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LANGUAGE AS CULTURE: PRESERVATION AND SURVIVAL.
Years ago the elders told us, "If you don't speak the language you can't understand the culture." Many of us experienced anger, hurt, and frustration because we were the second or third generations removed from our languages. The elders had experienced the trauma of United States government policies in boarding schools, where they were severely punished if caught speaking their languages and were indoctrinated to believe that native languages were inferior to English. These boarding schools, which operated from the late nineteenth century into the 1930s, were praised for helping the American Indian "assimilate" into the Western world. Since the 1970s those of us who were denied our languages through this process understand clearly that the United States policy which attempted to destroy our languages amounted to a form of ethnocide.
The results of the boarding school policy are troubling: some native communities have entirely lost their language, while in other communities the remaining speakers of the language are the elders and the younger generations speak only English. Thankfully, there are also some native communities where, despite the integrationist policy, the languages continue to be spoken throughout the community. Some of the elders, who as children were subjected to boarding schools, refused to teach their languages to the next generation to spare the children the pain and suffering they experienced. Others stubbornly refused to forget their languages. When we asked this generation to teach us, they willingly invested years of their lives to do so. The contemporary struggle to learn our languages, or relearn because they are within us, has depended on those rare elders who continue to speak the...