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The Importance of Community Initiatives
One of the results of the review was the discovery that only three of the 53 languages (Inuktitut, Cree and Ojibway) appeared to have excellent changes of survival over the longer term. Numbers of speakers for the 50 more endangered languages ranged from a healthy few thousand down to a very unhealthy mere handful; and in many cases where numbers were low the speakers were middle-aged or elderly. The prospects for Canada's aboriginal languages generally were thus far from bright. I should note, incidentally, that I worried a good deal about whether to publish the rather gloomy statistics, for fear of contributing to the sense of inevitability that exists in some native communities regarding the loss of the aboriginal heritage, and perhaps even unintentionally of providing ammunition to those who are pressing for a more unilingual Canada in any case. In the end, I suppose I was persuaded to proceed by the argument that it is better to face the facts of one's situation, however disquieting, than to suppress them in favour of one's dreams. What particularly concerned me in compiling the report, though, was not the mere collection of statistical information, but what kinds of policies should be developed in response to what appeared to be an irreversible slide toward extinction for many aboriginal languages. What's more, whatever the policies were, it seemed to me misguided to base them purely on numbers of speakers. Should one do so, one would immediately be confronted with the question of whether to put resources into communities where there were many speakers, or into communities where there were only a few speakers -- the former, presumably because of the greater chances of survival over the long haul, the latter, because of imminent threat of extinction. Suppose one decided to concentrate resources only on the most threatened languages, those with small numbers of primarily elderly speakers. Given that there is only meager funding available for minority language preservation, I must confess to having a certain personal bias favouring this approach, since I believe generally that it is important to document as many of the world's lesser-known languages as possible while there is still time. But I am by no means convinced that the desire to carry out rescue linguistic work is the best or most practical basis for a general language maintenance policy. Suppose, on the other hand, one decided to support mainly those efforts where there were substantial numbers of speakers. This would be a variation of the "backing-the-right-horse" theme which pervades the business world, and of course it would be more in favour among the politicians. In this case you'd have to assume that there is some magical cut-off point in terms of numbers of speakers below which a language is unlikely to survive. (Supporting languages below that level would then be tantamount to making a "bad investment.") One of the problems with an approach based on numbers is that no one really knows how many speakers it takes to insure a language's survival. Are 100, 1,000, 10,000 speakers necessary? It is also important to realize that there are situations elsewhere in the world where virtually dead languages have been revived as spoken languages on fairly grand scale. One thinks of Ireland where Irish Gaelic was brought back from almost nothing beginning in the late nineteenth century to become a healthy minority language, or of Israel, where Classical Hebrew, which survived for many centuries only as a liturgical language, was gradually revived as an official spoken language after 1948. In both cases language revival took place as part of a heightened sense of national pride which emerged at a particular historical moment. It seems to me that in the end, the question of language maintenance really has very little to do with numbers of speakers but with community attitudes and community initiatives. I believe that it is never too late to revive a language if the will and interest are there. Whatever may be the interest on the part of well-intentioned outsiders (anthropologists like myself, non-native teachers and government officials), there is no way anyone who is not part of the local scene can sensibly determine language (or, for that matter, cultural) policy for a community: it must come from the community itself. I see the government and the private sector as having the important role of providing financial and other kinds of support, once a community has expressed a strong interest in linguistic and cultural survival, has thought through the matter of policy, and has begun to develop effective programmes. This approach, of course, constitutes a kind of policy, but one that gives those most in the know (and with the highest stakes in the matter) the freest possible hand in developing their own programmes. Incidentally, by support, I am thinking not only of direct funding, but of technological assistance (for example, providing publicity, and perhaps publishing and computer facilities and advice). The Jake Thomas Learning Centre is a fine example of a community-based initiative in aboriginal linguistic and cultural maintenance, and it is just this kind of initiative that should, as a matter of policy, be supported. Here is a group of highly dedicated and talented people from the Six Nations Reserve who are thinking big thoughts and going way out on a limb to see if they can do something to reverse the downward slide of linguistic and cultural loss on their reserve. They do not need an outsider to tell them about this loss: they can see it with their own eyes and feel it in their own hearts with the passing every year of more and more of their elders, with the thinning of the ranks of singers and Longhouse speakers -- and simply with the decreasing numbers of fluent speakers of the six Iroquois Languages that once thrived on the reserve. (Of the six, only Mohawk can be considered now as reasonably safe for the future.) One of the exciting and interesting things about this initiative is that the organizers are talking not only about what will be taught at the Jake Thomas Learning Centre, but how aboriginal languages and cultures should be taught. One must realize that the aboriginal peoples of North America nowhere had anything equivalent to the European idea of the school. Their methods for educating young people were entirely through example and by oral tradition. The Centre organizers correctly sense that there are some inherent conflicts between the ordinary classroom situation and traditional methods of learning, and they are exploring ways of drawing upon the traditional methods. I don't have the impression that they are flatly rejecting Western pedagogical traditions, only using them selectively, and trying to combine them with their own. Moreover, some aspects of Western technology, such as the tape and video recorder, actually fit the requirements of an oral culture extremely well. Among other things, I would urge them to look into the possibility of having a state-of-the-art language laboratory though the backbone of the programme unquestionably should remain the use of elders as the basic resource. At a deeper level, the importance of the Centre initiative is that it offers a special opportunity to native people to strengthen -- for some perhaps to discover for the first time -- a true sense of native identity. The challenge that this presents to the Centre's organizers is formidable, and there are many obstacles to overcome, to say nothing of the practical hurdles involved in designing a facility and selecting a staff. One of the obstacles you face is how to overcome the legacy of skepticism -- even the sense of futility -- that exists in some quarters on the Reserve regarding the use of native languages and the status of native culture generally. This is a tough thing to deal with. We all know about the efforts a generation ago at the Mohawk Institute and in the schools to suppress the use of Iroquois languages among young people. These and various other factors account for a decline in the everyday use of the languages. Some Reserve residents regard any effort to revive traditional Iroquoian culture and languages as a return to a past they would now rather leave behind them, others find the effort worthy but demanding more of their time and energy than they are willing to give. Mustering a broad base of support on the Reserve will be a considerable but important challenge. In the remainder of my remarks I would like to address just one aspect of this challenge, not because I have any neat solutions to offer you, but because I want to give an indication of the kind of issue that I think needs to be thoroughly discussed and debated as you begin to work out specific programmes in Iroquoian languages and culture at the Centre (Institute). What I have to say may sound a bit academic, but please bear with me: I think it is the kind of thing that lies at the heart of your enterprise. The issue concerns the relationship between two entities we often refer to, namely language and culture. Now, I guess we know what the first term refers to in the present context: the six Northern Iroquoian languages. They are all still spoken, though with varying degrees of fluency and by varying numbers of people. The second term is more difficult to define. The dictionary tells us that culture is "the totality of socially transmitted behaviour patterns, arts, beliefs, institutions, and all other products of human work and thought characteristics of a community or population" (American Heritage Dictionary, 2nd edn., p. 348). By such a definition we would have to regard language as a part of culture, not as something separate from it. Maybe that doesn't seem a particularly remarkable idea. What is a challenging problem is to decide what the culture or cultures are that the Iroquoian languages are linked to. Is it what is sometimes called the "old culture" of the Longhouse? If so, what about the well-entrenched traditions which associate Mohawk, Oneida, and Tuscarora with Christianity and the so-called "progressive" end of the Reserve? I won't attempt to answer those questions tonight: indeed, I think it is only members of the Centre who can do so in any meaningful way. What I'd like to do instead is address the question of language-and-culture on a somewhat more general level in the hopes that this will provide some perspective for dealing with the practical issues. That language and culture have some kind of relationship seems undeniable. For instance, although culture includes all of the material products of a people--the kinds of things archaeologists dig up or museums like to display--it also, and perhaps more importantly, includes what goes on inside peoples heads, and these things are not material at all but exist solely because we have a concept of some kind and can transmit this concept through the medium of a language. Iroquoian terms such as akhwa:tsí:yax Œmy family' or kxasyá:tex Œclan' or kinship terms, though they may name certain individuals, really only exist as concepts. Furthermore, such terms have only rough equivalents in another language like English, and the social and political systems such terms organize are even less easily translated. Think of phrases that recur in Longhouse speeches like ska:t awá':tP hx, p kwax nkp kP hax, which, though capable of literal translation (Œas one become our minds'), cannot be adequately understood without a broad understanding of Iroquois culture. Such "things" are sometimes referred to by the term Œmentifact' to place them in a category that a museum can catalogue and store. At any rate, in some sense they exist only as linguistic facts, yet reflect a culture and a society. Now this is part of the story
but perhaps not the whole story. That part of language most intimately
bound to culture is its vocabulary, its inventory of words. But when, on the other hand, it comes to the structure of languages (the complex rules by which the parts of words we call morphemes combine into words, and words into sentences) and to their sound systems (the inventory of consonants and vowels that make utterances possible), there is little that directly links a language with culture or the environment of its speakers. It is here that we would say that languages have a certain independence, a certain life of their own. With regard to structure, languages seem more to reflect the nature of basic human thought processes--the fundamental logical character of those processes--than anything to do with particular cultures. While one can certainly think of cases where some feature of morphology or syntax is bound to a specific cultural concept (e.g., the presence in the Salishan languages of a set of numerical classifiers which are distinct from the regular set of numbers and which are only used when counting canoes), such cases are exceptional. And indeed if you look into the history of linguistics, you will find that there is a somewhat darker side to this question. At one time, before the period of what we would call scientific linguistics, people liked to classify languages according to a few basic structural types, and these types were thought to correlate with stages of cultural development. Thus, languages of the "inflective" sort (generally, the European languages) and those of the "isolating" kind (Chinese) were said to match advanced civilization, whereas those which were of the "polysynthetic" type, which included many of the known languages of the Americas, were said to match a "primitive" level of cultural development. Such ideas are inherently racist and seem silly to us today, but I mention them as examples of the kind of pitfall one can stumble into by taking a too literal approach to the relationship between language and culture. It is perhaps also worth noting that there are many instances of people speaking radically different languages yet occupying the same cultural area (in terms of sharing a similar ecology, economy, and social and political organization), and people speaking the same or closely related languages occupying radically different cultural zones. A classic case, in terms of North American aboriginal cultures, is that found in northwestern California, where groups speaking Athapaskan, Algonquian and Hokan languages lived side-by-side as neighbours for centuries, sharing a very similar cultural pattern which derived ultimately from the Northwest Coast and practicing bilingualism to facilitate trade. Conversely, speakers of the single Athapaskan family of languages lived in four entirely distinct ecological and cultural zones: the western Subarctic, northwestern California, the Prairies, and the American southwest. Closer to home, the Northern Iroquoian languages are, as you know, related to Cherokee, in the sense that at some distant time in the past, perhaps around 4,000 years ago, there was a single language that was their common ancestor. When we compare the culture of the Cherokee with that of the New York and Ontario Iroquois, however, they seem very different. The languages too are rather different on the surface, but there was nothing inherent in the ancestral language that stood in the way of the people in the original common speech community separating and ending up in rather different environments and with very different cultures. Languages have the capability of adapting to entirely new sets of circumstances on the part of their speakers. I hope I haven't wandered too far afield here: let me return to our more immediate concerns. However much you regard Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, Mohawk and Tuscarora as being bound to a particular culture or a particular set of beliefs on the reserve (the first three primarily to the Longhouse, the last three primarily to Christianity), the languages themselves have a great deal of flexibility to adapt to the fact of change. Even a purist would have to admit that there has been a considerable elaboration in languages like Cayuga and Onondaga, not to mention Mohawk and Oneida, of terms for non-native concepts and things, such as farm animals and machinery, the automobile, high steel work, and many aspects of domestic life. The invention of new terms represents no threat to the languages -- indeed, just the opposite: it shows their capacity to adjust to changing circumstances. Meanwhile, their fundamental structures remain basically unaffected. All of this means that the Iroquoian languages are capable of surviving beautifully in what we call the "modern" world. (There is no inherent reason why Cayuga or Mohawk or Cherokee could not be used to discuss nuclear physics, should there ever be such a need and the time were taken to develop the necessary vocabulary.) Whether they will survive or not depends upon whether you are able to convince people that they can accommodate to the many shapes of Iroquoian culture that exist on the Reserve. If you can do that, the languages could emerge as an extremely powerful symbol of Iroquoian identity. No one pretends that this task
will be easy. Remember that to learn a language at all requires many
years; to learn a language well requires a lifetime. The task you
have ahead of you requires wisdom and patience and imagination. But
knowing some of the organizers of the Centre as I do, I have no doubt that you
will deal effectively with the challenges that lie ahead and make this exciting
venture a resounding success.1
Michael K. Foster, |