Anthro notes

National Museum of Natural History Newsletter for Teachers

Vol. 12 No. 1

Winter 1990

ANTHROPOLOGICAL LINGUISTS AID IN CULTURAL SURVIVAL

[Editor's Note: The following two articles are written by anthropological linguists who have gone beyond the traditional work of accumulating vocabularies and grammars to bringing their linguistic expertise back to the native American speakers whose languages they have studied. Dr. Robert Laughlin and Dr. Kathleen Bragdon describe, respectively, their work with a Mayan community in Chiapas, Mexico and the Passamaquoddy of Maine.]

ME AND SNA JTZ'IBAJOM (The House of the Writer)

My work with the Mayan Indians of Chiapas in southern Mexico began in 1959. I was a member of the Harvard Chiapas Project, whose goal was to document culture change in a Mayan community. There I met Romin Teratol, a Tzotzil Mayan Indian who was employed as a puppeteer of the National Indian Institute (INI). My wife and I moved briefly into his mother's second house and began learning his language. My predecessor in the project, Lore Colby, had typed up a provisional dictionary, but it was just a start. Soon I was collecting folk tales and thereby adding vocabulary to the dictionary. Then I collected dreams. However, when I suggested the possibility of publishing those dreams, I was advised that I should be able to analyze them according to Freud, Jung, and who knows who else. So I decided it would be easier to compile a thorough dictionary. This process took the next 14 years, and in 1975 The Great Tzotzil Dictionary of San Lorenzo Zinacantán was published. The following year I published Of Shoes and Ships and Sealing Wax: Sundries from Zinacantán, based on the journals of Romin and his neighbor, Antzelmo Peres, who had become my collaborators. They had twice travelled to the States to finish our opus and offer a description of life in another world.

Eventually the collections of folk tales and dreams were published in Tzotzil and English: Of Cabbages and Kings: Tales from Zinacantán (1977) and Of Wonders Wild and New: Dreams from Zinacantán (1976). Selections from these have recently been published in The People of the Bat: Tales and Dreams from Zinacantán (1988), Carol Karasik (ed.). My most recent publication, The Great Tzotzil Dictionary of Santo Domingo Zinacantán (1989), is a translation and reordering of a 16th century Spanish-Tzotzil dictionary that I found in my home town of Princeton in 1974.

In 1982, aided by the Mayan poet, Jaime Sabines, brother to the governor of Chiapas, Mexico, a group of Tzotzil Mayan Indians who had worked with me or with anthropology colleagues over many years secured funding for a writers’ cooperative and published two bilingual booklets. However, the governor's term was ending, and, lacking further support, this light was permanently cut. I was then approached by the late Romin's son, Xun, by Antzelmo Peres, and by Maryan Lopis Mentes of neighboring Chamula, whom I had known for many years. I had hoped, during the many years of my anthropological and linguistic research, that somehow my work might return to Zinacantán. I saw this as an opportunity—an opportunity to help bring Mayan literacy to Chiapas.

By chance, a conference that same year celebrating “40 years of Anthropological Research in Chiapas” was scheduled to begin. I urged my Mayan friends to address the many assembled anthropologists and linguists. This they did, explaining, “You have awakened our interest in our own culture, you have published many studies, but always in other countries where we never see the results. Our young people are now literate in Spanish and think they are very smart, but they don't know a quarter of what their fathers know. We would like, at least, to put on paper our customs for the sake of our children and grandchildren.”

The next few years, aided by Cultural Survival, a human rights non-profit organization, we founded Sna Jtz'ibajom, a Tzotzil-Tzeltal writers’ cooperative.

Currently the cooperative publishes bilingual booklets in two Mayan languages; these booklets cover history, oral history, and customs. The cooperative has also established a puppet theater, a live theater, and a weekly Tzotzil-Tzeltal radio program. The puppet theater draws on folk tales, but also presents didactic skits on alcoholism, medicine, and bilingual education. The live theater has dramatized a folk tale and created a family planning play.

The cooperative also has started a Tzotzil literacy project. Initially I contacted two religious scribes and a secretary of the school committee of Zinacantán to teach. Currently the teachers (who have never been teachers before, and hence, have not been taught to scorn their own culture), give two hour classes in Tzotzil twice a week in their own homes to 10-12 of their neighbors. The interest in the project was so great that one teacher requested to teach overtime.

Those eligible to participate in the literacy program must already be minimally literate in Spanish. Initially there was some discussion as to whether women should be allowed to take classes. The idea of women and men spending time together in the evening at first made many feel uncomfortable. One prospective student thought that learning Tzotzil would enable him and his girlfriend to write secret messages to each other since his father only knew Spanish. In two years, the project has awarded 500 diplomas to men, women, and children in two communities. Presently we have two directors, 14 teachers, and 144 students enrolled each semester. Although Tzotzil is not the government or official language, that has not discouraged the Mayans’ enrollment in the evening language classes. Students are encouraged to record personal and family histories as well as to produce creative writing. Stories are reviewed and edited by Sna Jtz'ibajom. The federal publisher has agreed to print 3,000 copies of each work submitted by the cooperative. Students give the following reasons for learning Tzotzil: to improve their Spanish by working with translations, to learn, to become smarter, and to appreciate their own tradition.

Besides the personal enrichment the students-receive from learning to read and write their native language, the Mayan society also benefits through the national and international recognition the cooperative is receiving. The cooperative's success has been due in part to the talent of its members as writers, actors, artists, and/or teachers, and also to the great pride that the people have in their culture and their new desire to be literate in their mother tongue, to “become smart.”

We have already come a long way since our beginning eight years ago. We next would like to see the establishment of culture centers in each community, linked to a Mayan Academy of Letters based in San Cristobal, where teachers could be trained to spread our activities throughout the Mayan areas of the state.

My first responsibility to the cooperative as an anthropological linguist has been to train its members how to write their language correctly. While spelling is quickly learned, the decision as to where words begin and end is a problem even for linguists. For example, should the particles to and ox, when they occur together, be kept separate or merged?

Second, the economic crisis in Mexico, severely restricting government funding, combined with the lack of a tradition of charitable giving in Mexico, forces the cooperative to look outside for support. Very few foundations grant internationally, and of those a very small number support cultural projects. Even then, support is limited to two to three years, so it is difficult to plan for the future. I have been able thus far to steer the cooperative to appropriate foundations. For a weaving cooperative, self-sufficiency may be possible, but for writers?

As a member of Sna Jtz'ibajom, I see the significance of the project as strengthening the Mayan culture for the Mayans themselves and offering an alternative to the non-Mayan media barrage. Just as important, the cooperative is awakening an interest among non-Indian Mexicans in their Indian heritage and informing the outside world that Mayan culture is alive and flourishing.

Robert Laughlin

Department of Anthropology

Smithsonian Institution

AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL LINGUIST LOOKS AT PASSAMAOUODDY

The mist was rising off the inlet, the tall spiky outlines of the weirs just visible through the haze, as I drove for the first time into the small Passamaquoddy Indian reservation at Pleasant Point, near Perry, Maine. The reservation is spread out in a sinuous pattern, running along the shore of the inlet, and ending short of a narrow isthmus that bears the road running towards Eastport, a fishing/resort community on the coast. The conspicuous landmarks of the community include the Wabanaki Mall, where signs for the restaurant, auto repair shop (now closed) and grocery store are in Passamaquoddy and English, the native-run supermarket, and the Passamaquoddy Museum, home of the Passamaquoddy Bilingual-Bicultural Program.

I have come to begin a study of the Passamaquoddy-Maliseet language. Passamaquoddy is a language of the eastern sub-group of the Algonquian language family. I am already familiar with a related language, Massachusett, which I have studied with Dr. Ives Goddard, with whom I co-authored Native Writings in Massachusett. Massachusett, however, is an extinct language, and what is known about it comes from writings left by native speakers who became literate in their native language in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. My plan is to study Passamaquoddy and thereby to familiarize myself with a living Algonquian language, for the comparisons it will make possible with Massachusett, and for the insights it will give me into language use. For instance, do people within the community use Passamaquoddy in formal as well as informal situations and does speech differ among different age groups?

At the Wabanaki Mall, shoppers and employees speak softly in Passamaquoddy. I catch perhaps one word in five. Fortunately for me, all speak English as well. I purchase a basket and ask about the maker, a woman still living at Pleasant Point and well known for her skill. I am then directed to the Passamaquoddy Museum to meet Joseph Nicolas and David Francis, two Passamaquoddy men who have been most influential in sustaining the Bilingual-Bicultural program at Pleasant Point.

Both men are articulate about the needs of their community and their concern for the preservation of the Passamaquoddy language. Both spend much of their time creating and editing materials for school use, taping stories, and working on translations. The museum, the center of the Title-Four funded educational program, consists of two rooms filled with displays of baskets and other objects, as well as murals and life-sized models dressed in traditional clothing.

As a newcomer to Pleasant Point, I am more a receiver of knowledge than a giver. Both here and at Peter Dana Point, where Wayne Newell oversees the vigorous sister program, materials traditionally supplied by the linguist, such as dictionaries, grammars, and translations, have been begun or completed by community members, with the occasional assistance of other linguists and educators such as Phillip LeSourd, Robert Leavitt,and Carl Teeter. Here, as elsewhere in native communities across the United States and Canada, the people are beginning to take a more active role in generating information, and in making important decisions for the future, about their language and culture.

As an outside observer, it is this native involvement that I can perhaps describe and analyze as a community member could not. In pursuit of such understanding, I have begun to interview various community members about their use of and feelings about their native language. These interviews, in combination with well-established ethnographic techniques of field observation, allow me, even as a novice in the language, some insight into the way Passamaquoddy is being used, by whom, and for what reasons.

Fortunately, I encounter little resistance and hostility. The people of Pleasant Point and Peter Dana Point are proud of their language, proud of the fluency of their leaders and elders, and proud to discuss and describe their language to an outsider. As a beginner, I am dependent on them for information, which they generously supply. Their attitude greatly encourages my study and creates enjoyable working conditions. As the work of a number of modern sociolinguists has shown us, language preservation is not simply a question of recording texts, or creating grammars and dictionaries, but of working to create and foster natural (as opposed to formal teaching) situations in which the native language can be used (for example, teaching basket making or revitalizing fishing and hunting skills). In other words, language preservation can encourage social contexts in which the native language has a legitimate and valued place. Here, comparative information, derived from studies like mine of languages that did not survive, is important, as is the information from other successful language preservation programs in other contemporary native communities.

Yet all of this is in vain if the people of the community cannot or do not wish to make the enormous commitment to sustained preservation programs that is required. Among the biggest problems facing the Passamaquoddy and others like them today is the conflict between their increasingly strong desire for language and culture preservation, and their need to provide relevant education, job training, and an acceptable standard of living for community members, especially the young. In Pleasant Point today, the percentage of people under 30 who are fluent speakers of the language is declining, and young parents are not using the language with their children. Although native language classes are held in the elementary schools, these classes are seen by the children as having little relevance to their daily lives. There is relatively little published material in Passamaquoddy, and all technical and advanced educational literature is in English. Studies elsewhere have shown that only when native students are “immersed” in the language, and only where all official agencies provide truly bilingual services will the language have any hope of survival.

Leaders of the Bilingual-Bicultural program at Pleasant Point and Peter Dana Point are aware of this and are actively searching for new ways to involve the community in the language preservation effort. Some options to provide natural contexts for native language use include native language newspapers, closed-circuit native-language television shows, and the encouragement of traditional subsistence and manufacturing skills. The use of Passamaquoddy in newly composed songs, poetry, and literature offers another intriguing avenue of potential involvement.

As an anthropological linguist, I have found the efforts of the Passamaquoddy communities fascinating and informative. I now have a deeper understanding of the relationship between anthropology and education and of what makes a successful bilingual cultural program, information I am sharing with colleagues.

In an era where native people are becoming increasingly active in disseminating information about their own languages and cultures, the work of anthropologists and linguists takes on a different kind of significance. Scholars are now being called on to witness a revitalization of native awareness of their languages, and in many cases to assist native-run programs of language preservation. It is a great privilege to be allowed to observe and to assist in such efforts.

Kathleen Bragdon

Research Collaborator

Smithsonian Institution

Professor,

William and Mary College

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