Letters | Keeping Navajo language alive

Keeping Navajo language alive

Editor,
The continuing Native American language loss is well documented. Of recent, a survey by HeadStart indicated that some 2% of families speak the Navajo language in the home, while another 26% speak both the Navajo language and English in the home, and some 72% spoke only English in the home.

In academe, scholarly literature is replete with issues of this continuing dire Native language loss and revitalization. What is striking about this language-culture shift is that while there is a consistent upward slope over the years on publications on Native Peoples language loss, revitalization, and conferences, we see a downward slope on actual Native Peoples language use in the homes and our communities. This profound widespread abandonment and continuing cultural disintegration as unambiguously evidenced by the increasing searing socioeconomic demographics are disturbing. Our Native people, our homes, our families, behind these numbers are sending a powerful cultural message. The traditional family values that held families together in our sacred Native homes if not dissolved altogether have become thin and brittle.

The homes made of sacred prayer-songs of the early morning rising sun in the horizon in exacting congruity with the setting of the full moon on the westerly horizon, in harmony, have become foreign to our generation. These observed sacred celestial events are captured in our sacred prayer-songs in Haashjeelti’ Hoghan Biyin beginning with “Zaadee bee hooghanei la hozho hoghan,” or in “Naat’a Hoghan Biyin” with “Nohodzaayee bisahdee dooleel leh, bani dzisitkees leh.” These sacred hogan prayer-songs for the blessing of the home, property, healthy families, healthy family values, cultural wisdom as observed, lived, and continue to live in our relational worldview, have become foreign to our generation.

The upward parallel trend in scholarly publications on Native language loss, along with the proliferation of Indian education conferences, and the alarming upward trend in percentage of Native Peoples language abandonment are invariably deeply troubling.

Why bother with our heritage language use and bilingualism? In cognitive neurology, when bilingual subjects, similar to gifted subjects, are engaged in various cognitive and bilingual language tasks, neurological research document a distributive yet simultaneous lateralized left and right hemispheric neural network activity with a highly developed and active connective neural fibrous structure (corpus callosum), along with activity in the prefrontal lobe associated with executive functioning. The role of strong emotions and categories of memory continues to draw much interest with bilingualism and giftedness. Gifted and bilingual subjects are able to more efficiently process data sensory input using these neural estates; they make better use of their brain regions simultaneously.

Educators and researchers continue to work on developing these specific cortical regions with certain external cueing, specifically enriched extended teaching practices and activities, which includes the arts, music, and physical movement education. Using these studies in applied brain research, related cognitive work, along with carefully calibrated educational experiences, we can expect much higher proficiency in the academic performance of our school children, changes which can only enable and enhance students’ capacity for immediate and long-term, lifelong learning. Important work of this nature in Native indigenous communities and education however are too often considered beneath serious scholarly attention.

The data as such, however, sends another powerful message. That is, we need to get a better handle on Native language loss and Native cultural renaissance embedded in active Native language use. We have a compelling reason to do some soul searching as to the path we are on about the continuing abandonment of our Native languages. If we keep going in this direction, we can be assured of complete Native language loss in a noticeably short time. We as Native peoples will have accomplished quite successfully what the spectacularly blundering U.S. policy and legislation has been unable to accomplish over the past 500 years regarding the complete erasure of our Native Indigenous peoples, our language, identity, and culture, off the map.

Any language teaching and use begins and ends in the home, within a family, alive and lived by actual everyday use, driving home the maxim, “use it or lose it”. Educational entities can only take on the crucial cultural foundational role to develop and advance, not supplant, the profound importance of the home and family dinner table conversations and values in language use and development.

The gravity and depth of this language-cultural shift coming from within our homes, families, foregrounds the need for an intense critical dialogue on how Indigenous language abandonment takes on an exacting equation for complete cultural erasure, a critical global humanitarian public health policy crises that cuts deep into the core of Native indigenous collective cultural identity, critical cultural consciousness, and psyche.

Families have the ultimate duty and responsibility to strengthen the foundational exegetics of our Dine’ traditional teachings, values, and wisdom, in the home. Families can offer to the outside world our Native peoples of the Americas worldview, its relationality to the rights of the natural world. Families have the ultimate duty to provide collective cultural strength and support to the consequentialist’s troubling concern with our very own Native people who express little understanding of the value of our Native American Indigenous knowledge and language. It is critically important for the current Indigenous generation of families, educators, and Indigenous Spiritual Practitioners, to foreground the instructive powers of deeper thought inherent in the epistemology and ontology of Native American philosophical constructs.

The profound point in sharing these thoughts is that our traditional Native Indigenous peoples must and can help transcend philosophical boundaries, the transnational cultural, technological, inter-generational, and spiritual fatal disconnection that has surrounded global education and Native Indigenous peoples for too long. As Native Indigenous people, as Dine’, traditional knowledge instructs that we are an extension of, and aligned, with the natural world. As a cultural corollary and imperative, Native people must place on the table the need to confront the incredible global crises, climate change, the collapsing ecosystem, stemming from humankind Anthropocene now racing to the cosmos as “space junk”.

Yes, Native Indigenous knowledge must continuously be reaffirmed serving as the core foundation and cornerstone of our cultural identity within the homes, families, in educational centers in our homeland beginning with local schools. As has been enlightened and reaffirmed by others (Hara, K.), we have a duty, obligation, and responsibility to cultivate and bridge our lived experiences with the ontologies and epistemologies of our fundamental core traditional teachings, the wisdom and vision that honors our cultural heritage via our heritage language. We each must continue to cultivate engaging teachings and learning, inspiring guiding philosophy and insights, vision, wisdom, to foreground lived and to live by the traditional sacred songs and prayers for the Good Life, for continuous healing while incorporating Western education where applicable.

We do have a duty, obligation, and cultural imperative to not only reverse our alarming abandonment of our heritage language and culture but to advance that which we have been endowed and gifted with, the global understanding of our complex interconnected world, beginning in our homes. As a cultural mores and responsibility to invest in our youth, many among us were endowed and gifted by our visionary parents, grandparents, and relatives, with traditional Indigenous knowledge, prayer-songs, and ceremonies, coming from their heart and deep compassionate caring.

While our sacred traditional Indigenous Native Dine’ knowledge system awaits today, from generation-to-generation, our silence, absence, does not bode well for our people, for our current and future generations. As our fellow Indigenous peoples of Hawaii, the Polynesian Voyaging Society, in their Pacific voyage for oceans, a voyage for earth, note, “Living on an island chain teaches us that our natural world is a gift with limits and that we must carefully steward this gift if we are to survive together.”

Harold G. Begay
Tónaneesdizí

The Creator willed us to be

Editor,
Our ancestors, our grandparents were called heathens, idol worshippers. The newcomer immigrants had no understanding, no concept of our ways of spirituality, they belligerently and naively assumed their religion was superior to our cultural spiritual ways. Extreme atrocities were used to try to eradicate our ways, many Tribal peoples were annihilated along with their beautiful sacred cultural ways.

When columbus sailed into the Caribbean it is estimated there were 10 million of us, by the turn of the 20th century only 250,000 of us were left. The greatest holocaust in human history for the purpose of religion and greed.

Our cultural spiritual ways were always right for us, they were blessed to us by the Great Creator when he placed us on Earth Mother. Our Indigenous ways are the essence of the Original Teachings, which simply were to take care of each other and to take care of the Earth. The same Original Teachings were given to the four colors of humanity at our moments of creation. Indigenous peoples across the world who remain on their Creator given lands maintain their cultural spiritual ways. We respect and honor that peoples have their original ways, special and unique to them. We did not intrusively impose our ways on other peoples.

An accusation is made that there is a dark side with Native ways; it needs to be understood that there has been a dark side to every society, every people throughout history; for European originated religions, it began in the garden of Eden.

columbus in his report to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, said about Indigenous peoples, “So tractable, so peaceable, are these people, that I swear to your Majesties there is not in the world a better nation. They love their neighbors as themselves, their discourse is ever sweet and gentle, and accompanied with a smile; and though it is true that they are naked, yet their manners are decorous and praiseworthy.” We remain as the Great Creator willed it.

Chili Yazzie
Shiprock

Assessing the Nygren-Montoya leadership

Editor,
The Buu Nygren and Rochelle Montoya Administration has been in office for one year, and do you all believe the administration has accomplished what is was set out to do? Has there been progress in your community? Has the administration been to your communities? Has the administration lived up to his campaign promises of 2022?

I asked this because you are the people living day in and day out working to make a living in your community and see the struggles of livelihood. I’m not throwing him under the Chinle Bus, or his administration in any shape or form, but I don’t see any accomplishments in some communities that I have been invited too and visited to tackle some of these dire need projects.

President Nygren knows the construction industry, so he understands this industry very well, but does he really know how tough it is built in Indian Country? Native Businesses, or especially Navajo Businesses understand these trials and tribulations of working within the Navajo Nation. After all the sweat equity, tears, and resources invested into being proactive, thinking win-win, and synergizing to connecting with the Navajo Government and its Enterprises…it all fades due to political favors, family nepotism, discrimination, hiring established politicians, corruption, and even colonialization.

They say, “You’re only as good as the people you surround yourself with.” Certainly, this could be part of the reason why I don’t see any progress in some communities. The other reasons are Leadership and Management. This is new to the young leader and hopefully 2024 comes out better for him. Currently, I’m being patient and let’s see what’s happens in year two.

If you need to reach President Nygren, email or call his scheduler, Alray Nelson at alray.nelson@navajo-nsn.gov and his number 928.871.8000 Invite him to your community meetings, your project, or your sheep camp to let him know firsthand these problems and issues to address right away.

I also urge all of you to write to the Navajo Times ‘Letter of the Editor’ and comment these problems in your communities or with the administration. Inform your Navajo Nation Council Delegate you need to see progress. That’s the reason we elected these people for. So, they can work for the people.

Aside from my opinions, the only other issue I saw was excessive traveling this past year. More time was spent from his social media posts on traveling outside Navajo Nation. I get the Navajo Nation President needs to be there. But how many more times does the administration need to reinvent the wheel?

Time is of the essence and the fire which we burn in. The Nygren – Montoya administration needs to act quickly to figure out how to spend the remaining balance of the $2.1 billion of ARPA (American Rescue Plan Act) dollars this year, or as we seen in previous years, the failures of leadership and management to get projects done on time.

My last question is where is the Navajo Nation Vice President? Ms. Montoya has been a quiet leader so far. Nowhere have we seen her. At least she can take some of Mr. Nygren’s travels to outside invitation events as a representation of the Navajo Nation. Maybe there is an disconnect between the two leaders after one year in office.

What are the plans for the 1,000 miles of roads and 1,000 homes to be built? You’ve got three more years left, so get to work and strap on that tool belt. Our people and communities are becoming impatience and fed up. We need action. We don’t need chapter speeches. We need progress. I’m not talking about progress on your Tik Tok account. We need encouragement of leadership at the community level. Those are the ones that need us. For your information, I sure am doing my best to move projects without politics, but every project seems it requires a sign-off of projects from Window Rock administration. And you know what happens to that step. I don’t need to explain.

Time does not wait for anyone. President Nygren has invited us to his State of the Nation address tomorrow (Jan. 9, 2024). So, let’s see what’s in store for 2024 and see if there is a concrete plan for this year for your communities.

Stanford Lake
Prescott Valley, Ariz.

Searching for person

Editor,
Hereby I have a question that maybe you can help me with. In the ‘80s my parents sponsored a child through Futures for Children (an organization in Albuquerque). Her name is Lucinda James. Her address was in Vanderwagen, Box 393, NM 87326 Birthdate according to the papers 13 December 1968. She went to Roosevelt Elementary school (Gallup) And I believe also (Chéch’iltah) Boarding School.
Clearing out my mother’s papers I found many letters and photos from her and I thought it could be nice if we could return this to her or her family.
Greetings and thank you in advance.

Jacqueline Detiger
Wassenaar, Netherlands

Expressing my condolences to Diné

Editor,
My name is Steven Martin. I’m an Indigenous (Mi’gmaq Nation) filmmaker from Canada and the producer/director of a documentary series entitled Konnected.TV.

In 2016 we had the honor of producing an episode on Klee and his father Jones Benally and I’m shocked and saddened by the passing of Klee.

I’m writing to express my condolences to everyone impacted by the passing of Klee and would like to share the episode with your audience. Klee personified the term warrior and will forever remain aninspiration. I’m writing this to note that his spirit crossed international borders.

Please note, I haven’t reached out to his family in these difficult times but plan to do so in the near future.

Steven Martin
Listuguj Mi’gmaq First Nation
Gatineau, Québec, Canada

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