|
 More than an ocean separates Katherine Silva Saubel on the Morongo Reservation at the foot of the
arid, wind-swept San Gorgonio Pass near Banning from the language renaissance underway in Hawaii.
The silence suffocating many languages is almost tangible
in her darkened, cinder-block living room. There, in a worn beige recliner flanked by a fax machine, a treadmill
and a personal computer, Saubel, a 79-year-old Cahuilla Indian activist and scholar, marshals her resistance to
time and the inroads of English.
Saubel is the last fluent speaker of her native tongue
on this reservation.
"Since my husband died," she said, "there
is no one here I can converse with."
For 50 years, this broad-shouldered great-grandmother
has worked almost single-handedly to ensure the survival of Cahuilla. Her efforts earned her a place in the National
Women's Hall of Fame and a certificate of merit from the state Indian Museum in Sacramento. Even so, her language
is slipping away.
"I wanted to teach the children the language,
but their mothers wanted them to know English. A lot of them want the language taught to them now," Saubel
said. "Maybe it will revive."
If it does, it will be a recovery based almost solely
on the memories she has pronounced and defined for academic tape recorders, the words she has filed in the only
known dictionary of Cahuilla, and the songs she has helped commit to living tribal memory. Tribal artifacts and
memorabilia are housed in the nearby Makli Museum that she founded, the first in North America to be organized
and managed by Native Americans.
Born on the Los Coyotes Reservation east of Warm Springs,
Saubel did not even see a white person until she was 4 years old--"I thought he was sick," she recalled--and
English had no place in her world until she was 7.
Then her mother--who spoke neither English nor Spanish--sent
her to a public school.
She was, she recalled, the only Indian girl in the
classroom. She could not speak English. No one tried to teach her to speak the language, she said. Mostly, she
was ignored.
"I would speak to them in the Indian language
and they would answer me in English. I don't remember when I began to understand what was being said to me,"
Saubel said. "Maybe a year."
Even so, by eighth grade she had discovered a love
of learning that led her to become the first Indian woman to graduate from Palm Springs High School. But she also
saw the other Indian children taken aside at recess and whipped if they spoke their language in school.
In time, the child of an Indian medicine woman became
an ethno-botanist.
For linguists as far away as Germany and Japan, she
became both a research subject and a collaborator. She is working now with UC San Diego researchers to catalog
all the medicinal plants identified in tribal lore.
"My race is dying," she said. "I am
saving the remnants of my culture in these books.
"I am just a voice in the wilderness all by myself,"
Saubel said. "But I have made these books as something for my great-grandchildren. And I have great-grandchildren."
In its broadest outlines, her life is a refrain repeated
on many mainland reservations.
"Basically, every American Indian language is
endangered," said Douglas Whalen at Yale University's Haskins Laboratory, who is chairman of the Endangered
Languages Fund.
As a matter of policy, Native American families often
were broken up to keep children from learning to speak like their parents. Indian boarding schools, founded in
the last century to implement that policy, left generations of Indians with no direct connection to their language
or tribal cultures.
Today, the federal administration for Native Americans
dispenses about $2 million in language grants to tribes every year. But even the best efforts to preserve the skeletons
of grammar, vocabulary and syntax cannot breathe life into a language that its people have abandoned.
Still, from the Kuruk of Northern California to the
Chitimacha of Louisiana and the Abenaki of Vermont, dozens of tribes are trying to rekindle their languages.
Mohawk is taught in upstate New York, Lakota on the
Oglala Sioux reservation in South Dakota, Ute in Utah, Choctaw in Mississippi, and Kickapoo in Oklahoma. The Navajo
Nation--with 80,000 native speakers--has its own comprehensive, college-level training to produce Navajo-speaking
teachers for the 240 schools in Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah that have large numbers of Navajo students.
Some tribes, acknowledging that too few tribal members
still speak their language, have switched to English for official business while trying to give children a feel
for the words and catch-phrases of their native language.
When people do break through to fluency, they tap
a hidden wellspring of community.
"I was in my own language, not just saying the
words, but my own thoughts," said Nancy Steele of Crescent City, an advanced apprentice in the Karuk language.
|
back to the What's New page