National American Indian Heritage Month is celebrated every November

http://amlife.america.gov/amlife/diversity/american-indian-heritage-month.html

Washington — Each November, National American Indian Heritage Month pays tribute to the legacy of the American Indians and Alaska Natives — the first Americans — and celebrates their enduring contributions to the history and culture of the United States.
Today, there are nearly 5 million American Indians and Alaska Natives in the United States, or 1.6 percent of the total population, and this is expected to jump to 8.6 million, or 2 percent of the population, by 2050.

Most American Indians live in metropolitan areas and not on the 227,000 square kilometers of land held in trust for reservations. The states with the highest percentage of American Indians and Alaska Natives are Alaska (18 percent of its population), Oklahoma (11 percent) and New Mexico (10 percent).

There are 562 federally recognized Indian tribes in the United States. The largest, by far, are the Cherokee and Navajo nations, according to the 2000 U.S. census.
Navajo is the most widely spoken American Indian language, and almost one-fourth of Navajos speak a language other than English at home — the highest percentage of all tribes. Unfortunately, only one-half of the 300 or so native languages once spoken in North America still have any living speakers. (See “Navajo Textbook Aims to Preserve Language, Culture.”)
A recent study by the public opinion research organization Public Agenda found that non-Indians have little knowledge of the active, vibrant culture of American Indians today. There was a consensus among both Indians and non-Indians in the study about the need for more education on American Indian history and culture. (See “American Indians Seek Greater Understanding, Recognition.”)

The first U.S. state to set aside a day to recognize the importance of American Indians in the nation’s history was New York, in 1916. National American Indian Heritage Month was first designated in 1990 under a joint congressional resolution approved by President George H. W. Bush, the current president’s father.
Each year, the sitting president issues a proclamation, as did President George W. Bush this year.

THE CREATION OF AMERICAN INDIAN HERITAGE MONTHThe U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Indian Affairs provides some background on what has become an annual celebration of the culture and contributions of American Indians and Alaska Natives.

What started at the turn of the century as an effort to gain a day of recognition for the significant contributions the first Americans made to the establishment and growth of the United States has resulted in a whole month being designated for that purpose.

One of the very early proponents of an American Indian Day was Arthur C. Parker, a Seneca Indian, who was the director of the Museum of Arts and Science in Rochester, N ew York. He persuaded the Boy Scouts of America to set aside a day for the “First Americans” and for three years they adopted such a day. In 1915, the annual Congress of the American Indian Association meeting in Lawrence, Kansas, formally approved a plan concerning American Indian Day. It directed its president, Reverend Sherman Coolidge, an Arapahoe, to call on the country to observe such a day. Coolidge issued a proclamation on September 28, 1915, which declared the second Saturday of each May as an American Indian Day and contained the first formal appeal for recognition of Indians as citizens.

The year before this proclamation was issued, Red Fox James, a Blackfoot Indian, rode horseback from state to state seeking approval for a day to honor Indians. On December 14, 1915, he presented the endorsements of 24 state governments at the White House. There is no record, however, of such a national day being proclaimed.

The first American Indian Day in a state was declared on the second Saturday in May 1916 by New York Governor Charles S. Whitman. Several states celebrate the fourth Friday in September. In Illinois, for example, legislators enacted such a day in 1919. Several states designated Columbus Day as Native American Day, but it continues to be a day observed without any recognition as a national legal holiday.

In 1990, President George H.W. Bush approved a joint resolution designating November 1990 “National American Indian Heritage Month.” Similar proclamations have been issued each year since 1994.

See the U.S. Census Bureau Web site for a fact sheet on American Indian and Alaska Native Heritage Month and additional data on the American Indian and Alaska Native population.
Both the U.S. Library of Congress and the National Park Service have Web pages devoted to American Indian Heritage Month. The Library of Congress Veterans History Project includes a guide to American Indian and Alaska Native military veterans and interviews with former Navajo “code talkers” Keith Little and Merril Sandoval.

For more information, see “American Indian History, Culture” on America.gov and the Web site of the Department of Interior’s Bureau of Indian Affairs. The Web site of the U.S. Embassy in Berlin lists numerous information resources on Native Americans.

 

Native American Tribe Races to Preserve Endangered Language

Native American Tribe Races to Preserve Endangered Language

By Jessica Cheung-New American Media

 

Convinced that discarding their language would be tantamount to discarding their identity, members of one Indian tribe recently donated $1 million to California State University (CSU), Fresno, in an effort to save their language from extinction.

The funds, which leaders of the Chukchansi tribe hope will allow linguists at the CSU to compile a dictionary and assemble grammar texts over the next five years, generated from the tribe-owned casino nestled in the Sierra Nevada foothills.

“When [the United States] began the genocide of Native American communities, the reason they allowed us to sign our treaties was because we had a language,” Kimberly Lawhon, education coordinator for the Picayune Rancheria of the Chukchansi Indians, said. “Generations of our elders went through drought and atrocities; the core of our language is our identity.”

Jose Diaz, associate dean of the College of Arts and Humanities at the Fresno school, said the grant would “speed up the process” already in motion at the school “to preserve an endangered language.”

“Before the grant, faculty members were volunteering on their own time with the Chukchansi tribe,” Diaz observed.

Research on the language started in the summer of 2009 when the Chukchansi tribe reached out to faculty linguists.

Agbayani, Chris Golston, and Niken Adisasmito-Smith are three of the main CSU Fresno linguistic professors currently working with the Chukchansi tribe.

A 2011 UC Berkeley survey of native Indian languages in California by UC Berkeley indicated that only a few fluent speakers of Chukchansi exist today.

“We were very lucky to be approached by a few Chukchansi fluent speakers,” Agbayani said. “[But even among them] a lot of the vocabulary is at the tip of the tongue. The more time we spend with them, the more we’re able to tap it.”

Two centuries ago, California was the most linguistically diverse region in the western hemisphere with about 90 native Indian languages spoken. Today, only about 50 native languages are spoken in the state — but just barely. Half of those languages have a scant number of native speakers, most of whom are in their 80s.

“Most speakers are semi-speakers” who remember their language, UC Berkeley Linguistics Professor emerita Leanne Hinton observed. “There’s a movement of language revitalization, with an increasing amount of second language speakers, and a growing number of families trying to use [their tribal languages] at home.”

Around the world, one language dies every 14 days, according to a study done by National Geographic and the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages, which estimates that roughly half of the 7,000 world languages spoken today will disappear by the next century.

The movement to revitalize endangered languages is at high tide as students and schools across the nation are banding together to create Native American student groups and implement preservation projects. Hinton recently directed a Breath for Life workshop at UC Berkeley, where students and a linguistics mentor worked with a group of Indians to document languages.

But the effort is fraught with challenges partly because there is a scarcity of people who want to learn the language.

“The problem is that diversity in languages is so great in California that there aren’t strong programs where people can be fluent,” Hinton said. “Revitalization is pulled by the bootstraps, pioneered by individuals, organizations, advocates and living speakers.”

“We have a lot of people dedicating time and effort to teaching the language, but there aren’t a lot of adults dedicated to reach fluency of their language,” Lawhon said. “The biggest hurdle is getting our membership to devote themselves to learning.”
But Lawhon remains optimistic, saying that she’s even had “non-native speakers in the community come to learn the language.”

Chukchansi courses for kids and adults are taught predominantly by members of the tribe at Coarsegold Elementary School near their Rancheria. They will offer Chukchansi courses as an elective in the junior high class if 20 students sign up.

Even though the recent efforts to document endangered languages will provide records, the future of native languages, Hinton said, is in “revitalization, not survival.”

“There are two sides to language preservation,” Agabayani said. “One is to revitalize the language, encouraging their children to carry [forward] the language. The second is to document the language.”

Language research and documentation can only prevent endangered languages from complete extinction. The population of native speakers is shrinking, and researchers worry that in due time, all that will be left may be records.

Only a minute fraction of today’s 7,000 existing languages are indigenous, which Golston describes as “precious.”

When a language goes silent, knowledge along with it dissipates. Because speakers of endangered languages generally live near animals and plants, their language holds key to unlocking insight to nature.

“Languages don’t fossilize” like dinosaurs, Golston said. “We can still learn about dinosaurs [beyond their extinction]. When languages are not recorded, they’re gone forever. It’s becoming more critical as the number of native speakers dwindle into small numbers.”

“This may be the last generation of speakers,” Agbayani said. “We’re hoping that more tribes are taking action to revitalize their language, and I think it’s becoming a worldwide effort.”

see article link here:

http://www.nationofchange.org/native-american-tribe-races-preserve-endangered-language-1342965738