O'siyo Brothers and Sisters! I am now archiving these as NA-NEWS. This issue is nanews01.002. In the event there is a Native American RoundTable established, I will offer the Lead SysOp the opportunity to post these digests if he or she so desires to do so. In that way there will be a chronicle of events that effect the path of those who walk with us. Until and unless a Native American RoundTable can be a reality there needs to be a method to make others aware of plights and opportunities to help others on the Red Road. The phases of the moon for the month of April 1993 are as follows: Tue Apr 06 - FULL Tue Apr 13 - LAST QTR Wed Apr 21 - NEW Thu Apr 29 - 1ST QTR Here is the news items I have collected for this digest. Mitaquye Oyasin! Night Owl ----------------------- clip here for news features -- 8< --------- ---------- "abenaki update" ---------- 1/29/93-missisquoi, socalled state of vermont--the "fair trial" of chief homer st. francis ended today with a mistrial as one of the jurors fells asleep duing upoening statements by the defense, but the states atty will be bringing the chief back to court in 60 days to face the same trumped up charges, wasting more of the Abenaki Nation's time and resources. The Abenaki are in need of technical, material and finacial support of all kinds as well as simply getting the wrod out. please contact the Abenaki tribal council, pobox 276 Missisquoi vermont 05488 for more infor. ---------- "Sioux language at Stanford" ---------- Original Sender: lyn@anchor.esd.sgi.com (Lyn Dearborn) Reprinted without permission from the San Jose Mercury News, 3/2/92 Written by Barbara Koh, Staff Writer SOUNDS OF SIOUX ECHO AT STANFORD Calvin Fast wolf is on a crusade to spread his Sioux language under the red-tile roofs of Stanford University. "Dances With Wolves" introduced millions to the rippling sound of Lakota, but the five students in Fast Wolf's intermediate Lakota class are well past the introduction. They huddle around a table in a closet of a room, fussing over the six variants of "to come" and "to go" and the permutations for coming and going home. One of them, half-German and half-Sioux Kaydee Culbertson, asked Stanford to organize the class so she could talk with her grandmother and other relatives. Now when she speaks Lakota, they explode into delighted laughter and be her to repeat herself. Her father understands but cannot speak the dialect -- something she wants to make up for. Her dad's generation "lost it," she said. "Unless you can speak your own language, you're lost," says Fast Wolf, a harsh critic of those who can't. Lakota is the second-largest Indian language after Navajo. One of three Sioux dialects, it is spoken fluently by about 18,000 of the 59,000 Lakota Sioux. Most of the fluent speakers are older than 40, Fast Wolf said. But among younger Indians, Lakota and other Indian languages have had a gradual resurgence, one that's spreading from the reservations and tribal-run colleges in the Midwest to mainstream campuses, several experts say. Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley are the only Bay Area universities offering Indian language classes, a result of student interest and luck in finding teachers. Fast Wolf was raised on his grandparents' Lakota, on a South Dakota reservation. His grandmother, at age 12, survived the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre by fleeing seven miles with her younger brother and hiding in a badger hole for a few days. The rest of her family was killed. ENGLISH BANNED IN HOME Not surprisingly, Grandmother banned English from her home. She understood English, "but she'd never deign to speak it," Fast Wolf said. Young Fast Wolf learned English at the federal boarding school on the reservation. His teachers, most of them white, did not chide him for speaking Lakota. But several of his classmates were ashamed to speak their mother tongue, he said. "Half-breeds," Fast Wolf calls them. People who can't speak their language, "people that are half up here," he says in his bass voice, tapping a finger to the side of his head. Indian studies programs at many colleges have been led by "half-breeds" who "had to learn (their culture) second- and third-hand from whatever a white anthropologist wrote," he said. Television continues to divert Indians from learning their language and culture, he added. Drawing students into Indian language classes today is "a pride in their own Indian-ness," said Wayne Cadotte, executive director of the American Indian Center in San Jose. In the past decade, he said, Indians have been more "fed up with (the treatment of) the Indians as sub-citizens." In being able to say you're Lakota, you should be able to speak your language," Cadotte said. LANGUAGE INTEGRAL Much of Indian cultures is rooted in language, said Laura Williams of the Native American Center for Indian Education at Arizona State University in Tempe. She noted that many tribal-run colleges offer language courses. "It's oral tradition -- that's how they teach morals to children," Williams said. "If you don't know the language, you're not learning from your elders." But not just Indians are enrolling. Most of the 25 students in Berkeley's beginning Lakota course this term are not Indian. At Stanford, junior Adam Gould is a classic liberal arts case, unsure what to do with his Native American studies major, "trying to avoid law school" and in the meantime, enjoying Lakota. The language can be unwieldy, he says, as it cobbles together morphemes, the smallest meaningful unit in a language, and sticks subjects and pronouns inside verbs. When one comes home, it's "glicu"*; when one sets out, "ku" on the way and "gli" upon arrival. "Mani" is 'to walk,' "Mawani" is 'I walk,' "mayani" is 'you walk' and "mayanipi is 'you all walk.' There isn't a Berlitz guide, or many other learning materials. Lakota, originally just oral, was Romanized (?) by missionaries in the late 1800s. Fast Wolf's students rely on a 30,000-word Lakota-English dictionary, last updated in 1970 by Catholic priests, and a 1976 workbook from the University of Colorado in which they find a mistake every few pages. MOVIES PLAY A ROLE They also go to movies such as "Thunderheart," a portrayal of modern-day reservation life. English major Peggy Dunn, from Oklahoma, inherited a passion for languages from her linguist father. She knows French and Italian, but Lakota helps her escape "the mindset of English and Western European languages" and better understand literature by or about Indians, she says. Stanford has offered Cherokee, Navajo and Tlingit, a southern Alaska tribal language, since 1972, and Berkeley has had Hopi and Lakota -- ad hoc classes largely initiated by students -- administrators say. The courses also depend on good fortune: "It just so happened there were more people interested in Lakota (this year) than previously, and the fact we were able to find someone who's actually a Lakota scholar, who had experience teaching languages, made it perfect," said linguistics Professor Will Leben, faculty coordinator of Stanford's Special Language Program. TRANSLATING SIOUX STORIES Fast Wolf, also a home health care worker in San Francisco, taught introductory Lakota to about a dozen Stanford students in the fall. He is translating the ethnographic stories of George Buschotter, an 1880s Lakota Sioux, and he advised on a program developed by International Business Machines Corp. on "Black Elk Speaks" for high schools. "Immerse yourself totally in your own language and you'll get culture as a byproduct," he says. "The soul and culture of a people are reflected in their language." "Dances with Wolves" aroused interest in Indians' cultures, yet was "an apologia for all white people," Fast Wolf said. "There were no Dunbars in those days," he declared, referring to Kevin Costner's Union Army soldier who learns about and defends the Sioux. Fast Wolf recalls watching the epic movie, amused. "They couldn't speak that well. They weren't taught very well," he said of the non-Lakotas' Lakota. He'd give Costner a C. ____________________ * accent marks/keys over the Lakota words unavailable on this system. ^+^+^+^+^+^+^+^+^+^+^+^+^+^+^+^+^+^+^+^+^+^+^+^+^+^+^+^+^+^+^+^+^+^+^+^ "We did not weave the web of life. We | Lyn Dearborn are merely a strand in it. Whatever | Naturalist/Person we do to the web, we do to ourselves" | dearborn@anchor.esd.sgi.com ^+^+^+^+^+^+^+^+^+^+^+^+^+^+^+^+^+^+^+^+^+^+^+^+^+^+^+^+^+^+^+^+^+^+^+^ ---------- "SEMINAR IN N.E.PA" ---------- SEMINAR ON NATIVE AMERICAN CULTURE IN THE POCONOS on 27th - 28th of March 93 There will be a weekend seminar with Louis Skyman , a speaker on native american issues in the Quest Center in the Poconos 30 miles north of Scranton PA . Skyman belongs to a multi-cultural teaching team called the "warriors of light". For further information also on other programs please call (717) 289-4021 or (215) 747-8477. ---------- "HELP NEEDED: SOUND BOARD FOR TRIBE" ---------- Request for assistance: The Muscogee Tribe of Oklahoma is starting up a language program for its elementary school kids. They are looking for some technological help in general and more specifically for some one who knows about a sound board that they could program. The "Quest" software package was mentioned to me. If you have some interest or know-how in helping out you can contact the graduate student who is coordinating this: Barton Morrison P.O. Box 8073 Yorketowne, VA 23692 home (804) 898 0122 work (800) 942 8368 You can send email messages through me: ekemper Thanks a lot! Ellen Kemper, Esq. Santa Fe, NM ---------- "Indian Nations Youth Tutorial Progr" ---------- Original-Sender: AP08%UKANVM.bitnet@vmd.cso.uiuc.edu (Troy Swallow) Hello everyone! I'd like to take this opportunity to say, 'Hello, greetings from the Heart of America, Kansas City.' My name is Troy Swallow, I am a software engineer for the University of Kansas Medical Center. I have a serious interest in Native American education as it pertains to children. Currently, I do volunteer work for the Indian Nations Youth Tutorial Program which is sponsored by Visible Horizons, a 501-C(3) organization (non-profit). The program director, Melicent Boysen, is doing real results oriented work here in KC. The Indian Nations Youth Tutorial Program focuses on factors relating to school dropout, education/tutorial, and culturally specific materials. Our latest concerns include learning disabilities/difficulties and any relevance to bi-lingual environments and, of course, fetal alcohol syndrome. While our program is still in its infancy and we initially received little support in the community, we now have appreciable successes and now have the attention of many KC Indian parents. We still have much ground to cover, but thanks to many a volunteer undergrad tutors and local support organizations, there is hope in sight. Our latest finding that may be of interest to "NAT-EDUers" is a recently published book titled _Teaching the Indian Child_. It's by Jon Reyhner, published by Eastern Montana College. Second Edition. Billing MT, 59101 You will find it an execellent source of information and references. I would encourage those who may be interested in or of assistance to the Indian Nations Youth Tutorial Program to contact Melicent Boysen, Director at Visible Horizons 427 West 12th Street, Fourth Floor Kansas City, MO 64141 (816)474-8663 (816)474-8347 FAX On a personal side, I would ask anyone able to investigate the 'American Indian Freedom Of Religion Act' currently up for legislative consideration to do so. If there was ever a time a decent individual could be of use to native peoples, this is it. So be it, TES