The life of a language

Gayle Cottrill
Thu, 03 Nov 2011 17:15:39 +0000
Culture, Encounter, Cottrill, culture, encounter, Green Bay, language, top posts

By Gayle Cottrill

They are the People of the Standing Stone, the onʌyoteˀa·ká· .

Forced from their home in New York to the Green Bay area in the 1920s, the Oneida People have spent nearly two centuries rebuilding a homeland. But the greatest problem they face as a nation today stems from the threat of extinction of their language. Tribal members are now fighting to keep their language and the very essence of their culture alive.

yakwé·yaleɁ “We Remember”

When the Oneida moved to Wisconsin from New York under the order of treaties and the United States Removal Policy, they were granted land that had belonged to the Ho-Chunk and Menominee nations. According to Randy Cornelius, a staff member of the Oneida Cultural Heritage Department, a combination of poor farming soil and scattered family plots was one of the first challenges the Oneida faced upon arriving to their new home, making it difficult to live as they had in New York.

The Oneida hold ceremonies at the longhouse. Photo by Gayle Cottrill.

Shirley Barber and Delora Cornelius, both retired teachers and members of the Oneida Nation, recall a more resounding affront to their culture once in Wisconsin, that of Oneida children being forcefully removed from their parents and placed into Catholic-run boarding schools. The children were taken at a young age, often between ages 5 and 10, and remained at school until their teens. The schools’ mission, Randy explains, was to “kill the Indian, save the man.”

At school, the children feared to speak their native languages and take part in cultural traditions. Even the slightest display of tribal connections or interaction between siblings led to severe punishment. For Shirley’s and Delora’s parents, the boarding schools instilled a fear that is still present in the Oneida culture today. Nearly an entire generation suffered through years of punishment for practicing their ways and speaking their native languages, essentially having their culture beaten out of them.

Once the schools shut down and children could remain with their parents, the Oneida members had difficulty forgetting the past. The children who grew up in the schools remembered what happened when just one Oneida word was spoken. Because of that residual fear, many people did not teach their children the Oneida language. Shirley and Delora were among those children who never learned Oneida as their native language, and now the community is trying to combat the lack of native speakers.

“Fear still has a lot to do with it from the way our parents were brought up and grandparents were,” Shirley says. “They think, ‘Oh, if I go back to the traditional ways, that sometime, somewhere, somehow, I’ll be penalized.’”

But now, through culture and language programs, traditional ways are once again returning to the Oneida nation, revitalizing what was nearly lost in the early 1900s.

onʌyoteˀa·ká· “People of the Standing Stone”

Even though the language isn’t as active as it once was in the Oneida Nation, it still has been written down, preserving the ways of the Oneida for 160 years. According to Ye’shatstʌslaha:wi (She Carries Strength), director of the Oneida Language Revitalization Program, it wasn’t until the 1980s when the first ceremonial longhouse was built on the Oneida reservation. Longhouses were the traditional homes of the Oneida and play an integral part in their community and cultural practices.

The Oneida have 13 traditional longhouse ceremonies that celebrate life, death and the earth. However, these ceremonies were nonexistent from the time the first Oneida arrived in Wisconsin until the first ceremonial longhouse was built. The culture existed only through the life and perseverance of the language, kept alive by native speakers.

“It’s a huge, huge feat to revitalize something like that,” Ye’shatstʌslaha:wi says. “It’s kind of a phenomenon, really. You can speak your language fluently, but yet you don’t have an idea of how your traditional culture and ways are practiced.”

And, despite years of not participating in longhouse ceremonies, the ideals and values of the culture are still intact, which has been a crucial tool in teaching the Oneida language and in turn revitalizing the Oneida culture.

“Everything in our culture begins with our spoken language, to know it and to know yourself through that language and to know your people through that language,” Ye’shatstʌslaha:wi says. But one challenge has been to teach the language in a way that also illustrates the cultural meanings embedded in each syllable.

Randy, who has been studying the Oneida language for 30 years and has been teaching it since 1996, is an advocate for the Oneida language and incorporates it into lessons about the origins of Oneida words. His classes look into the parts of words and discuss where words come from,

Oneida is a complex language. Pointing to a table, Randy calls it by its Oneida name that means “what’s used to put food on.” The type of table changes depending on the detail of what is put on it.

Randy says each word “describes its function, and that’s how a language is. It’s a very descriptive language, and so a native speaker could name everything in this house in the language based on its function.” Even words to describe humans are complex. The Oneida word for man, for example, embodies the idea and vision of what a man is and should be to his family and community.

The emphasis on where words come from is part of the new focus for teaching language in order to revitalize the cultural aspects and incorporate the cultural components of each Oneida word, Randy says.

According to Professor Cliff Abbott, Ph.D., of UW-Green Bay, the Oneida language carries with it meanings that can be lost through simple translations. While studying the language, Abbott has realized that defining words is not always easy.

“In English, if somebody says the word medicine to you, what pops into your head?” he asks. “I would guess it’s probably going to be a little vial of pills. If you say the corresponding word in Oneida, ‘onúhkwaɁt,’ I would guess what pops into their heads is some sort of plant, something in the natural world.”

According to Abbott, a simple translation from the Oneida word to the English word hides the cultural connections and associations. For instance, words for family relatives are verbs in Oneida, not nouns like they are in English. For example, “my mother” means “she is parent to me.” In English, personal relationships often use possessives such as my friend, my dad or my cousin, making it seem like someone owns someone else. “That’s a little subtle difference,” Abbott says, “but I think it has consequences in how people think about other people.”

ʌ yuky ʌ to·lá·se Ɂ “It Will Be Difficult For Us”

The Oneida Cultural Heritage Department, managed by Anita Barber, has developed educational and therapeutic

For centuries, Oneida Hymn Singers have sung Christian hymns for special events. Photo courtesy of the Oneida Cultural Heritage Department.

programs to inform the community about the struggles to preserve and revitalize the Oneida culture and also help heal the wounds from a history of oppression.

The community in general faces more than just a loss of many first-language speakers. Internal prejudices and damaging mentalities still affect how some Oneida deal with issues like education, alcoholism and living as an Oneida on and off the reservation. Generational healing sessions have been instituted to help discuss how to move beyond such issues that stem from past fear and hardship that have trickled down into younger generations.

Since the 1930s, preserving the Oneida language has been an ongoing project, and, according to Ye’shatstʌslaha:wi, it is already preserved. Now the challenge is to revitalize it and bring it back to everyday life. Ye’shatstʌslaha:wi has studied the Oneida language for more than 10 years and is working with six other staff members of the Language Revitalization Program to educate community members about the language. The longhouse ceremonies have played an important role in achieving that goal.

The program continues to strive toward its mission to help Oneida members become functional speakers. It has been successful in establishing a language development plan to help adult learners become functional speakers in less than five years, Ye’shatstʌslaha:wi says.

Even though the Oneida have had some success in their endeavors to help revitalize a dying culture, not all tribes have been so lucky.

“For many nations, they’re on the verge of extinction with their language,” Randy says. “That’s where we are today.”

It’s the harsh reality of what is happening. Randy solemnly admits, “Realistically, 10 years from now, 15 years from now maybe at the most, there’s not going to be any speakers left in our community where Oneida is their first language.”

He and so many others in the Oneida community are working to push past challenge after challenge, but the battle hasn’t been won. The Heritage Department believes collaboration with school systems and other language immersion programs is needed. The department continues to look for more ways to revitalize the Oneida culture and language.

Despite the decline in native speakers, the language has still been preserved and has helped to sustain the life of a culture.

“Everything that’s in our culture begins with our language, or spoken language I should say. To know it and to know yourself through that language and to know your people through that language: It’s like this huge umbrella that just covers everything that is about what makes people Oneida,” Ye’shatstʌslaha:wi says.

Efforts from Oneida community members have begun to take effect to ensure that the traditions and history of the Oneida Nation are revitalized and will live on through many future generations of the Oneida, Wisconsin’s People of the Standing Stone.