Sunday, February 27, 2011

Noeg gishget yawen ngom....

Enjoy this day folks for it is another day of mercies and blessings the Spirit of all Life has given to us. Life is precious and we should always be thankful for it, the air we breathe and the fact we can get up and move about so freely....some folks can't and some folks won't be breathing any more....some folks barely have enough to eat and others have not the freedom they want and deserve....

All over this world people are suffering and fighting to be free......some folks don't have the liberty to take a free breath of fresh air.....so enjoy this day and glory in it......but don't forget to thank the God who gave it to us and let us be thankful for all things. It is so easy, too easy to give utterances of ungratefulness and to be sour on life. There are many folks who are happy without much, but there are many folks with everything and not much happiness at all.....what's up with that?

Be happy and give thanks for the day and to our Creator!

Enjoy this day of new mercies and blessings.....

Nin se Neaseno....

Friday, February 25, 2011

Good morning folks....

A few thoughts today on LIFE and the beauty of it....

There are many folks who don't appreciate the life given them by our Creator, nor the very air they breathe, much less the breath they take, which is all of the Spirit, given by Him/Her, maintained, cherished, and eventually called forth by the self same Spirit.

I never want to be so lax as to not know these several things or at least be aware of these principles of LIFE. I am so glad I can arise each morning and wiggle my toes, feel the pain my 71 year old legs give me sometimes, and step outside to take that first breath of cold clear Northern Wisconsin air. The fact that I can move at all, or take a breath I attribute to the same loving Creator who made me what I am today, and for always. I am Neshnabe and on Monday,  I go to Athens, MI to bury one of my students, Ruth Ann Chivis, who also was a dear friend and sister of the Neshnabe faith.

She is no longer alive but somewhere in the Universe awaiting her release so she can go home. I am the one the family has chosen to speak to her and give her that release to go among her distant relatives beyond. She will leave the kin and friends she has here among the living, but she will have our undying love and admiration. I, along with others, will still have the LIFE she once had and it is my intent to cherish it as long as our Creator will allow me to, and be happy the day He/She calls me forth into the Heavens.
I am glad to be alive.....

Nin se Neaseno.

Thursday, February 24, 2011

An Announcement....

Folks:

Today we are going to take the time to say farewell to a grand old lady,
an elder from the Huron Potawatomi Tribe, Ruth Ann Chivis, effectionately known to many of us as Edwegizhgokwe.
Many of you know her from the on line classes which she loved dearly.
She was active in her home community on the Pine Creek Potawatomi Reservation near Athens, MI, doing a host of activities nearly all the time.
I had the privilege of naming her as Edwegizhgokwe and she carried that name well with such joy and zest. She was also a great "support singer" often backing up the men from the community and others. She had a high clear voice and taught many young women many things about being a Neshnabe kwe and mentored many younger folks.

Edwegizhgokwe went home last night about 10:30 PM EST, according to her son in law, Arthur Zapata, who called me to inform me. I had journeyed to Kalamazoo, MI to go and pray for her while she was in the hospital there. Mamogosnan decided it was time to bring her home....guess he needed another "spirit lady" to sing around the drum up there. Others call them angels, we knew her simply as Edwegizhgokwe.

We will miss her, as her accustomed place in our on line classes will be empty now, and that will leave a big hole among us. She embraced her language and her culture and loved her family dearly.
Think well of her as she will be singing for all of us among the star nations now....put some semau down for her family. I shall be journeying there to her home reserve to conduct her funeral on Sunday. I believe her funeral will be on Monday though.

We say "bama mine iw pi emwajesnoyak zhi ednesyen".

Nin se Neaseno....

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

More on The Reason for our being......


Immersion Experiences and Why They Work

If you stop to speak to any instructor of any foreign language in any high school or college setting, and ask them “What is the best way to learn a language?”, they will inevitably tell you to go to where that language is spoken and surround yourself with it, so you hear it all the time.  Our brains are amazing sponges that can soak up experiences and interpret them to communicate with others, thus the absorption and use of languages.  Although it has been proven that young people, especially small children, can learn languages faster than adults, this does not mean that adults cannot learn!

Note that the immersion experience takes place where the language is spoken.  Where the language is spoken, the culture is practiced as well.  You can’t go to France to learn French, and not learn something about the culture as well.  The language and the culture go hand in hand.  They must be learned together. 

Stages of Language Learning:

1.      Recognition.  The brain recognizes that a different language is being spoken, and recognizes through the sounds, patterns, and intonations that it is a specific language, in this case, Potawatomi.
a.       As an adult learner, if you can recognize that a different language is being spoken, and you know what that language is…
b.      ….then you can learn it.
2.      Comprehension.  The brain hits on different words and parts of words, and understands what is being said. 
a.       As an adult learner, if you can recognize that a word in a language means something…
b.      ….then you can learn to respond to it.
3.      Usage.  The brain sends signals to the mouth with instructions on how to form a response to those words.  This is the process that takes the longest, and is the most frustrating for adult learners. 
a.       As an adult learner, practice is necessary to form new words. 
b.      Just as language is a form of communication between people, a line of communication must be opened from the brain to the mouth.  This takes time.

The Immersion Experience can speed this process by putting gentle pressure on the brain to recognize, comprehend, and respond to the language being spoken.  Through immersion, the process of language learning can be reduced by several years. 

Consider for a moment the infamous “Boarding School Experience” that has been cited as a major cause of native language decline.  In the boarding schools, the children were removed from their culture and placed in a new environment.  They were altered physically through the cutting of their hair and the change in their clothing.  They were unable to practice their traditional religion, and in many cases were given Christian religious instruction.  And they were unable to use their language, under threat of punishment.  They were required to learn English to ask for food, to meet other needs, to communicate; in short, to survive.  And it worked, too well in many cases, because the English language is now so predominant that many Native people no longer see the need for their own languages!  That was the original Immersion Experience, one that should never be repeated, but perhaps one that should be Reversed…

The Reverse Immersion Experience

What are you attempting to Reverse?  You are attempting to Reverse the dominance of the English language, and you are trying to Reverse the attitude of indifference toward the Potawatomi language.  You are trying to Reverse the indifference toward the Potawatomi culture and replace it with a sense of pride in belonging to such a wonderful nation.

Humans are physical beings who think in symbols.  They therefore need a physical connection to something before it becomes a reality for them.  Consider the tactics of the “Boarding Schools” – they altered the physical appearance of the children through hair and clothing.  They also removed the traditional objects, dismissed them as idol worship, and replaced them with Christian imagery.  How to reverse this?
Some suggestions:
·         Hair ties or jewelry representative of the culture
·         Ribbon Shirts or Traditional Dresses/Shawls
·         A cleverly designed T-shirt (let’s face it, material is expensive.)
·         A traditional craft that the people make themselves.
·         Something tangible that will cause the learner to remember these experiences, and the language involved.

Another aspect of reversal is the reversal of the fear and/or indifference many people have toward their Native spirituality, and specifically Potawatomi Ceremonies.  Consider these questions:
·         In your community, what is the ratio of those who identify as Traditional Practitioners, those who identify as Christian, and those who are indifferent to either?
·         What resources do you have available for ceremonies?  Are there grounds dedicated to such a purpose?
·         How difficult would it be to gather the materials necessary for a sweat lodge ceremony?  How many participants would be interested?
·         How difficult would it be to gather the materials necessary for a tobacco burning ceremony?  How many participants would be interested?


Folks:

We have done much of what we share with ya all here in this writing and have found many people do identify with much of this. It is a way to allow people to express themselves in a positive manner about their cultural experiences and language.

Again we encourage you to learn your heritage language and speak it as much as you can....

Nin se Neaseno..... 

Monday, February 21, 2011

Prayer request!

We had a prayer request this evening for a grand old lady who has been taking language with us for several years now, Ruth Ann Chivis, aka Edwegizhgokwe. She is in the hospital this evening and needs our prayers folks, so would ya all please join me in offering prayers for her and her family.

Migwej....

Don Perrot.

The reason for our being......


By Donald A. Perrot

Before you can resolve a problem, you have to define exactly what that problem is, and what caused it to exist.  The problem in question is the lack of use, or even interest in, the Potawatomi language.  It is a problem because the culture of the Potawatomi is defined by its language.  Without the language, the culture of the Potawatomi will become a shell of its former existence.

The language itself has been under tremendous pressure over the past 200 years.  Missionaries, educators, and government officials have promoted American English as the language of choice, and in many cases have caused a disadvantage to those who spoke their native language.  After the Indian Removal Act, the Dawes Act, and the Indian Relocation Act, many Potawatomies have been displaced from their traditional homelands, and removed from their traditional communities where the language and culture could have been learned.  Even on the reservations, the pressure to communicate with the BIA and other agencies has caused English to become the predominant language. 

The Potawatomi people are a sovereign nation consisting of 7 Sovereign US Bands, as well as several Canadian and Mexican bands.  What makes a Sovereign Nation unique?  It is the combination of a distinct language and a distinct culture. 

*  The revitalization of the Potawatomi language will promote Widoktadwen among the Potawatomi people.  Widoktadwen is a unique word to the Potawatomi language, and cannot be translated directly. It implies a sense of unity, togetherness, community, harmony, cooperation, communication, and a shared sense of belonging together.  It is a unique cultural component of the Potawatomi that cannot be defined in English terms. 

*  Through the Language, the Potawatomi people will be able to communicate with each other in their traditional cultural terms.  The Language will instill a sense of pride, a sense of belonging, and hopefully a sense of concern about the future of the Potawatomi people.

*  As English is retained within the community to communicate with the rest of America, the Potawatomi people have a unique opportunity to become a bilingual nation.  It has been proven in study after study that children and adults who are bilingual have an advantage in the American educational system.

*  The Potawatomi language is necessary for the survival of many aspects of traditional spiritual culture and is an important aspect of many Potawatomi ceremonies.  Through the language, the Potawatomi people will have the option to participate in these ceremonies, something that was once discouraged by the dominant society.


Just some thoughts on the Potawatomi language folks.....
Let's keep our language so folks will know who we are, eh?
Don't just be a card carrying Potawatomi, be one who speaks his/her language!

Iw enajomyan ngom......

Nin se Neaseno.

Sunday, February 20, 2011

An article on watching our language.....


Watch your language!



by Suzan Shown Harjo
Columnist

An "Indian" lexicon lies within the English language, coloring attitudes and actions toward Native Peoples. Most English-speakers do not even notice it exists, let alone that it degrades the Native subjects and the spoken and written word.

This sub rosa language uses the past tense almost exclusively, suggesting that Native Peoples do not live in the present or have a future. Commonly, American Indians once were and used to be, but rarely are or will be.

Curiously, with such an emphasis on the past, Native American history is scarcely recognized. In its place are legends, stories, myths or tales, and pre-history, meaning time before the 1492 Invasion. Which brings us to discover, as in, Europeans discovered India - that is, the Western Hemisphere - and (ahem) Indians.

In the language of discovery, they found and claimed our countries in the name of Manifest Destiny and the divine right of kings. Now, non-Natives are landowners, while American Indians are mere inhabitants who occupied this territory.

But, read on through the "Indian" dictionary and, if you need a guide, just ask the nearest scout.

American Indians eat maize, rather than corn, and game, not meat or fish. American Indians have ponies, rather than horses, and bison, instead of buffalo. And American Indian runners and ponies are swift - not fast, not speedy, only swift.

That's not Native American music or singing you hear - it's American Indian chanting and drumming. And Native American writing and art? Nope, only symbols or markings. American Indians have pow wows, not business meetings. Only American Indians seem to have plights.

Let others wear clothes, fashion and finery. American Indians are decked out in garb. Full Clevelands, Santa Fe style outfits, dashikis and saris all have their distinct identities on folks who are dressed, attired and adorned. Not us. We're garbed, in feathers, war paint, beads, braids, regalia, costumes and, well, you know - "Indian" garb.

It is important for Native Peoples to be familiar with this "Indian" lexicon, not only to try to change outside references and related behavior, but to avoid using the isolating and charged terminology ourselves and to communicate Native American messages in no uncertain terms.

American Indian children, when imprisoned in church and state schools, were force-fed an English that marginalized and belittled both relatives and cultures as savage and uncivilized. The kids were rewarded for using words that demeaned or distanced them from their past. They were punished for speaking their own languages or for expressing favorable thoughts about their homes and families.

After a century of generational indoctrination, many Native American adults today have internalized both the self-denigrating terminology and the attitudes, and often are the harshest critics of Native American languages and traditions.

Ordinarily, language is a tool of art and communication. In an abusive society, language is a control mechanism, too, and words are weapons used to signal status information, such as who are the inferior and superior folks.

Bullies communicate their status by size, stance, volume, numbers. Verbal bullies do so through put-downs, technical jargon, threats and lies.

The bully strips away self-identifiers - starting with group and individual names - and replaces them with terms of diminution or derision. Traditional names and pejoratives are then co-opted for the bully's playthings and places.

Over the past 150 years, for example, the historic white man all but eliminated Dakota, Lakota and Nakota as recognized titles of languages and nations, converting them to names of locations, vehicles, teams and products. These national names were reshaped into one distorted identity, Sioux, a word in the Anishnabe language for snake or enemy.

Name-calling and cultural thievery are most noticeable in sports these days. When objections are raised, the practices are recast as the innocent sounding nicknaming. A reasonable person can understand why another would object to leveling epithets or stealing identities, but it sounds petty to struggle against a little ol' nickname. In this way, the issue and the person raising it are held up to ridicule, mostly in news stories about objections to ridiculing.

While nouns pose the worst problem - redskins and squaws most prominently - the verbs are troubling, as well. Sports writers never write that cowboys or Vikings scalp anyone, despite ample historical evidence to the contrary. No, in sports headlines, scalping is done by chiefs, Indians and braves.

Don't look in literature or educational materials for American Indians who walk, jump or skip. "Indians" roam. Antelope and elk roam, but "Indians" are the only people who do. The United States even officially outlawed "Indian" roaming, for 56 years in the 1800s and 1900s, regulating that "all nomadic Indians ... will not be allowed to roam away from their reservations without any specific object in view." 

 

 

Ms Harjo makes some interesting points here.....

I recall several years ago when a certain Phillip M. Parker, developed a computer generated dictionary on Potawatomi, which he had copied from various sources. This is quite easy to do with today's technology being as is, and this man called this so called dictionary his publication.

It was full of errors and should have been banned by all the Bodewadmik who knew of it, but several top ranking tribal officials from one of the Potawatomi bands were seen brandishing it as though some trophy. One tribal chairperson even had his own secret copy tucked away in his briefcase, and rumor has it he still has it to this day, even though Phillip M. Parker, has been legally censured by the Maori Nation for trying to do the same to their language. In fact, Amazon took his remaining books off their sales and refused to sell them any longer.  

It is interesting that many Native American people have totally accepted the printed word, and often see it as the gospel truth. i.e., what gets published must be true, and they do nothing about questioning what is published, nor the authors of some of the stuff they buy and come to trust in, often quoting it liberally. In short, they don't take the time to authenticate the books they buy. This was true of Phillip Parker's books on the Anishinabe languages he did.

Thank goodness the rest of his books have been censured, but folks, Amazon still sells some of his computer generated stuff he did on the Abenaki language, the Hmong language, and a few others, because no one registered a complaint against them and Dr. Parker. I wonder just how long we Neshnabek will feel and suffer the effects of colonization, for that is what all this is. Even some of our people calling themselves Indians, instead of by their tribal name, accepting reservation land as their only land, when all of America was our country. This is a mark of colonization and what the long term effects can be.........

Learn your language. It will tell you who you really are, it will give you your inherent rights and much, much more as a Neshnabe, for that is what we call ourselves in our language. Other groups call themselves by a host of other names, but not Indian.

Iw enajmoyan ngom........nin se Neaseno.

Saturday, February 19, 2011

It's all about time folks....


"What happens in subsections of seconds? In a tenth of a second, we find the proverbial 'blink of an eye,' for that's how long the act takes. In a hundredth of a second, a hummingbird can beat its wings once. ... A millisecond, 10-3 seconds, is the time it takes a typical camera strobe to flash. Five-thousandths of a second is also the time it takes a Mexican salamander ... to snag its prey.

"In one microsecond, 10-6 seconds, nerves can send a message from that pain in your neck to your brain. On the same scale, we can illuminate the vast difference between the speed of light and that of sound: in one microsecond, a beam of light can barrel down the length of three of our metric-resistant football fields, while a sound wave can barely traverse the width of a human hair.

"Yes, time is fleeting, so make every second and every partitioned second count, including nanoseconds, or billionths of a second, or 10-9 seconds. Your ordinary computer certainly does. In a nanosecond, the time it takes you to complete one hundred-millionth of an eye blink, a standard microprocessor can perform a simple operation: adding together two numbers. ... The fastest computers perform their calculations in picoseconds, or trillionths of a second, that is, 10-12 seconds. ...

"Ephemera, however, are all relative. When physicists, with the aid of giant particle accelerators, manage to generate traces of a subatomic splinter called a heavy quark, the particle persists for a picosecond before it decays adieu. Granted, a trillionth of a second may not immediately conjure Methuselah or Strom Thurmond to mind, but Dr. [Robert] Jaffe observed that the quark fully deserves its classification among physicists as a long-lived, 'stable' particle. During its picosecond on deck, the quark completes a trillion, or 1012, extremely tiny orbits. By contrast our seemingly indomitable Earth has completed a mere 5 x 109 orbits around the sun in its 5 billion years of existence, and is expected to tally up only maybe another 10 billion laps before the solar system crumples and dies. ... In a very real sense, then, our solar system is far less 'stable' than particles like the heavy quark. ...

"Scaling down to an even less momentous moment, we greet the attosecond, a billionth of a billionth of a second, or 10-18 seconds. The briefest events that scientists can clock, as opposed to calculate, are measured in attoseconds. It takes an electron twenty-four attoseconds to complete a single orbit around a hydrogen atom - a voyage that the electron makes about 40,000 trillion times per second. There are more attoseconds in a single minute than there have been minutes since the birth of the universe.

"Still, physicists keep coming back to the nicking of time. In the 1990s, they inducted two new temporal units into the official lexicon, which are worth knowing for their appellations alone: the zeptosecond, or 10-21 seconds, and the yoctosecond, or 10-24 seconds. The briskest time span recognized to date is the chronon, or Planck time, and it lasts about 5 x 10-44 seconds. This is the time it takes light to travel what could be the shortest possible slice of space, the Planck length, the size of one of the hypothetical 'strings' that some physicists say lie at the base of all matter and force in the universe."

In the midst of all this heavy scientific talk, we are losing our language. Some say we are not, but we are losing the definitive way we fluent speakers speak and pronounce the old words. Speaking of that, we have lost many of the old words, for there are many words no longer in use today. Some speakers may know a few of those old words but no longer use them much, for there is no one who would understand us; and folks, there are only 7 fluent speakers left, of which I am the youngest at 71. No matter what anyone attempts to tell you! 
The folks on FB say they are using our language, but it is "baby talk" compared to what I am addressing this morning. If we tried to speak with some of them, they cannot understand the fluent speech we do, at the rapidity with which we say our words to one another when communicating with another fluent speaker. I know cuz when I have addressed some of them, they all tell me the same thing, "You speak too fast for me", or "I only know a certain way to speak", or "I am not aware of that way", or many
other excuses they make for not being able to understand the old language. 
The startling fact, we are losing our language, for with the passing of the last fluent speaker from this Earth scene, ya all will have lost the fluency of this language I speak of and still speak.
Oh, you shall have a remnant of the language, with some would-be speakers who can say a few words, but they will not have the fluency we have had and still have, and go to our graves with.
I am not trying to scare anyone, I am trying to motivate folks to get in there with the fluent speakers and learn how to correctly pronounce the old words. Don't listen to some of these "johnny come lately" folks who think they are speakers.  

Iw enajmoyan.....
Neaseno.