Monica Davis, 16 February 2008, Saturday
More than 7,000 languages will die over the next century, leaving a dangerous vacuum in the human body politic. For it is the language of the people, which reflects its soul, and the cumulative soul of the human race is slowly disintegrating.
OUR WORDS, language and history are intricately woven together, none complete without the other. So often, we take all of them for granted, assuming that we will always be able to speak, communicate and discourse. But, that is not always true, not for those whose speech is impaired, or whose minds will no longer allow them to manipulate words, concepts, ideas and message. And it is most certainly not true of those whose memories are so terrible, that they burn in the telling.
All over the world, through the ravages of time, we are losing our elders, losing touch with our oral history, and slowly drifting away from the anchors of civilised culture. For many native people, those whose numbers are rapidly dwindling, this is a living death.
A Lakota (also called Sioux) friend of mine is engaged in an oral history project, which may well take her years to complete. She is chronicling the life experiences and oral traditions of several Lakota female elders on the Pine Ridge Reservation in Pine Ridge, South Dakota.
In native cultures around the world, the elders are dying, and taking their native languages to the grave with them. People whose numbers once ranged into the millions are now down to a handful of native speakers, and, when those speakers die, so does the language of their respective cultures.
According to linguists, more than 7,000 languages will die over the next century, leaving a dangerous vacuum in the human body politic. For it is the language of the people, which reflects its soul, and the cumulative soul of the human race is slowly disintegrating.
Our vibrant languages, tongues, which have a dozen words for ice, or lyrical languages that soothe the soul, even though the listener doesn’t understand a word, are slowly fading into oblivion. With the disappearance of those languages, goes a piece of human history, which can never be recreated by human hands.
For all of our arrogance, for all of our hijacking of the word ‘civilisation’, western man is woefully ignorant of the language, folkways and history of the world in which he lives. Sadly, he parades his ignorance as superiority, and has spent centuries destroying other cultures, uncaring of the knowledge that was lost with his plundering, as have barbarians who long came before him.
Native American language and culture have been under assault for generations, particularly by federal policies in both the United States and Canada. From the mid-nineteenth century until as late as 1975, hundreds of thousands of native children were forced to attend distant ‘residential schools’ from the age or 4 or 5 to 16. And, in those ensuing years, they were forbidden to use their native tongue, forbidden to come home, forcibly separated from the culture, which gave birth to them.
Lawsuits have been filed over the alleged abuse, rape and murder, which reportedly took place in those schools, but, for those who survived, the separation from family, adults and culture took a heavy toll.
Culture is passed from one generation to another, as is civilised behaviour, socialisation and language. Forcible assimilation, distant schooling at extremely young ages, in addition to the reported rape, beating and murder, which many residential school attendees say was endemic in both Canada and the United States, took a heavy toll on indigenous populations in North America.
Many people blame the madness in the ‘residential schools’ to much of the dysfunction in today’s Native American and indigenous enclaves. Referring to alleged atrocities at the residential schools, William Combs told reporters, “I saw children being buried at the Catholic residential school in Kamloops. I saw a lot of kids die there. I’m upset the church has gotten away with murdering them.” (Aboriginal survivors Press Release)
How many of the residential school students have Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSD), due to their years of residence at these schools? How many generations of dysfunctional adults passed their own dysfunction on to their kids and communities?
Now, in addition to the cultural trauma of having children ripped from their cultures for six generations and placed in residential schools, indigenous communities are now dealing with the flip side of residential school’s trans-generational byproduct—parents who have no parenting skills. Today, Native American children are grossly over-represented in the nation’s foster care populations, as the below shown table enumerates.
In some states, Native American children represent as much as 51 per cent of their representative state’s foster care population, while comprising no more than 20 per cent of any one state’s population. In one state, Native American children make up 10 per cent of the state’s foster care population, while only comprising one per cent of the state’s general population. (Press Release, American Indian Children Over represented in Nation’s Foster Care System)
The report, titled Time for Reform: A Matter of Justice for American Indian and Alaskan native children, found that nationally, American Indian and Alaskan native children were reported to the state and found to be victims of child abuse and neglect at the rate of 16.5 per 1,000 American Indian and Alaskan native children. This rate compares to 19.5 for African American children, 16.1 for Pacific Islander children, 10.8 for White children, and 10.7 for Hispanic children. Native American children are more likely than children of other races/ethnicities to be identified as victims of neglect (65.5 per cent), and they are least likely to be identified as victims of physical abuse (7.3 per cent). (Ibid)
Referring to the monies awarded former residents of these residential schools through a class action lawsuit, one angry woman told fellow bloggers that there was no way for the mainstream religious organisations, which perpetrated savageries in the residential school to ever buy their way out of the atrocities. For her, what happened in those schools was perpetrated by monsters, pure and simple. Unfortunately, those deeds of those monsters still lives in the form of the dysfunctional adults, the damaged minds, and the broken souls they left in their wake.
Left behind are a people with an over representation of child neglect, substance abuse and mental anguish, mind pain that is so powerful, even drugs and alcohol cannot hold the memories at bay. The old ways, the language, the ties that bind people together as a culture and community have been under assault for two centuries.
Even more telling about the destruction of a culture is the casual rape perpetrated by males of the so-called dominant culture. Forcible assimilation through kidnapping and residential instruction and de-culturalisation of a culture’s children is only one step in the process of destroying a people. Add sexual attack, rape and dehumanisation to the mix, and you have yet another tier.
There is a Lakota saying, “A people are not defeated until the hearts of its women are on the ground.” In times gone by—and still occurring in some communities, raping a woman of colour was a right of passage, or a proof of manhood for white males. Even today, according to recent case studies, “US indigenous women face 3.5 times the average rate of rape in the US. Some 82 per cent of assailants are white men.”
The Delaney sisters, African American twins who lived well past 100 years of age, related how black families had to keep their female children out of harms way, or, rather out of the way of potential white rapists. Because it didn’t take much for a black man to get lynched in those days, blacks practiced prevention—they kept their daughters as far away from white men as they could, because their fathers were in no position to defend their helpless kin. (Sadie and Bessie Delaney, Having Our Say)
When the last native speaker of these cultures dies, there will be no one left to sing the songs, tell the stories and pass on their legacies. There will be no elders to pass their wisdom on to the next generation. If some have their way, there will be no next generation.
