Delphine Red Shirt. Photo by Rich Luhr / Flickr
Do we always need the approval of 'experts'?
By Delphine Red Shirt
Lakota Country Times Columnist
www.lakotacountrytimes.com When Albert White Hat, Sr. wrote Reading and Writing the Lakota Language, Lakota Iyapi un Wowapi hanhan Yawapi in 1999, Vine Deloria, Jr. wrote the foreword. Deloria wrote that White Hat’s format for a book was not only usable but that someday others would be copying the manner in which he thought and wrote. Recently, while visiting a classroom on the Pine Ridge reservation, I heard a newly certified Lakota language teacher from a different reservation, teaching at Pine Ridge, say that linguists (those that certified her and others) have given White Hat’s approach, their “seal of approval." That finally an Indian got it right; or at least that’s what their approval seems to signify, to me, a fluent speaker. Deloria wasn’t a linguist but he knew scholarship when he saw it and he appreciated White’s approach for teaching Lakota. We all do. Those of us who have used White Hat’s book. I have even downloaded his keyboard from the web. I don’t ever use diacritics, except for the gutterals, but I recommend White Hat’s keyboard for students. I rely on a single dot over the consonants that have the guttural sound that students dread. Deloria wrote the forward for White Hat a few years before Deloria’s death, in it he wrote, “People often forget that language is a creation of people, of communities, and the interplay between and among members of families and the people who interact with them. Thus, the formality that has been given to languages does not exist in real life. People not only “break” the rules of grammar, but also rarely heed them, preferring instead to communicate with others." From an early age, I knew the language of children speaking Lakota and the language of Lakota adults. Later I knew the special language of oral tradition in Lakota story telling; and I knew the narrative voice of my mother wanting to tell us something about her life, our family, or just the Lakota people around us. I was fortunate to remember it all. Sometimes, I wish some things, I could forget. Most of what my Lakota parent taught, as I was the product of a single family household, except for a grandfather, and uncles and aunts passing through our house, sometimes staying for days, or only for a cup of coffee or tea. Most of what I heard was the Lakota language, the grammar inherent in it, that I learned to imitate. I remember the humor, too. The teasing, and the testing of boundaries Lakota people set around social interactions. The one that my various brothers-in-law enjoyed was the respect my mother accorded each of them, whether they deserved it or not. In our culture, a mother-in-law never speaks directly to her sons-in-law. Even if she was alone in a room with a son-in-law, it was a social rule to never directly address him, so she would have to find someone in the family to speak for her. There was always humor in the situation when she found herself in the company of sons-in-law. Another rule was to never call her sons-in-law by name, so my mother would refer to them by the name takos or if she were talking about him, she would again, avoid using his name and say mitakos.
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Watching these interactions was always fun for the adults and curious for the children because we were expected to watch, listen and learn. I did, I remember, but I have not yet practiced them. That’s how these things are forgotten when we forget to practice them. Today, I would be considered rude if I ignored a son-in-law, though I may have one someday, when I do, I’ll try to remember “takos." White Hat’s book is that way, it challenges students to use his book to practice saying kinship and relationship terms as he explains their use. Patient and wise, he may not have been a linguist, but he knew his language and the culture inherent in it: without language you can’t have culture. As Deloria writes in the foreword, “Once the words and phrases are seen in the context of people’s social lives…language comes naturally, it flows, and it educates…” He calls it the first real “people’s” grammar. So what if the linguists now practicing teaching our language and “certifying” teachers didn’t give their seal of approval? It wouldn’t matter, because those of us who come from those communities, whether at Rosebud, or Pine Ridge, know what fluency sounds like, even when it is written down, like White Hat’s. (Delphine Red Shirt can be reached at redshirtphd@gmail.com) Find the award-winning Lakota Country Times on the Internet, Facebook and Twitter and download the new Lakota Country Times app today.
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