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Page: Profile: Wren's Nest News Local
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Article: 20000
[Native]
Date Posted:
9/7/2008
9:28:40 am EDT
Wvox Stats
Views: 8,951
RSS: 16,455
Comments: 7
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Native Speaker Last Of Her Kind
Author: Lauren Dake, The Bend Bulletin Source: Seatlle Times
Title: NATIVE SPEAKER LAST OF HER KIND
At daybreak, Neda Wesley stood at the edge of the grave.
She watched as her friend's remains vanished under a blanket of dirt. Like countless other funerals, Wesley attended as a neighbor and community member. But the 70-year-old, fluent speaker of Sahaptin served another purpose as well.
They call her an echo.
When the medicine people speak, Wesley translates their words into Sahaptin so they can be passed on to the Creator. Wesley is glad she can send friends into the next world in the way they would want.
Wesley is the reservation's last echo.
So who will speak for her?
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Community Thoughts: There are 7 comments posted | Reverse Sort |
| Hmmm | Sep 10th. at 12:28:52 pm EDT
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Silver Faery (Hays, Kansas) - Email Me
Personally if I was this lady's granddaughter, I would be learning as much of the language I could possibly learn. But then again I have the ablitily to pick up on languages and cultures. I love to learn about those things.
It's going to be a sad day when this person dies, the world will again loose a bit more culture and knowledge that could be passed on to the next generation. How sad.
Silver Faery
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| Delivering The Eulogy | Sep 8th. at 6:18:41 pm EDT
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Mysteries Child (Garfield, Arkansas) - Email Me
Time passes, and cultures die. Whether they are forcibly ground out by aggressively dominionist cultures, destroyed by disaster or disease, assimilated through interchange or cultural imperialism, or simply changed so much over time that the product of millenia of evolution is scarcely recognizable as related to its forebearer, time passes and cultures die.
That does not make it an unsad thing, nor does it make the deliberate decimation/destruction of a culture right. Many things that are natural are sad, troubling, upsetting, or outright wrong.
I will state this much: I became upset over the family history that I knew would die with my grandmother. So I took the time to learn it from her.
I became upset that the knowledge of speaking Italian, not to mention the value of the language, were beaten out of my grandmother, by her own parents, for- her- own- damn- good, when it became clear that she was a very bright child growing up in a West Virginia coalmining camp.
So I saved up the leftovers of my grocery budget for a few months and bought a used copy of The Complete Idiot's Guide to Learning Italian.
I understand that there is no Complete Idiot's Guide to Learning Sahaptin. I'm not an idiot, of course.
But there is still yet a living speaker; those who bewail its demise should take the time to learn, if even only a little, now, while the chance is yet before them.
Those who bewail its demise should take the time to learn-- and the time to teach those who are interested.
Perhaps even if those interested parties are less than ideal students.
I am deeply ashamed of, and outraged by, what was done to indiginous peoples in the name of manifest destiny. I hope the sad sense of loss a white Arkansan from West Virginia feels over it all, not to mention the overwhelming evidence of the far-reaching destructive results of institutionally enforced cultural anomie, might stand as some kind of testament to encourage future cultures to think twice, or thrice, before repeating the mistake.
I am also reminded that those who bewail their status as victims uniformly drown and disappear, while those who stagger back up to their knees and make a determination to go down fighting sometimes survive against the odds.
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| The Loss... | Sep 7th. at 9:30:01 pm EDT
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Corax (Glendale, Arizona) - Email Me
of any indigenous (sp?) culture is always a sad and tragic thing. However, why should we be surprised? This is the two thousand plus year legacy of the monotheistic religions, who, historically, simply refuse to tolerate the slightest deviation from their one-sided doctrines. I believe that the monotheistic religions are the main source of the ideas of xenophobia, which has destroyed many rich cultures wherever its tentacles reached, and which in our own country motivated the punishment of Native American children for the horrible crime (*sarcasm*) of speaking in their ancestral tongue.
It's all about making everyone CONFORM. They don't want thinking individuals, they want ignorant automatons who will do as they are told, and like it.
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| A Candle Going Out.... | Sep 7th. at 4:16:17 pm EDT
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bigcat (peoria, Illinois) - Email Me
If someone doesn't step up, at least to learn the parting words, it will be a much sadder sunset as another tradition will have gone extinct.
Extinction is forever, be it for creature-or culture. And that is sad.
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| Pride | Sep 7th. at 3:25:28 pm EDT
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Silver Night Hawk (Denver-Metro, Colorado) - Email Me
The young people don't learn because their parents don't speak it. This woman suffered punishment at the hands of teachers at boarding schools if she spoke her native language. Many did not have her strength.
It is also a matter of pride. To carry on the language and tradition of a people, and not be sucked completely into the modern world, you have to have pride. Pride in your people, pride in your tribe.....but most of all, pride in yourself. Without pride, there is no reason to commit the time and energy to perserve a way of life. I hope her granddaughter realizes the gift her grandmother has and uses the time she has left in this life to learn from her.
Neda Wesley you have my blessings and I pray that there will be someone to speak for you.
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| Native Tongues | Sep 7th. at 3:15:12 pm EDT
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Ariel Moonshadow (Park City, Illinois) - Email Me
In the tradition of the Roman empire, native cultures in the Americas were squelched and/or destroyed, along with their native tongues. The Romans pushed the Gallic tribes westward in Europe until there was no place left to go except the hills ( baen in Gaelic, hence the baen sidhe - people of the hills) . Native European languages were continually suppressed by the Church after the fall of the Roman Empire. The last native speaker of Cornish, which is similar to Welsh, died in 1953. We will never know how many other languages have been lost to history, because of the foolishness of pursuit of uniformity.
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| : ( | Sep 7th. at 11:11:17 am EDT
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Elistra (Lexington, Kentucky) - Email Me
Sad to see such things dying out. Why do none of the young people wish to learn the language?
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