Is Language Life? --LILC, Davis 2009--

Yootva ikxareeyav,
Hooray spirit people,
te apunva, nani supa
You understand, my days
karu vura nani harinay;
my collective years
voom vura yav karu yaamach;
they have been good as well as beautiful
voom vura ikyaakam karu vura yaamahukkich
they have been difficult as well as simple
haa, ko vura pa nanu kuup'ha.
yes, all of them have been OUR doings
Nukyaviichvuti pa nani kuup'ha xakaan.
we've worked together to determine my every course of action
Yootva.
hooray
Chimi ni'ahooheesh pa ahirak.
May I continue to walk in the light
Ux pa nanu taat te karit.
the earth is our mother, n all.

Our physicle bodies are mostly water, without water we shrivel and die- like salted slugs.

Recently I took a trip with my young son to the university of U.C. Davis for a conference called Language is Life, put on bi-anually by the Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival (AICLS). The conference was one I'm not used to frequenting, but my daugter and older sister are apart of the program and so with a little nudge from them we decided to turn the conference into a family affair. I drove through Friday afternoon and got myself lost between Santa Rosa and Davis, but finally I arrived fashionably late just as the registration table was about to close Friday night. My son and I found our dorm room and settled in for the night, he was excited and I was unsure of just exactly what I was getting myself into.

The next day began with a man from somewhere in Washington, he spoke a native language and infact ran an immersion school (and he advocated arranged marriage between the best speaking children, a sober truth thinly veiled by what would have been humor [had it been a joke]).

For the first hour and a half, the man lectured us in language. He walked us through his alphabet, had us singing prayers, talking about dishes, playing games, talking about eachother, and even laughing at puns in his language...
The first think i thought of was, "Immersion has come a long way from the eighties when my eldest was taught how to say single words with the help of pan-indian flashcards... Yes, immersion teaching methods and methodologies have come a long way."

Why is this important?
Well, if water is important to the physicle health of humanity then you could think or language as important to the human in every being. Language is the health of something older and wiser then states, language is the health of cultures, civilizations, peoples, and for the majority of Native Peoples our languages are endangered.
With the fabric of our cultures "at risk" we are running into road block relaities...
our children are forging new relationships with themselves via gangs, and re-forging destructive habits they've inherited from several generations of the abused Indigenous People that make-up our history.
People talk about the statistics of Indian youth, families, suicides...
But without talking about Native Languages
we are not "seeing with the eyes in our hearts"
we are plucking the chords of foreighn instruents and still our children have no words through which they can vent thier frustration, or voice the grief that has been building like water pressing against a dam forced on the river generations ago-
Without our Native Languages our way of life is lost.
That is why the government spent so many millions taking indian children and carting them off to boarding schools to break them of thier ability to speak, to connect to thier families, to thier peers, to themselves...
And this is why AICLS, and the LANGUAGE IS LIFE Conference, and the BREATH OF LIFE CONFERENCE exsist.
Indigenous people are not going to fade quietly into the night, we are going to drag our family members to conferences, and talk in our languages at the dinner table even if its hard at first, we will continue to create bi-lingual cats and dogs and we will continue to exhist as long as we have the will to find the words that enable us to understand what it means to exhist.

At this conference, a pannel discussion happened.
One of the federally recognized tribes of Southern California was instrumental in creating a bill that was recently sighned by Governor Schwartzenegger. The bill will make it easier for tribes to get native speakers, and teachers of Native Languages certification that serves the same purpose as credentials throughout the state of California.
One small step for Indian Kind, on giant step for a single tribe...

The thing I was not anticipating to witness during this pannel presentation, was the standoff that followed during the Q & A session afterwards. You see the bill was created to benefit Federally recognized tribes only. It was a choice of words easy for the federally recognized tribe behind the bill to assert- and yet thier close relations were left in the cold (the non-federally recognized tribal members of neighboring tribes, and even the un-federally recognized neighboring factions of the same tribe).
Many people were upset, language workers written down or off as extinct voiced thier teary objections to some Indians making things better for thier own while leaving thier cussins to deal with the wolves of tearany on thier own.
It was a stark difference between the haves, and have nots in NDN California.
I often find it is that way in the north betwen those who have reservation land, and those tribes that wern't so lucky... But being in the south made me realize to be federally recognized is not something to be taken forgranted- things could be worse.
As I begin to see how much responsibility we have to eachother and our languages, I'm impressed by those tribes without recognition or funds who are still fighting for thier languages-
we are all fighting for our lives in today's language climate-
and as I watched my son and oldest daughter argue in Karuk, teasing each other and playing keepaway in language,
in the language my mother was cut off from when they took her away from her family and sent her to boarding school...
in a language I hardly ever heard growing up...
I feelt a sense of hope. Language is a seed like any other, with enough water and love, it never fails to grow.