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Oneida spoken here-Eight taking classes in tribe's language to keep it alive

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Oneida spoken here

Eight taking classes in tribe's language to keep it alive

Wednesday, October 06, 2004
By Glenn Coin
Staff writer

When Oneida Indian Nation leaders decided last year to team up with Berlitz, a language company, to teach the Oneida language, they ran into a problem: No one in the New York tribe spoke it fluently.

So the nation imported two teachers from the Oneida tribe in Ontario, Canada, who have been passing on the language to eight New York Oneidas in a 40-hour-a-week class that began in February. The hope is that those eight - who graduate Oct. 22 - will teach the language to others and keep it alive.

"I don't want to see it die, and it's dying," said Sheri Beglen, one of the Oneidas taking the Berlitz course. "It's a dire situation for the language, probably more than anyone realizes."

"There's no one left," adds fellow student Penny Raymond. "The only way to keep it going is for us to step in and learn it and teach it."

The course is the nation's biggest effort so far to preserve the Oneida language. Scattered classes over the years have taught some Oneidas some words, but not enough for them to become fluent.

"We could teach you 10,000 words, but if you don't know how to put them in a sentence, it doesn't matter," said Ray George, one of two teachers brought in from the Oneida of the Thames reservation in Ontario.

To teach the language, the nation contacted Berlitz in late 2002 for help. The worldwide language company, known for its conversational approach to teaching, has worked with the Lakota tribe in South Dakota. The Oneida project is far more extensive, said Deniz Ghrewati, Berlitz's district director for New England.

"It was everything from learning the language to teaching the techniques to providing the materials," Ghrewati said. "It's a total program."

Berlitz provided detailed course materials in English last fall. George and Norma Jamieson, the other teacher, then spent several months translating the material into Oneida.

Everyone agrees that was the hardest part. The ancient Oneida language, which wasn't written down until the 1940s, doesn't have words for many modern items and ideas.

Among them: corporation and computer. For corporation, George substituted the Oneida word meaning a group of people. For computer, he combined the Oneida words for movies and typewriter, words of recent origin themselves.

Another difficulty with learning Oneida is the complexity and length of the words.

"Some of these words are so long," George said, "that even I have to stop and break it down to understand what that word is."

The nation pays the students to take the course. Raymond said she gave up a better-paying job in the nation's child-care center so she could learn the language.

"That's how important it is to me," she said.

The students will graduate from their language course Oct. 22, then attend a two-week training session with Berlitz instructors on how to teach the language. It's not clear yet, Beglen said, how they will begin teaching the rest of the Oneida nation.

George's parents spoke so much Oneida at home, he said, that "I did not know a lot of English when I went to school."

He didn't teach the language to his children, though, and now regrets it.

"When you become older in life, then you really appreciate your language, especially when you see the danger of the elders dying off," said George, 67. "In the near future, I'm going to be one of the few elders who speak the language."

Of the 500 Thames Oneidas who spoke the language 20 years ago, he said, only 100 are still alive.

George hopes the Oneida-Berlitz partnership will help keep the language alive.

"It's the biggest step I have seen any Oneida group do," George said. "This is only the first step, but they're doing it well."

© 2004 The Post-Standard. Used with permission.

Copyright 2004 syracuse.com. All Rights Reserved.

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FROM: THE NEW YORK TIMES NEWSPAPER

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eida.html&tn_
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Oneida Journal
Saving Oneidas' Language, One Long Word at a Time



By MICHELLE YORK
Published: July 18, 2005

ONEIDA, N.Y. - In 1999, Marion Johns was near death.
Advanced Alzheimer's disease had left her bedridden and erased many of her
memories. Still, one day, she turned to her daughter, Penny Raymond, and
crooned a few words that Penny did not understand.

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Li-Hua Lan for The New York Times
Sunny Shenandoah, of Oneida, teaching students how to count to 10 in the
Oneida language as part of an effort to revive the language.

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Li-Hua Lan for The New York Times
Penny Raymond helps Jared Rose, 10, learn Oneida numerals.


Mrs. Raymond's sister, Shirley Mason, recognized them, though, and
translated: "My beautiful little baby."
Mrs. Johns had reverted back to an intricate, difficult American Indian
language she had learned as a child - Oneida. "She never spoke it to us growing
up," said Mrs. Raymond, 51.
Few of the 500 members of the Oneida Indian Nation who live on or near this
reservation about 30 miles east of Syracuse knew their language. Among Mrs.
Raymond's generation, the number of native speakers here was all but
nonexistent, and scarce also among Oneida tribes in Wisconsin and Canada. The language
was nearly lost.
That day, listening to her mother on her deathbed ignited a desire for Mrs.
Raymond to keep her language alive. "What's going to happen if we start losing
this part of our culture?" she asked. "It's like losing a part of
yourselves."
Six years later, Mrs. Raymond is not only fluent in Oneida, but she is also
passing it on. On a recent summer day, she and Geraldine Feeley were working
at their jobs as language teachers, coaxing a handful of young students
attending summer camp to count from 1 to 10 in Oneida.
The classes were the result of the most unusual and ambitious projects ever
undertaken by an American Indian tribe. The Oneida Indian Nation contracted
with the language experts at Berlitz to create an intensive curriculum. Then
the tribe paid eight people, Mrs. Raymond and Mrs. Feeley among them, to study
Oneida full time for eight months so they could become fluent. Now, those
eight students, who ranged from 26 to 63, have become language instructors and
are teaching others, especially the young. "Somebody had to do something to
save it," said Sheri Beglen, 45, an instructor.
The Oneida Nation has offered language classes since the 1980's. But they
were held once or twice a week, too infrequently to be of much use. Then there
was the difficulty of the language itself. "The words were so long you had to
take a breath to finish pronouncing it," said Brian Patterson, a
representative of the Bear Clan, one of three groups that make up the Oneida tribe.
He remembered one moment when he stared at a block of words that formed a
largely useless phrase. "The interpretation was 'She wears a wristwatch,' " he
said. "At that moment, I got so frustrated because I couldn't remember the
last time I said that in English, let alone say it in my language. Our elders
were not teachers."
With no more than the limited financial resources the tribe possessed at the
time, the Oneida language might have died out. But in 1993, the tribe opened
its Turning Stone casino and resort near Oneida. Today it is the largest
employer in a three-county region and generates millions in annual revenue. That
allowed the Oneidas to pull themselves out of poverty and invest in cultural
projects - chief among them language preservation.
From the outset, the task was daunting. They had few materials to work with.
Oneida, like many American Indian languages, was primarily a spoken language,
not a written one. In 1939, a Yale anthropologist and expert in American
Indian languages, Floyd G. Lounsbury, gave Oneida standardized grammar rules
which were embraced by all Oneidas and allowed the language to be written.
The tribe first needed to find experts.
"I was passing through one year and they were asking me if I knew any fluent
speaker who would work with them," said Ray George, 66, who learned Oneida as
his first language and lives on the Oneida Nation of the Thames reservation
in Ontario, Canada. "Jokingly, I said, 'If you send me a good contract, maybe
I'll consider it myself.' Two weeks later I got a call."
Mr. George knew how to speak Oneida. A colleague from Ontario knew how to
write it. Together they worked with the local Oneidas to translate English
phrases into their native language. Then they provided that information to
Berlitz so it could develop a curriculum. "For us, it was tough; we don't know
Oneida," said Deniz Ghrewati, a Berlitz director, who estimated that among 400
American Indian languages, half are no longer in use.
Only one other American Indian tribe, the Lakota tribe, has enlisted the help
of Berlitz to preserve its language, but not with the same vigor as the
Oneidas, said Ms. Ghrewati. "They were desperate."
In the Oneida program, a few tears were shed during the intense training, and
one of the students quit. "There were days it was so hard," Mrs. Raymond
said. "At night I couldn't sleep cause my mind was going over Oneida words. It
was just pounded into our heads."
Ms. Ghrewati came to the Oneida reservation for a recent graduation ceremony.
"I was actually amazed," she said. "They were joking in Oneida."
But the success of the language program will ultimately depend on how well
the teachers can spread Oneida among the tribe's youth. One student in Mrs.
Raymond's class, Jared Rose, 10, played a few language games with a competitive
streak. "It's really fun, actually, to learn the language," he said. "My mom
and dad, as soon as I walk in the door, they surround me. They say, 'What
have you learned today?' "
The time has long passed when Mrs. Raymond could converse with her mother in
their native language. Today, she has other goals, saying, "I want to teach
my grandchildren."