By Rob Reynolds in
* Americas on May 13th, 2010
"A long time ago, man never known on earth was all alone... then he made the first man, Having Power to Carry Light... then he made the first woman, Bright Shining woman."
-Wichita Creation Story, as told by Doris McLemore
In a meadow in rural Oklahoma, I sat and listened to a language that soon will be gone forever.
Doris McLemore is 83 years old, and the last fluent speaker of Wichita, a native American language that once was spoken by upwards of 10,000 people on this continent.
She is a short, slightly cranky woman who has not lived an easy life. Yet she alone possesses this priceless human treasure. The Wichita, who now number about 3,000, admire and respect her; but few bother to learn any of their ancestral language from her.
The Wichita words for earth and sky, joy and sorrow, essentially will die with her.
The daughter of a white man and a Wichita mother, Doris was raised by her Wichita-speaking grandparents in rural Oklahoma. She remembers a time when the language thrived in their community outside Anadarko, Oklahoma.
"You could say things in Wichita that were so funny," Doris said, a smile briefly lighting up her face. "You wouldn't dare, the way some of them talked- you wouldn't dare say it in English." When I asked what she meant, she said a lot of Wichita banter was risqué, to put it mildly.
But the dominant English-speaking society gradually destroyed the old ways. Generations of Native American children all over the United States were shipped to boarding schools, forced to learn English, and punished if they spoke in their mother tongue.
"The white people did not value it," Doris said. "They wanted it to be gone. just like everything else. They wanted to annihilate all the Indians."
White America failed to annihilate Native Americans, but their languages were, in many cases, casualties of the cultural assault.
Hundreds, perhaps thousands of languages and dialects have already disappeared, and many more are endangered.
When I asked Doris how she feels to be the only Wichita-speaker left, she shrugged. "You know, I never think about it. That's just the way it is. I just don't dwell on it."
Wichita is just one of thousands of small languages world-wide on the brink of oblivion. Swarthmore College professor K. David Harrison is director of the Living Tongues Institute, which seeks to preserve endangered languages.
"We're seeing an unprecedented rate of language extinction or language death," Harrison says. "Approximately half of the world's languages are considered to be endangered. And we may be losing a language as often as one every 2 weeks."
Harrison and his colleagues have identified several language "Hot Spots" around the world where clusters of endangered languages are concentrated. They include northern Australia, eastern Siberia, central South America and two regions in North America: the Pacific Northwest and Oklahoma.
"Languages disappear for many reasons, but usually it's because the speakers are pressured to assimilate to a more dominant culture," Harrison said. "They are made to feel from a very young age that their language is not as good, is not as worthy, is not as modern as other languages that may be spoken."
With the death of each language, an immeasurably valuable piece of humanity's inheritance disappears.
"When a community loses its language, especially if it's primarily an oral language that is passed on that is transmitted mouth to ear and stored only in peoples' memories, they really lose their history," Harrison said.
"They lose their connection to the past; they lose all of the wisdom and knowledge that has been accumulated over centuries about how to live in a sustainable manner on this planet."
Wichita tribal officers sadly agree with that assessment.
"The language that she carries represents our identity," says Tribal Secretary Terri Parton.
She has been working with Doris and linguists from US universities to record and preserve as much of the language as possible.
There are many tribes in North America, Parton says, but "The language sets us apart from other tribes. It's the one thing we have that is Wichita. And once it's gone... it's gone."
But extinction need not be the fate of all small languages. In Part Two of this blog, I'll describe successful efforts by Native Americans to save another language.
http://blogs.aljazeera.net/americas/2010/05/13/language-brink
