Importance of language planning and language policy

I recently had some conversations with various people about the state of the Irish language, which is rapidly disappearing as a family-community language in Ireland. While it is a mandatory subject in Irish schools and this program does produce speakers, the uses of the language seem to be confined to performance/public realms. So everybody in Ireland can say a little something in Irish Gaelic, but no one has conversations in it. Also, the language is supported in a public way with all signs in Irish first and English second, but children do not use the language on playgrounds with other children, nor with their parents or grandparents at home.  The estimate is that Irish will cease to be a language of the family and community in one more generation.

This reminded me of the situation with the Choctaw (& perhaps other American Indian languages). While the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma provides support for the language via the establishment of the Choctaw Language School, virtually no speakers of the language are being produced. The state of Oklahoma allows for the instruction of American Indian languages in public schools, but all of the curriculum I have seen teaches about Choctaw language and culture. Anecdotal evidence further suggests that people are being certified to be Choctaw language teachers, for example, without being fluent speakers of the language and that community efforts to restore Choctaw as a community language have been strongly discouraged and heavily criticized.

It seems that the Choctaw may be headed down the same path as the Irish. Not having that language as part of the identity of an Irish person kind of just makes them all additional Anglicized speakers of English. I have a keen interest in what happens as my grandmother was Choctaw and spoke Choctaw. That language was not passed down to her children or grandchildren, so I have a keen interest in its preservation. The Choctaw have a unique history and culture that will not be passed down if they language goes. Their stories will just become quaint stories from by-gone days, and the next generations will just join the billions of others who speak English globally.

Beastly Behaviors

Beastly Behaviors

How am I to account for the beastly behaviors of young men old enough to vote and procreate but who live with the awareness of an earth worm blindly boring their way through dirt oblivious to the effects they are creating on others or worse feeling they are entitled somehow to an unwarranted position of superiority.  As an instructor in a program that teaches about diversity, I have to feel that perhaps US society has not become as enlightened about the potentiality of each human being regardless of gender.

I am reminded of werewolf—man wolf-- stories and the full moon theory. The gravitational pull of the moon on animals and tides is well documented. So part of what separates humans from animals is that people have the ability not to be affected by the full moon The medieval belief was that a real man controlled those beastly urges: That is what made him a man. However, the resentment and absurd justifications I recently heard spewing from the mouths of two young men who had behaved badly toward two young women makes me yearn for times when there were codes of courtesy that were expected in terms of behaviors between men and women. Today those codes have been replaced by laws and punishments that do little to raise the consciousness of individuals because the punishments reinforce beastliness: People who are treated like animals tend to behave like animals, fighting and clawing their way to survival without regard to the ill effects they create.

 The well-known French tale of Beauty and the Beast--La Belle et la Bête—plays on a similar theme of overcoming beastly urges.  In this story, it is the love of a beautiful young maiden who transforms the beast. This parable is intended to show that only the spiritual aspects of aesthetics, in this case called love, can overcome those baser instincts. It is interesting to note that the beast is represented by a male and the spiritual aspect of love is represented by a female. This portrayal contrasts sharply with the portrayal of woman as temptress as seen in Eve and Jezebel and may represent an older European idea of women.

Certainly in Native American cultures of most of North America, women were associated with life with the men openly acknowledging their dependence on women for sustenance. The Choctaw story of corn illustrates the importance and reverence accorded women. In this story, two young men who have gone out hunting are unsuccessful in finding game. As a consequence, they are on the verge of starvation when a beautiful young woman appears to them. She provides them food that sustains them but also all future generations. Tanchi represents the Choctaw idea of femininity. And it isn’t by accident that Rabbit, the trickster of Southeastern tales, and Coyote, the trickster of Southwestern tales, is male or that male rain is the one that comes crashing down with thunder and lightening, sweeping everything in its path while female rain falls gently and consistently to water crops.

While “modern” psychology likes to pretend it has some understanding of human behavior, it appears that ancient people already had it figured out and were teaching the lessons they learned to their children as they grew up. I am going to guess that the two young men who behaved badly did not grow up with these lessons as they were totally unable to see the beauty they were destroying.

I recently returned from New Zealand as a Fulbright Specialist. One of the places I visited was Te Puna Wānanga, which is a small piece of Māoriness on the Epsom Campus of the University of Auckland. The building that houses the classrooms and offices are slated to be razed. The demolition of the building and removal of the staff echoes the history of Auckland and its indigenous people, Ngāti Whātua, who have had their ancestral lands carved up to make way for the establishment and expansion of New Zealand's largest city, so that instead of fertile sea beds and bush there are anchorages for individual recreational sailing vessels and asphalted foot paths and campgrounds.

This seizing of lands and the dispossession under marching colonization of its indigenous people is a story told and retold across the planet. My own people, the Choctaw and the Cherokee, along with most of the those living east of the Mississippi were removed from their ancestral lands for the expansion of the US. And once the US had expanded to surround the lands given to all these discarded nations, the land was carved up into individual plots--160 acres for each adult and 40 acres for each child--creating a checkerboard effect in the planned-to-be 46th state, less than a hundred years after the land was given in perpetuity to these nations, completing its Manifest Destiny. The Allotment Act effectively reduced the political and economic influence of my ancestral nations. Today non-Indians easily out number Indians in Oklahoma, another blow to any political power.

All this might be considered ancient history if not for the demolition of Te Puna Wānanga or the Native American Studies building at the University of New Mexico, a little piece of land and Indianness along the edge of that campus. The latter is now safely surrounded by Academia, its own little reservation in the heart of the university. Perhaps the intent now is similar to the original intent of reservations, the academization of these indigenous study programs.

Next to Te Puna Wānanga is a marae. I wonder if the expansion of the University of Auckland will require that space as well.