Delphine Red Shirt. Photo by Rich Luhr / Flickr
The argument for fluent speakers in classrooms
By Delphine Red Shirt
Lakota Country Times Columnist
www.lakotacountrytimes.com If we follow the advice of experts (linguists) intent on “saving” our languages, they use a top down approach where they know everything and we, at the bottom know nothing, even though it’s our language and we continue to speak it. Yet, as the presidential candidate Bernie Sanders stated in his campaign speech, “real change comes from the bottom-up,” from the people. So, it’s up to us to figure out how best to teach it among ourselves. The argument for fluent speakers in the classroom is strengthened when we think about how infants or wakanyeja learn language. Only a fluent speaker can navigate that river of sound that is the spoken Lakota language. The rhythm of sounds, pauses, pitch, and volume of the language is even more important than a reading or writing system. It’s what I heard growing up and it was what I preferred as late as my ninth grade year in high school: Lakota over English. Most experts say that by twelve months, or one winter, wakanyeja are able to say single words and then join those words into short phrases. How infants do this is a mystery but by three waniyetu (winters) they are able to speak in complete sentences and tell you what they want. Most scholars agree that you can’t learn a language until you know the words and you can’t make out the words until you know the language, so it’s like the age old question: which comes first, the prairie chicken or the egg? In graduate school, I suffered through a linguistics course where we looked at African languages, among other languages, to see if we could recognize patterns. Once you recognize those patterns you can give a best guess in how that language is structured and how it might work. In the course I took in linguistics, these languages that linguists have collected are randomly thrown at you until you learn how patterns work in most human languages. For me, the class was sometimes frustrating, but the Lakota virtue of patience paid off. In Lakota, like any other language in the human family, there are definite patterns in the language that once you master them, the language gets easier and easier to understand and learn. It would take a fluent speaker to recognize them and to teach them in a way that the learner can also pick up on those patterns and follow along until she or he knows them. It’s how wakanyeja learn. They listen and unspe iciyapi (learn) to recognize sound and syllables so that they know where one word stops and where one word begins by the order of sounds. What’s even more amazing about wakanyeja is that they learn the circumstance in which the word is used as young as they are.
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They do this by grouping words together to tell you what they want or what they want you to do for them. Sometimes they just point, but in the end, they learn to communicate by imitating the language their caretaker speaks: ina (pronounced ee-nah meaning “mom”), ate (ah-the meaning “dad”), or unci (un-chee meaning grandmother). As you may have read from an earlier column I wrote: hoksila wan mani, or “A boy is walking,” is an easy sentence for a wakanyeja to learn. But a parent teaching that wakanyeja, Lakota for the first time, might say, “hoksila mani,” simply, “boy-walk.” It’s how a toddler learns language first. The most amazing orators are those that speak their own languages and fluent speakers know that. Those comfortable in that knowledge are able to teach through sound and through sound, meaning. Our language isn’t complex. What gets in the way is that since contact with those outside our culture, we have stopped trusting ourselves, our ways. And we let others tell us that the top-down approach is best. I challenge every fluent speaker to learn a song for a child and to sing that song at any school gathering, on KILI radio, to your children, grandchildren. Trust that you know what is best to keep Lakota going for the wakanyeja. (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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