This was written and posted here in 2016:
Are Sauk, Latin, Myskoke, Chickasaw languages asleep or is there something more going on? It’s easy to say they’re dead or on the point of extinction (in five years 70 of the remaining 139 Native American languages will “disappear”). But are they really going to be dead? Will they just be asleep? What’s really going on with these languages?
In my view, Jacob (Sauk), John and Robert (Latin), Kate (Myskoge), (Wade) Cherokee and Josh Hinson (Chickasaw) may intuitively want to do more than just “wake up” or “revitalize” their languages. Maybe they want to hear them again, loudly and everywhere amidst the laughter and tears of life – fully alive again.
Are their goals to revive the culture via the language? The culture has been destroyed, either by time (Latin) or intentionally (U.S. Government systematically from 1900 to 1950 – see http://www.culturalsurvival.org/programs/elc/program).
It surely is about keeping the culture on life support and bringing it back to vibrancy via the language, of course. That’s what is needed when talking about these “disappearing” languages. They are not disappearing at all. There is more going on here. Might they be just resting?
When the Arapahoe people were living on the very land my house sits on as write this near the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, do the sounds made there by those who lived here remain as the extreme faintest of echos in the ether (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzV9QExGFQs). Could there be a place where those sounds still live, parallel universe of not? Are those working to preserve these languages drawn by that echo? Is that what fuels their courage?
Sometimes, on a long bike ride in the mountains I will stop and sit in the quiet spaces that overlook the magnificent vistas that we are blessed with in Colorado. I close my eyes for a minute or two and then – because my eyes were closed – when I open them again I see a lot more than I could see before: single trees that I just didn’t see before, valleys, lakes, snowbanks (even in August) appear as if by magic once I have given my senses a chance to open up to them, to see more deeply.
So also, I ask if it is possible that there is more to hear in the world of sound? Could we, if we listen closely enough, maybe hear the echoes of words which still remain somewhere in the air from centuries past? I know, it’s weird, but it’s my blog so I get to say what I want, to think how I want. I am drawn by an echo. I am drawn by respect for indigenous lives lived. I am drawn by heroic actions that still reverberate in this world, but are constantly drowned out by the society that we live in now.
Where do words go after they are spoken? Am I right? Could there be a kind of residue, an echo, of them left over somewhere? Although each day they become fainter and fainter, might they exist in some parallel universe of sound that we can’t get to yet, but when we learn to breathe the new life into them, when we set out to wake them up, might they come back to a level where we could hear them?
I’m not a dreamer on this. I know that with the right language curriculum we can do what I describe above.
If one accepts the existence of an invisible world, an active place where all sorts of things are going on that we can’t see and so don’t pay any attention to, maybe there is also an inaudible world, a place where sounds/words go after they are made/spoken.
I’m drawn to the possibility of hearing such echoes. I probably won’t be able to in this lifetime, but wouldn’t it just be the finest thing to be able to sit down on some land and try to feel what it was like before the invasions happened, to sit on some land perhaps in central Oklahoma, and just listen, and at least try to hear those voices from cultures that have lived on that land for thousands of years?
Thinking about that makes me weep.