The Santa Fe New Mexican from Santa Fe, New Mexico • 34

E2 THE NEW MEXICAN Sunday October 30 1994 LANGUAGE Get A Tube for convenient home delivery 984-0363 Conference highlights Ed Wapp left a music professor at IAIA leads a traditional Arapaho song while professor Dana Dupris center and students Evangeline Red-steer and Melissa Mestas join In Here are some highlights of the 1994 Native American Language Issues Institute Cor i'f rence being held Nov 9-12 at the Glorieta Conference Center southeast of Santa Fe For more information call the Center for Research and Cultural Exchange at 988-6434 or 1-800-313-5741 WEDNESDAY NOV 9 1:30 pm Opening We Come" ceremonies 3: IS pm Congress and Native American languages 3:35 pm The Native American Languages Act 7:30 pm Keynote address by Buffy Sainte-Marie Yupik and Tlingit music and Inupiat and Yupik dance and song THURSDAY NOV 10 6:30 am Sunrise prayer service 9 am Opening prayer songs by women elder singers 9:20 am Presentations on the most moderately and least endangered languages people to elders to young mothers to poets artists wait for linguists at the universities to come help she said Smith said she is making some last -ditch single-handed efforts to save Eyak the language of her people who lived in small fishing villages around the current-day town of Cordova south of Valdez on the Gulf of Alaska children are not speaking the language" she said "But I have four grandchildren who are 10 am Student day activities running through 3 pm including talk by actor Wes Studi 11 am Dancers and a youth group presentation 9 pm A visit to the stars with ethnoastronomer Greg Cajete of Santa Clara Pueblo FRIDAYNOVil 6:30 am Sunrise prayer service 8:30 am Opening prayer songs by women elder singers 9 am Talk by Kohango Reos a Maori tribal member from New Zealand 7 pm Performances by Navajo singer Geraldine Barney aqd the Kahurangi Maori Dance Theatre of New Zealand SATURDAY NOV 12 6:30 am Sunrise prayer service 8:30 am Opening prayer songs 8:50 am Setting a national agenda 9:30 am Setting a national agenda for youth having me teach them My 16-year-old granddaughter she called me one day and she said she wanted to learn So I told her to write down words like goat hello and she learned them all in one week And teaching my great-grandson young people of this world have nothing to be ashamed of (in terms of) who they Smith said gave me to a Eyak family and this is what I am proud of and will always be proud of this is what I want the young people of this world to understand" (of Indian Affairs) schools Christian schools and mission schools have not viewed our language as important current generation of students are children of parents and grandparents who were punished severely for speaking the language" she said father used to have to wear a ball and chain like a prisoner and their mouths were washed out with Emerson said she suffered the same punishment for speaking Navajo when she attended a mission school is a form of cultural genocide to try to teach you to believe something else" she said there are a lot of native people who grew up believing that their language and their culture was pagan and that it was wrong to think about going back to the reservation back to the blanket" But Emerson and others are optimistic about an apparent rise in interest among Indian young people wanting to learn and pre serve their languages are finally coming to realize that our languages are precious and they are pathways to another time predating the creation of this Emerson said throughout Indian country are waking up" Emerson said the Center for Research and Cultural Exchange has been charged by Congress with the responsibility for organizing a national indigenous lan- guage materials repository Just how to accomplish the task will be a major focus of the upcoming conference she said have a sense that a lot of our people feel powerless to change things to take control over their own lives A lot of us have waited for the federal government for Congress for the state for our schools to take charge" Emerson said saving languages is business and I hope through this conference we can appeal to young leads to publication of Hopi books Continued from Page E-l Research and Cultural Exchange like if all known about you and your heritage would be burned forever and memory is scrubbed about that past "It really is the burning of humanities the literature the knowledge of the medicinal plants the knowledge that we have of our ecology of our environment of our cosmos" Emerson said just completely scrubbing out of existence a people leaving no trace" Scholars predict that without intervention only 20 Native American languages will be spoken by the year 2050 and up to half the 6000 languages are expected to disappear over the next century Saving languages is important just for its picturesqueness not just for the loss of information about medicinal plants for history but also most gravely for mankind's linguistic diversity as a system in which mankind was perhaps meant to live" Krauss said are we to say that mankind could survive without different ways of seeing the world and without different ways of thinking We lose more than just the intellectual wealth of mankind the spiritual wealth of mankind We lose maybe the ability to Even speakers of some of the more widely used Native American languages fear for the future of their words h2S been considered one of the more stable languages because of our size and because of our relative isolation over the years but changing" Emerson said "Border towns around Shiprock Farmington Gallup Window Rock where young people are not learning the language" Emerson said lot of it has to do with the fact that public schools federal Bureau Journey By NANCY PLEVIN The New Mexican Four years ago Joanna 16-year-old daughter asked her mother to find out how she could visit the Hopi reservation from their home in Berne Switzerland The request spawned a journey leading to publication of the Arizona first bilingual story books for children work with California and New York tribes to save their dying languages and establishment of' a Santa Fe-based organization whose goal is the preservation and perpetuation of the indigenous languages of the Western hemisphere those spoken before the arrival of Europeans "You never know as a mother what can happen through your Hess 55 said recently at her sprawling adobe-style home in the foothills of the San-gre de Cristo mountains overlooking Santa Fe "She really literally changed my whole life by asking me to research how we could visit the Hopi reservation because she was doing her A-levcl art thesis on the Hopi when she was 16 in Switzerland way up in the Alps" said Hess who moved to Santa Fe two years ago from Switzerland where her Swiss-American husband Donald is from running 14 tourism real estate and beverage companies Hess and her daughter Alexandra who is now 20 and lives in Santa Fe were introduced to Hopi members through an artist friend living outside Flagstaff Ariz Through a discussion with tribal elders the pair discovered that the language was not being taught in their schools lies also learned that experts predict that 45 of the remaining 155 Native American language spoken in the United States will disappear by the end of the century six year away was a time in the early when the community wanted their kids to learn En THE CONFORMIST 230 5 7 A9 k- 1 ft Vtll Lino I SHOWING IN DTS Lino Mll 471-33771 1:60 4:25 7:00 9:50 SORRY NO VIP COUPONS iBHSs'lyH'SN ESS A Tim Burton Fllmt ED WOOD (R) 1:303657:009:25 Film of the Year" PULP FICTION (R) 12:30 3:45 7:00 S5CARLOAD -LAST DAYCLOSING FOREVER 1st SITTING PRETTY 2nd FORREST GUMP PG-i3 FREE SOUVENIR SPEAKER FIRST 10 CARS EACH NIGHT GATES OPEN 6:30 PM k-FM RADIO SOUND ONLY- Vl44l i' '1 tl flfiv TODAY 1:30 pm KID3 SAVE 300 eg grrriru ALL SEATS RESERVED S1M SUM SUM Aok (bout SPECIAL VIP OOLD CIMCLI SEAT SHon OO 0 00 Off INFORMATION: 634-0309 nnq a tSZZl TTOIVL- were illustrated by Hopi chil- more" Goldtooth good dren Any profits are to be put thing about it is that a cooper-into a fund for future Hopi edu- ative effort between the stu-cation projects Hess said dents the staff and IPOLA" needs to be more Hopi- Hess said she currently is English language materials avail- searching for a project in New able for the students on the Hopi Mexico The institute can be reservation and pro- reached by calling 505-820-0311 ject through the publishing of or writing IPOLA 1237 Cerro these books provides a few Gordo Road Santa Fe NM 1 The Fe Jaz FOUNDATION INC Presents SCOTT HAMILTON TRIO with Gerald Wiggins piano and Andy Simpkins bass October 30 at St Francis Auditorium 6:00 PM Hamilton has grown in stature to become the most well-versed tenorman of his time in the art of classical swing" Downbeat Tickets are $15 and available at the Candyman or by calling theSanta Fe Jazz Foundation 982-0842 become a clearinghouse for other groups with similar aims Currently IPOLA works with several small California tribes where elders are passing down the language through one-on-one tutoring and summer language-immersion camps Dictionaries also are being created three to five years yoil can literally save a said Margaret Gray IPOLA executive director if you save a language you save a Working with a part-time staff of four Hess runs IPOLA out of a converted guest house on the grounds of her Santa Fe home The institute is funded by the Hess Holding Co and grants and donations from foundations and individuals The process of putting together the Hopi books began by taping storytellers in action Hess said the tapes went to the University of Arizona where Hopi scholar Emory Sekaqua-ptewa edited the film down to a child's version of the story then back to the storyteller for approval" Hess said took more than a year to get one story set" The books which were to be presented to the tribe this month glish in school and (they believed) Hopi should be learned at said Adelbert Goldtooth chief administrator for the Ho tevilla Bacavi Community School on the Hopi reservation That resulted in a growing number of youngsters who speak Hopi Goldtooth said the parents are beginning to realize if the school teach Hopi the kids will not know the language" said Goidtooth who runs the 125-student school that runs from kindergarten through 7th grade So I less who has no training in linguistics anthropology or history began working with the tribe and the University of Arizona to produce four books am a wife and a mother and a citizen and deeply concerned now that I know more what the loss will be to each and every one of us as we lose these she said Two year ago Hess decided to expand her efforts by founding the Institute for the Preservation of the Original Languages of the Americas or IPOLA a private non-profit agency to fund and otherwise assist projects aimed at saving indigenous languages The organization also hopes to Writers Harvest: The National 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LoveJpfair po 13 --o 2:20 4:00 7:33 10:03 sorry ho vip coupons SUPERIOR THRILLER' frmm ftOUiMi fTO4 A DENEFIT FOR HUNGER RELIEF A LITERARY INDULGENCE Wednesday November 2nd Afternoon workshops with Santa best-loved teachers 3:00 Miriam Sagan 400 Judyth Hill 5:00 Joan Logghe $10 suggested Conation 4 Evening Reading with Absolutely Everyone Halt Hunger Now I liabeth Berry MC Refreshment Provided 7pm till $5 Suggested Donation At the elegant El Dorado All proceeds to benefit St Elizabeth's Shelter $f'nxirej mtuwiilly by A mrrirai Eiwu SILENT FALL 0 2:20 4:33 7:23 0:40 sorry NO VIP COUPONS i ifcAJk i lYU'iLM M'tN 471-33771 nsttiMi 4.