage, this tradition has to be honored. Unless the Native American tribe collectively agrees on a system of writing, no one has any right to impose a writing system on a language.
This attempt to associate letters with sounds seems a result of the visual and textual nature of society. Everything is written down or spelled out, making much of memory meaningless. For millenia, oral communication was the only option, from our earliest ancestor to timeless Homer. This reminds me of something I read about the comedian Eddie Izzard; namely, that he never writes any of his material down, but commits it all to memory, because that is how humans worked for the longest time. If you’ve seen his shows, its very believable given his informal behaviors and spotaneous style.
The prospect of learning a language by memory now seems impossible, with no dictionary or thesaurus to run to for help. For us, though, its also terribly rewarding, maybe not intellectually (are there any studies on this?) but at least emotionally. And if nothing else, it’s an homage to a lifestyle all but forgotten.
