In the end, one woman passes on what's left of Indian tribe's language

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/longterm/stories/012008dnmetwichita.2d212de.html


ANADARKO, Okla. – The silence can't be far off now, Doris knows. She'll die and an old Indian language will die and the world will move on slightly smaller than before.

No, she never expected to be the last one, the fair-skinned illegitimate daughter of a Wichita woman and white father. But everyone just kept disappearing: her mom, Mae, and brother, Newton, and tribal elders like Bertha Provost and then Vivian McCurdy five Decembers ago.

Now it's just her, Doris Jean Lamar McLemore, the 80-year-old last fluent speaker of the Wichita language, driving alone through the dense fog of an early November morning to preserve what's left. Like most Fridays of late, she left her small house behind a budget motel before 8 a.m., rattling in a white Ford Escort wagon down a two-lane highway to the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes complex.

There she parks and limps inside a brown portable building that doubles as a kitchen where most mornings she makes biscuits and gravy for tribal workers. But today she sits dutifully at the table with the plastic pumpkin tablecloth until Terri Parton arrives with the laptop, connects a microphone and begins to record a list of words and phrases.

I feel like I'm losing something when they go

Feels like something vital is leaving the world...another way of grasping and understanding is being lost to us

It's just so sad

and just leaves you with a feeling of loss that is unexplainable.

:applause: :applause: :applause:

I'm happy that the language is being preserved, but sad that she is the only one who still speaks it and she's 80. Too bad there isn't a gifted linguist to learn the language and have a conversation with her, to help preserve the song of the language.

Me, I have such a bad ear for languages, I'm not sure if I could pick up one if I was living among people who only spoke another language. But, I knew a guy about 35 years ago, who worked in a tire place. He had such a gift for languages it was amazing. He was about 20, but already could understand about 25 languages and could speak about 10 or more. He could pick up a language just by listening to it. I tried to get him to find out what it would take to work at the UN, but he didn't seem interested.

zalinda

Your account of guy at the tire place, reminds me of my contacts with individuals who had a 'natural' talent. The naturals seem to not like encounters with professionals who feel a need to 'train' them the 'right way'.

will have completely disappeared. A recording of some words and phrases will reside in a library as a curiosity. We will remember the name Wichita as a town, not as the name of a whole people - gone and forgotten.

So much can be learned about us from our languages.....

called "Lost Tribes, Lost Knowledge" about the fact that the vocabularies of many local languages encode knowledge that's available nowhere else on Earth. So when those languages die out because younger speakers have been ensnared by western cultural imperialism, the knowledge is lost too.

The article mentioned the efforts of the (few) people, mostly in academia, who purposefully seek out the local elders who are guardians of their people's knowledge. They do it ostentatiously, with hoopla, all kinds of technical trappings, and open deference, their goal being both to capture the knowledge before it's lost AND to make it subtly clear to the younger people that those elders are far from being useless old fogies; that they're people of incalculable worth and power.

And these archaeologists were trying to determine if there was an entire new species of human beings discovered in this area off Sri Lanka.

What impressed me the most is that they asked the tribal elder to come down to the thatched hut where they were recording measurements of people's physical characteristics.

And the children in the area absolutely went crazy with happiness - that their tribal elder was coming into their area. They were laughing and crowding around him. Trying to touch him and to get close. No matter that he was frail beyond belief and very old.

Kids in our society would never have that kind of reaction.