March 26, 2024 • 59 mins
Dr. Iene Vini Olsen-Reeder joins us for a conversation about Individual language journeys and social reclamation movements with the intention of bringing our languages home by being excellent multilinguals. Iene is a co-host of the upcoming podcast 2 Couple to Kōrero, which will talk about bringing languages home from the perspective of a couple committed to language use as individuals and as a family. Some people might think that thousands of miles of ocean separate peoples, but in reality, the ocean connects us, and so do our journeys of recovering from violent and racist colonial practices and behaviors.
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
They tried to colonizes, try to genocide. Yet we're still
here with the tongue on broke. And just to cut
you on yeah eighteen ye ny a Cajun talk catchwood
(00:39):
to Stein. You did sten eighteen whans you do a
sock way Pacific Ocean. Welcome folks to the Tongue unbroken.
This is episode eleven. I'm super excited because we are
reaching across what we call which is raven black. I
(01:02):
guess is how that translates and eighteen e khannach so
across the ocean to a dear friend and relative. It's
been five years since we've seen each other. We both
do language work, and I'm excited to have a conversation
with Eana. Vinnie in Alta Roa working in the Maudi
language and is working on a podcast of his own.
(01:23):
So I'm excited today to go international. We're going across
the waters, We're going across time. It's tomorrow for him,
and so I'm excited to just visit with you for
a bit and hear what you've been up to and
what's going on over there. I just want to recognize
the Maudi peoples as an origin point for so much
stuff for global language reclamation movements. The language Nest movement
(01:48):
has its origins in New Zealand and among the Maudi
people and the Hawaiians sahed and replicated it, and then
we've been studying with the Hawaiians when we've been replicating
what they've been trying to do. And so I just
want to get have a lot of a lot of
love to to your peoples and to your side of
the world. And why don't you tell the people who
(02:08):
you are and about a little bit of your language journey.
Speaker 2 (02:13):
Na koto kordo or Hey, good morning everybody. Thank you
(02:50):
so much for giving me some space and your podcast
to talk about some things with your listeners. A big,
big thank you to you, and thank you to everyone listening.
But also it's just so nice to see you after
so long. I have such incredible memories from my time
visiting the Indigenous people of Alaska in twenty nineteen, and
(03:14):
I can't wait to get back. But thank you so
much the hospitality I felt, so I felt so home
over there, and I think for that I've just felt
this sense like I really want to get back over
and see you all in person. But for now, it's
great I'm dialing in from weynuior Matha, Wellington Old the
Greater Wellington area is quite big, and weynuior Matha is
(03:36):
a part of that smaller city called Lower Hut. My
name is Vincent Vinni. My milder name is Ednie. And
a little speech that I opened with just at the
beginning there there's a pope pot of Butter and it's
from home, and there's kind of a little saying that
if you can understand our top potter butter, our ways
(03:57):
of introducing ourselves in our ancestral spaces, you get to
know us pretty quick. So the place names that I
listed around the end that I come from in the
Todunga region of the North Island of Zealand, and all
of those place names the places that I it's lovely
to spend some time and looking for chats killed cheesh. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
So we were hanging out in the Kenai area in
dinna Ina Country in twenty nineteen. The Alaska Native Studies
Council had gotten some funding to do two sessions. One
session was language specific and we brought you over in
Kiki Kavaia from Hilo and just had a wonderful time
talking about languages and planning and what we can do.
(04:42):
We had probably twenty or thirty folks from all over
Alaska who were there, some of them who have language
schools and programs built, and some who have maybe fewer
than ten speakers remaining. It was a really diverse group
of people in terms of their backgrounds and what they're
working on in their languages. And it was just a
wonderful time. We had incredible weather, We had people who
(05:03):
took us out onto the land for a bit. We
went hiking down by the water, and so it was
really wonderful and it was really great to meet you
and to see some of the things that you're doing
and working on. And then after that we had a
session maybe a month or two later with Graham and
Linda Smith and they came to Anchorage and we got
into this little cabin and just brainstorm on how to
(05:25):
possibly decolonize a university, which is it might not be
possible sometimes and maybe it is possible, but it is
a journey, it is work. At our university. We have
some people who sometimes whisper in meetings that maybe we
shouldn't even been used in the word decolonization, and so
that to me, tells me, we've got a ton of
work to do, but thinking of language journeys and thinking
(05:47):
of things that unite us because we're on the opposite
sides of the world, and there's some things we have
in common. We all met this dude named Cook who
floated around a boat and apparently buried coins somewhere and
would like say it now that land belongs to the
king or the queen or whoever. And so we've seen
some colonizer some of the same ones. And we've also
(06:08):
seen colonization through a real similar process and through various
forms of language restriction, and also attempted cultural genocide and
taking of land, taking of resources, abuse of people. But
I think more importantly the things that unite us now
is this reclamation of time and space for our identity
and for our languages. So I started learning thing it
(06:31):
when I was about twenty. On my father's side, I'm
also Ubik and Sami, and there were yuchten speakers in
my family. There were Sami speakers in my family. If
you go back Thlingett speakers go back to only my
grandparents generation and then hei to speakers same thing. So
I'm clink Itt Heida Upik and Samie, And so when
I turned twenty, I started to learn thing it and
(06:51):
also started to realize just how endangered languages are around
the world. My focus started with North America, but then
I started to sort of look globally, and when you
look globally, there's a lot of things that point towards
our Tatoa and the things that have happened there. So
could you share a little bit about your individual language
journey and also the journey of your people's corney.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
I didn't actually realize that you yourself had pursued your
language as an adult, and I resonate with that having
started my own language journey at aged eighteen when I
entered my university and decided to start studying it there.
So that was my language trajectory, and so I really
resonated with your order it or about indigenoused universities, because
(07:37):
that is, weirdly, strangely the space that I began to
sort of foray into the world of indigeneity. So I
entered Victoria University of Wellington to heading o Waka at
aged eighteen in two thousand and eight, and I went
to enroll in a music program and I really liked
(07:58):
the idea of being a musician, and I wanted to
study jazz and those beautiful and I had a free
space and my first trimester, and I could fill that
with the language. I've always wanted to find out a
little bit more about my ancestry. I hadn't really participated
in my culture at all up until that point. I
grew up with my mother, my wonderful mother and her
(08:21):
own mother, who were English speaking, and that's where I
spent most of my time. My father's side, there was
some MILDI language spoken. I remember hearing it had some
family gatherings, but not in a very big way, and
so I never really thought about it all that much
until I got into that sort of seventeen eighteen year
(08:41):
old frame of mind. And I think naturally a lot
of us start questioning a lot start questioning a lot
of our peers, of our teachers at school, of the
adults in our lives. And I'd had some experiences that
kind of showed me, actually, I'm not sure these adults
really know what they're doing. I'm not sure they really
at the same what they're talking about. And so some
(09:04):
of the negative things that i'd hear about Mardi people
in Mali culture, I started wondering, is that really true.
I'm not sure that's true. It's not very representative of
my world. It's not very representative of the only other one.
I'm going to go and find out. And so I
enrolled in my first Mardi language course in two thousand
and eight and absolutely fell in love with this language,
(09:26):
to the point that I dropped out of music and
just followed the El Maudi Marti culture at my institution
and just did those as core courses. And I think
I learned a couple of things pretty quickly about the
trajectory of Maldi, which, as you say, is not unlike
your own language. A couple of things I learned where
(09:49):
we had a really intense and quick period of loss
for our language. It was possibly within a generation or so.
I had always been taught up until that point that
my people sort of gave the language away, you know
that we just kind of thought, oh, that English that
looks pretty cool, Like you say that cook guy who
seems pretty cool. We might just like rock over there.
(10:12):
And it was quite confronting to learn about actually the
education system, even the European education system established here in
eighteen sixteen was purely Maldy speaking. You hang on, I
thought these schools were I thought they came in like
they used the education system to colonize my life, but
they were Mildy speaking. I didn't learn that that is true.
(10:35):
They did use the education system, but they started it
in Todal Mildi sort of gestured it towards English over
a period of time. They did the same thing with broadcasting,
although back in the day it was newspapers they were
all being written into They all Mildi, even Westminster Government.
When all of those things were being done, they were
being done in Mildi at the outset, and then very
(10:58):
slowly changed into being English. And I think that taught
me the quest of colonialism at the time was to
be a little more covert, and so that trajectory in
Old del a lot of it feels covert, and my
observations of other language backgrounds around the world that sometimes
(11:18):
it was more overt. That has meant that here we've
had to think quite deeply about unpacking, like what is
actually going on here, because it's quite hard to tell.
So that was one thing I learned pretty quick was
a what I had learned when I was growing hadn't
actually happened like that, but b it had been this
kind of subffuge over a period of time. And I
(11:38):
guess one other thing that I learned, which was surprising,
is I had actually thought that I was the only
Mildy person who couldn't speak Mildy. I thought, and it
was just me, this is my sister and I, you know,
were the only ones who could, and literally everybody else could.
They just did it. That was my assumption. It wasn't
until I got into class that I realized that ninety
(11:58):
six percent of the nation has no Mildi language skills
whatsoever beyond a couple of words. And I was sort
of part of that ninety six But there was hope
in that for me. And there was hope in that
once I understood that I wasn't alone, that everybody in
this room was here with me, they were on my journey,
(12:19):
and that we could become part of four percent, and
that enough of us, if enough of us became part
of that percent, we could become part of the ever
percent comes to me. And so I felt hope in that.
And so while learning about all of the things that
happened here. I think it was an episode that you
had with Brain Taken Alone and Doctor Walkee. Those two
(12:41):
episodes are very reminiscent the loss of language and the
experience some of their schooling experience is very reminiscent. And
so I learned about all those things while at the
same time seeking these little elements of hope. And it's
been the hope that I've clung to it difficult times.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
Cheese for sharing, Yeah, and I can relate to so
much of what you just shared with us. And so
one of them is having sympathy for the adults because
I pretend like I know what I'm doing. We have
a verb it's autriae, which is, well, they pretended like
they knew what they're doing, but they didn't really know
what they were doing. And the neat thing about it
is the verb root for that is raven. And I
(13:23):
feel like that probably ninety percent of the time, it's like, Okay, well,
I'll just act like I know what I'm doing. And so,
especially when you get into the realm of language teaching
and language learning, and there's so much depth to indigenous
languages and there's so much that needs to be done
to replace what we have lost and so among the
thing get people, we have maybe one hundred people who
(13:43):
can speak our language. If you just said, okay, well
who could just function entirely in the language, it probably
gets down to fewer than twenty. And then if he said, well,
who could do everything in the language like the old
people used to do long time ago? And it's about
seven and so these are critical times for us, and
sometimes we are making moves and we are building motivation.
(14:07):
But it's such a thing like the tide goes up
and back down, but it seems to be going lower
every time. And so sometimes at a high tide kind
of level metaphorically, people will feel really good and they'll
stand up at some of the meetings of our indigenous
leadership here and they'll say, I'm so glad we almost
lost everything and now we're in a good safe space.
Speaker 3 (14:25):
You know.
Speaker 1 (14:26):
And I'll just look around the room, thinking, what is
this space? Where does it exist? Because I'm panicking every
single day. And so but I think also, as you're saying,
if you have four percent like for us, it's probably
I would say fewer than one half of percent of
Clinget people can speak their own language, and so it's
probably similar numbers for our neighboring folks around us, like
(14:48):
Simshian and height of peoples, and so to try and
transform those things because colonization is so sneaky and tricky,
like it's deeper than some of the things that we
might even imagine, Like as you're saying, some of these
things that you just sort of are taught, and like
I don't remember ever hearing in school what happened to
indigenous languages, but I remember coming out with some assumptions,
(15:12):
and I don't know where those come from, Like, oh,
I guess people just stop speaking. Oh I guess, And
there's a lot of people who live on our lands
who would probably say the same thing. Oh, they just
it wasn't useful, so they stopped speaking it. But it's
so interesting because I don't think teachers have to actively
teach like that anymore. It's sort of deeply ingrained into
the fabric of the colonial society. And so as we
(15:33):
embrace decolonization and as we embrace language reclamation, it's a
constant tug and pull between trying to raise awareness and
then try not to make people feel too bad because
they're not doing enough right now. And so it's tricky
business to sort of say, okay, can we get to
one percent, and then can we get to two, than
to three, than to four because for us we have
(15:55):
most of the speakers that I worked with a lot
as my fluency was re in a climbing stage over
the past ten years, especially those they were all in
their nineties, and so I knew when I was working
with them I had such a limited time. So I
would just keep asking questions and say, translate this, translate this,
do all this, do all that, And I'm so thankful
that they did. I made sure they were paid, and
(16:16):
I really tried to take care of them and bring
them gifts and just elevate them. But they taught me
so much stuff in those last years of their life,
and I would usually just say to them, dasa to
a sagukubuk, so I said, what do you want your
grandchildren to know? If you tell me, I will try
to teach it to them. And so those were such
(16:38):
precious moments. And so it's a bit of a balancing
act to raise awareness but to not make your own
people feel guilty. I try, I really try. Sometimes I
don't try that hard. I'll just get up there and
just be like, well, just card carrying white people now,
and I'll sit down. And someone said, you said you're
going to be positive. I was like, yeah, that was
I want to snuck in there. So but I do
(16:58):
try to like really be encouraging. But it's sometimes I
mix the messages up.
Speaker 2 (17:02):
Oh that makes that maybe last. Sorry. I So I
absolutely resonate with you we're saying we I feel like
we are very much in the same boat when it
comes to attitudes around language and maybe the way our
communities view safety. And I definitely feel that same frustration.
(17:25):
I suppose one thing that I've tried or I try
to impart to anyone around here who will listen, is
I guess there are two ways of talking about language health,
and perhaps among circles of scholars and linguists and people
who are able to talk about language loss in a
(17:48):
scholarly way, there's still very much that sentiment of being
concerned and being frustrated that we're not moving quickly enough,
and being sort of just keenly aware of how too
much much positivity might transfer as complacency. I don't know
if that makes sense, Like if we're too positive about it,
people might get complacent, and so we don't want to
(18:08):
do that. We want to just like you know, keep
nudging them just hey, like we're not we're not in
the clear yet. On the other hand, I do feel
like when I'm in public, spending time with my community,
spending time with my people, I observe here, and I'm
not sure whether it's the same thing. I observe that
the more we share our concerns about loss with our communities,
(18:29):
the more they think, Wow, that looks too hard. Then like,
if you guys can't do it, what am I going
to do? To hell, I'll just keep living my life.
Because it's that, or maybe maybe it's that I've observed
that when we're a little too negative, our communities start
to go, well, okay, what do we do. It's all
about the kids, right, It's all about the children. So
(18:51):
we'll make them do it, and we'll just be a
bit more stern with the children. And I can see
that that doesn't work either, because the children go, whatever
you guys are doing as adults, that looks too hard.
I'm not going to do it. I'm going to speak
English because that's where the fun is. And so I
guess I like I sit on this constant see saw
of am I doing the right thing and pushing and
(19:12):
like a message about loss or relentless positivity. And I
think between my two communities, one scholarly one you know,
community based with less of the academic background but more
of the actual do you know or if they're actually
doing every day, it's these people on the community side
that I just I think I've just clung to relentless positivity.
(19:34):
But people do disagree with that here and I'm not
sure how you feel, my friend, but it's relentless positivity
the thing to cling to because does it do I
then validate that complacency of ah then he says it's cool,
and he says everything's great.
Speaker 1 (19:49):
Right, And you know, it's tricky because I think I
saw just some silly ad on social media just this
morning where it's like talking about toxic positivity and it
says like if you go and break your leg and
you go to a doctor and the doctor says, okay,
you need to go get five hugs every single day,
and you know, and so but at the same time
you have people who are it's people in peril, you know,
(20:12):
and so the people are already they've been beat up
for generations just about the horror of colonization. And so
one of the things I was doing some work in
Havea III, and I was we were just sort of
in this free flowing conversation mode in a class, and
I said, well, sometimes I feel like my language it's
like the Titanic and the movie The Titanic when the
(20:32):
ship breaks in half and it just really sinks and
all these people are in the icy waters screaming, and
it's like there's a boat that's going around with a
big bullhorn yelling why didn't you learn how to swim?
Speaker 2 (20:43):
You know?
Speaker 1 (20:43):
And so I don't want that to be me like,
because sometimes I feel like there's a real harshness there,
which you know, it's we're hard people. Like we've always
been pretty hard people because we've had to survive and
the elements we've had to be ready to fight, and
that is part of our history. But a strong part
of our history is well. So there was an elder
named Kawu Cyril George, and he used to tell a story.
(21:05):
He said there was a village and these people came
to raid the village one time and take people into
slavery and so there was slavery on the northwest coast,
and everybody ran and they ran up into the woods,
and this one man he got away, but then he
heard the cries of his son, and his son had
been captured, so he ran down to be captured. And
he'd rather be with his son as a slave than
(21:27):
to be free without him. But he would use that
as an example of love. And another one he said,
this person went to visit someone and they gave him
some soup, and when he would take the soup, he
would put his hand under the spoon, and they said, oh,
don't don't burn your hand. And he said, well, I
don't want to waste one drop of your love and hospitality.
And so I think also that supreme love is there
(21:48):
within our peoples. And so colonization tries to trick us.
I'm sure it does this to you where it talks
about just how vicious you guys are, just warring with
everybody and eating people and you know, all kinds human sacrifice.
But I think that's a trick to get us to
not think about how much we love each other and
how much we want to hold each other up, and
how that was the unifying force I believe and that
(22:11):
that's the unifying force that moves us forward. And so
we're gonna talk about this and a whole lot more,
but we got to take a little break and we'll
come back so excited to be visiting with Na across
the ocean that unites us. We'll be right back, little cheesh.
Speaker 3 (22:40):
One or two or three times. You try any rounds,
you run all around without joy, struggle yesterday, you struggle.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
Still today now.
Speaker 3 (22:58):
But your find a broada away my brother sisters, don't
you know what about the way to wait?
Speaker 2 (23:10):
Hit back for those who call.
Speaker 1 (23:15):
Believe in yourself now bullieve in us?
Speaker 4 (23:20):
Somehow?
Speaker 3 (23:22):
Donnadi call Thenasi.
Speaker 1 (23:39):
One of our elders to ease Hermann Davis, he used
to say he would kind of lament. He would go
into this really sad moment where he'd talk about what
it was like going to a boarding school and what
it was like to watch all this watch the language
lose all of its speakers and to see him become
one of the few remaining. And he's talking about how
sad it was, and I remember or down how I
(24:00):
should say, ginach couch its isoka tungi. It's like it
blew out of our hands, and she said it's like
a parachute that just got carried off into the wind.
But then it was Herman Davis who said it's echoing back.
It's echoing back now. So to be part of these
language movements, I think coming back to positivity is you
got to keep yourself positive as well, and sometimes relentlessly
(24:24):
like you were saying. And so I really appreciate you
sharing a lot of that wisdom and knowledge with us
here today, and you have a new platform to carry
this stuff out. So I'm excited there needs to be
a lot more Indigenous people making podcasts. It's a tricky
thing to talk into microphones and to edit this stuff
and to put it out there, but I think we're
trying to indigenize all the spaces, and podcasting is one
(24:47):
of those spaces. So could you talk about your upcoming
podcasts and just tell us a little bit.
Speaker 2 (24:51):
About Koda and thank you for giving me some space
on your own own podcast to talk about another win.
For the last year and a half, perhaps have been
on a bit of a journey to talk about some
of these things a little more openly with my language community.
Then I may he was in the past. Some of
(25:12):
the things that I think and feel about language are
not the same as my elders, and not the same
as some of the really well known people work on
my language around around the land. So I held back
a lot for a while, and just recently have felt like, no,
(25:33):
I think this line of conversation or that line of
conversation needs to be heard, and if my community don't
like it, they'll say so. At least they get to
hear it. And so I started a platform called Mind
Your Tongue, which was trying to really get people to
think about how they mind their languages, their heritage languages,
their ancestral languages. And I did that for a while,
(25:56):
and then one day my fiance and I were talking.
We were on this beautiful by the beach and we
were just having language conversations about what we idealized for
our own family and what we wanted for our lives
for our languages, and my fiance had this like it
was such a genius idea to start a podcast that
(26:19):
doesn't just talk about these issues that I had been feeling.
You know, I guess as a language scholar and as
a participant in my language, but as a family unit
and she had this idea of recentering the discussion around
a home and that was because we had been talking
about things like intergenerational transmission and what it means to
pass a language around your family and to different family
(26:43):
news and what is involved in that. And I harked
back to something I heard in twenty seventeen, which was
of the people in out there or who could have
Mildi as the main language of their home, only two
point six percent of them at shall he do so?
Even those who could have Mildy as the main home
(27:04):
language ninety seven percent are not doing so why not?
They should be the group of people who can if
any of us can. So what's going on there? What
are the things to uncover? And just this beautiful idea
kind of just permeated out from my about what it
would look like if the two of us sat down
(27:26):
and talked about it. From the perspective of being a
couple who share a family, who share a power dynamic.
One as a teacher, one is more of a learner.
We've had different language experiences growing up that inform how
we feel now in terms of the positive and the
negative language trauma that we've managed to let go of
(27:47):
and overcome. And then after all of that, how do
two people turn around and say, all right, this relationship
that we have right now, I love it, but I
want it to be in a different language, and what
does that look like? And then we have different ancestral
languages as well. I'm Mildy, my fiance is Maldi and
from long How does all of that work? And so
(28:10):
you know, the idea for the podcast is who Wholly Hurts.
We are about to finish filming season one. We're doing
video and audio. We'll put little bits of it on
social media. It's going to be called two Couple to
cord It or we're just jumping out there with some
things that we're going to try and start talking about
our community. Are we able to change the language of
(28:33):
our home become part of that two point six percent?
Or are we already too embedded in our ways as
a home to family as they're too much at play?
Is there too much at stake for us a couple
to be able to cord it or in our home?
So that is the trajectory of the podcast, and it
will be out, we hope, around April, and it will
(28:55):
be going up into Apple platforms Spotify, So it should
be going into all of the kind of key areas
and people as podcast content. But what we really hope
is that it will just spark people to think, oh,
actually I can do something positive or even some of
(29:16):
the things that we talk about our experiences, language experiences, neative.
Oh man, I just did that yesterday to my family,
or just criticized them this way or just corrected them
this way, and actually I'm hearing on this podcast that
may not be the next way. So that is the
podcast two couple too caud it or are we atly?
It's going to be set up in the nineties because
(29:37):
we're nineties skids, so other designs and nineties that kind
of take off the nineties tracksuit clothing that was popular here.
I'm not sure where he was popular over there as well.
The cartoons that we were watching. It sort of like
follows that tradictory and we're so excited.
Speaker 1 (29:53):
That's wonderful. Yeah, I just got a new track suit
just the other day, so well, my son is bringing
it back, and so all the things that you know,
everything that's retro is now it just circles through. This
is what we're hoping for our languages is bringing them
back into the home. And first thing, one of the
things that I noticed was we hadn't raised kids in
(30:15):
our language for several generations. Right we go probably sixty
years from the last birth speaker to the new current
birth speakers that we have. And so one of the
things that we realized is if your language loses all
the places where it's spoken, so these domains, these social
or physical spaces, one of the last strongholds is usually
(30:36):
the ceremony. And so one of the things I think
that happens is your language, every language act becomes an
active ceremony, which means your language is not going to
be used on a day to day basis, because once
you start raising kids and stuff, you have to start saying,
you know, wipe their butt, and did you go to
the bathroom, and did you poop your pants? And you
got to go to the bathroom here, and so there's
(30:58):
a lot of stuff that you don't You don't usually
say this stuff to adults, and so what happens as
well is that becomes very jarring for even some of
our elders. They said, we don't use our language that way,
And I said, but how did we how did people
learn how to do all this stuff like just go
in the bathroom and taking care of yourself, And there
must have been ways, because every language functions like that.
(31:19):
There's stuff that you do inside the home that's different
than once you do outside of the home, and so
what we've had to do is reconstruct some of that stuff.
One of the things that did happen with our language
was not just an enormous amount of language loss, but
then some of the folks that came to start documenting
our language were missionaries, and so the missionaries, it kind
of depended on those individuals, like how much did they
(31:42):
want to wipe everything out and replace it and how
much did they want to sort of incorporate it into
Christianity basically. And so we were fortunate here some of
the main missionaries that we had that did a lot
of language work, they were okay with the language existing.
That's what it seems like when you read their materials.
They weren't trying to convert everything. But they also just
(32:03):
have a strong sense of maybe embarrassment when it comes
to pooping and peeing and sexual activity and so all
of that stuff is absence. So I remember one of
my mentors was talking about this verb dictionary and slaying it,
and he said, they got all of them. They got
all the verbs. I said, this book is wonderful, but
they did not get all of the verbs. And he says, well,
what do you mean. I said, well, if I just
(32:25):
use this, I can't poop, I can't pee, I can't
make more people. And my aunties and uncles they taught
me how to say all that stuff. And so the
other thing is trying to get back to a whole language.
And so whole language means we have to re envision
what our language even is and what our language is.
It's a method to communicate everything, everything about the world,
and everything about ourselves and everything about our peoples. And
(32:48):
then also the challenge that we found is And I
thought of this because a legislator said, when we're talking
about language and education, Indigenous languages and education, and she said, well,
how do you bo it's the ancient of the Alaska
Native language and the modern of English. And I thought, okay,
I'll laugh at this question, but it's also so I said, well, okay,
(33:11):
there's a bit of a stereotype here that I just
want to point out that English is modern and Alaska
Natives are ancient, and there's some dangerous stuff with us
being frozen in time, but there's also some reality there
because our language was actively banished. There was a war
on our language for eighty years, so we weren't allowed
to be part of the conversation about science and technology
(33:32):
and everything that's going on, and so we didn't have
a chance to make the words that everyone else has
made words for this there's so many words in English
that didn't exist one hundred years ago where you could
go back, and it's not just stuff on social media.
It's a lot of science and technology concepts. If you
just hopped into a time machine and went to eighteen
(33:52):
eighty is that how many gigabytes? Is that, they would
look at you like you're crazy, and so same thing
for indigenous languages. We have been prohibited from these spaces.
So I'm so excited about your podcast because these are
the topics that we also need. Is how do you
get the language back home? Because I remember we would
focus a lot on teaching it through the university and
teaching it through the elementary schools and the high schools
(34:14):
and the preschools, and some of our own people would say,
that's not it. You got to get it into the home.
I said, yes, but it's not a one thing or
the other. We have to teach people the language so
they can bring at home. We can't just say everybody
speaks think it at home, because nobody speaks it. Twenty
years ago maybe grandma and grandpa did, but now hardly anybody.
And so it's not so limited that we only pick
(34:36):
one spot like, we got to bring it back everywhere.
So I'm excited. I'm excited about the podcast. How has
it been recording episodes and cutting them up and doing
that kind of stuff.
Speaker 2 (34:45):
Oh my gosh, there's so much that you just said
that I would just love to dive into. I'll start
with the podcast and then and then I feel like
if we can come back to it, that's so great.
Things that you were talking about. I was just thinking
about something to say. It's language, it's treasure. Language is
told that, and I guess considering what else might be
treasure to us. So you've got your you know, you've
(35:07):
got your ceremonial, which is that language that you hold
so tightly mostly, but then seeing something else, like you know,
a mug, a drink, bottle, a knife fork, seeing all
of those things as treasures too that are functional, and
what kind of language is encapsulated and the toilet paper,
(35:28):
all of those beautiful. It's been such a cool process
working on this podcast together. It's been a lot of fun.
We decided, because it was home based, that we would
report it all in our lounge. We wouldn't go into
a studio, we wouldn't use any online platforms for this season.
We would sit in our lounge with all of the
(35:51):
stuff that comes with that, like garbage trucks outside and
the cat being just an absolute pain everywhere she goes.
If she sees a camera stand or tripard holding a
phone or a camera, and she'll go and you know,
try and knock it over because it's new and exciting
and so all of those things we thought would be fun. So,
(36:13):
you know, I'm sitting in my lounge at the moment,
and this is where we recorded it. We wanted it
to be really based centered around ourselves and how we
are as a couple, and we wanted to be silly
and say nerdy things, and so we decided to do that.
And when we got to interviewing guests, we also tried
to keep that as much as possible. So we did
(36:34):
interview some guests, one couple who are raising their family
in both Maudi and Tongan. And then we wanted to
step just outside of the Pacific, so we interviewed some
friends of say Sri lank And. We wanted to talk
to all of these people about how do you reinstate
(36:55):
intergenerational transmission, but we wanted to step into the reality
of it. A lot of I think a lot of
us when we think about intergenerational transmission, we just think
about the one target language. But the reality is for
us as a couple, we've got at least two to
think about dadel Maudi and Tokla for our dadel Maudi
(37:16):
Dongan family. We saw that as being a beautiful example
of how do you actually do that got multiple languages
going on? What is what happens? You know? What? How
do you think? How do you feel? What are all
the beautiful code switching moments that your children are making.
So that was great from the perspective of the Sri
Lankan fine note, we wanted to know, well, you are
(37:38):
in New Zealand born or you've been here living here
for a long time, you've got children, you've got parents
still here with you. How have you managed to maintain
your language transmission as an intergenerationally transmitting family on the
same lands that I am, And we're breathing the same air,
(37:58):
we experienced same well similar kinds of oppression from the outside.
We have the same external factors, we have the same
English pressure. How have you managed to dodge it? Because
we've talked about this so much, and Maldi communities talk
about this so much every day, how do you do it?
How do we get over it? How do we get
over this hump? How do we stop this from happening?
(38:19):
How do we control and do you guys even talk
about this? I'm not even sure that you do. So,
you know, we got to we got to sit down
with them and say do you actually talk about it?
They're like no, and then you know, so we get
through the podcast, they're like, now we will. You know,
For me, it was like seeing that no, these families
are maintaining their languages, they are not giving them just
(38:43):
up to anybody, and it is it feels so comfortable,
the way that they move in and out of languages
and where and where they don't accommodate you know, so
like for myself as a stranger to the family, they
don't accommodate me. And that's something I think that Maldi
communities often struggle with because we come from a background
(39:04):
of hospitality, so we want to accommodate, you know, we
want you to feel coved. And I think we've got
to a point in time and certainly after seeing that
family and talking to them and seeing how they maintain
their languages without accommodating me, and I didn't feel uncomfortable.
It's beautiful. I love, I still felt welcome, I still
felt all the hospitality and thinking and maybe we accommodate
(39:26):
too much and maybe that's a barrier. So all these
little things are just you know, amazing. So working on
the podcast has been beautiful, going out to their home,
otherwise sitting at home cutting it together, you know, from
a file with a team of people who are just awesome,
beautiful company Mildi owned production company called Ata. They do
(39:46):
an amazing star It's been so much.
Speaker 1 (39:48):
Fun, fabulous, and we need more indigenous voices that are
out there and looking at around the world. There are
so many languages that are trying to do the exact
same thing, like it's it's a different language and it's
a different situation, but it's a similar thing where a
group of people have come and tried to destroy your
language and tried to replace it with something else, and
(40:09):
so trying to sort of now, look and say, okay,
well can we do We could do both, We could
do both, that's okay, but then trying to sort of
redefine some of these spaces and sometimes redefine some of
these relationships. Like so if you said, okay, well now
we're going to do this all in thing it. And
so my wife and I we we decided when our
babies were born that I would speak to them entirely
in thing it. And it was for myself it was
(40:31):
a huge challenge just to look at this little baby
and think, what am I guys say to you baby?
Like what now? And so it's you know, because so
much of my language journey had been how are you good?
How are you good? How's the weather fine? And then
you know, then switching to English after that it's a
handshake language. And so having this these babies and then
really talking to them and then seeing that they can
(40:53):
communicate just fine. It's like whatever language you pick and
you could pick multiple languages and they'll they'll be just fine.
And so we're gonna talk about a lot more of
this when we come back. We're gonna take our second break.
I'm so excited to hear about your podcast. I'm so
looking forward to listening to it, and I'm so glad
that you folks are making it.
Speaker 2 (41:11):
Jeesh, we'll be right back. He hed.
Speaker 4 (41:26):
Ah yah yah, not say oh God, oh a kara
(42:04):
is away.
Speaker 1 (42:28):
When cainsagu.
Speaker 2 (42:34):
To us a.
Speaker 1 (42:37):
Yage. So sometimes folks are canoe runs aground, and when
it runs aground, it takes a lot of work to
get that canoe back in the water and going again.
We have a verb for something like that, for a
canoe to run aground or for a car to get
stuck could be the same verb, and then people got
(42:59):
to work real hard to get that canoe back in
the water. But we have another verb which talks about
when everybody is really paddling, just completely synchronized and paddling
with such rhythm and strength, that that canoe just starts
gliding across the water. So that's our metaphor for this
next part of our conversation, which is when you get
stuck as an individual, and when you get stuck as
(43:22):
a collective, what's the next step? And these are always things.
If you're working in indigenous languages, odds are you're probably
just up every night trying to figure out the next
thing you're trying to solve in terms of how do
I make this easier for people, how do I make
this more incentivized, how do I bring the people back,
how do I get the people to care more deeply
and to be more committed, But also how do I
(43:43):
help heal the people, and how do I heal myself
because maybe I'm being mean to people just over correction
or correcting with meanness. You know, one time, we're learning
a lot from our Hawaiian language teacher and he teaches
us all the time, and sometimes we're just correct this
kind of harsh, but laughing, and we were all in
the same sort of space that it wasn't offensive, it
(44:04):
wasn't hurtful, it was it was all in good fun.
And I think I came back and maybe tried that,
but it wasn't. I was maybe upset and I was
frustrated that someone didn't know something, and I really hurt
their feelings by the way that I corrected them, And
I'm not trying to blame it on anybody, but sometimes
the energies that we bring we might not understand in
our own selves how that can be harmful sometimes. And
(44:27):
so some of the areas that I think about is
like what's next for us? Because if we look at
Maori for thinking people, where you're like, they've they got it,
they figured it all out, they've done the thing. We
just have to be like them. But I'm sure if
I came among you, it would probably be something else,
like who has figured it out? We're stuck on this thing,
(44:47):
you know, and so when you're in the woods, it's
hard to see the forest, and then when you're in
the forest, you know, sometimes it's hard to see where
to go next. So I want to ask you your
thoughts on where things are at, sort of with the collective,
with you and as an individual, and what your current
strategies are on getting that canoe back in the water
(45:07):
and getting that speed up again.
Speaker 2 (45:09):
Yoda, that's a that's an awesome intro. I was thinking
while you were talking. We have a proverb that's sort
of similar waka, and it's it is about the collective,
but it's sort of like choppy waters can still be
used as gliding waters of everybody's paddling in unison, And
that's kind of the crux of that proverb. And I
(45:29):
think that really harks to parks back to where we
are in our language situation. I've often heard on my
travels with international communities that they look to my language
as I guess a point of inspiration, and I think,
I think you're you're right. It might be that I'm
not seeing the forest for the trees. Potentially. I know
(45:50):
that there are things about our language journey that have
been different from the colonial experience of others, which means
that forms of oppression have been different. There are some
I mean, I would never say lucky, but there are
some parts about our colonial history and settler colonial history
here and all that I have observed are less intense
(46:13):
than what other languages have undergone or other cultures have undergone.
That's not luck. That's actually I don't know if what
you'd call it, but it means that a lot of
people look to our language and think, man, those people
have it sorted. And I just think we just happened
to be in a different part of the world at
a later period of time that by the time Cook
(46:33):
arrived and all of these horrific things started happening, colonial
powers had become a little more conscientized and a little
more enlightened previously. And so that's the if there's any
luck in it, it's that distance and time we have
been in some respect. So I use that word luck
like just for complete lack of a better term. Our
(46:56):
language came to a point where it was one generation
away from having no native speakers, and about the nineteen seventies,
which is quite a lot later than other languages that
I've visited. By that time, we were able to talk
with other communities and see what that had been through.
You know, this is the nineteen seventies. There's opportunities to
talk across the water, across the seas, and so we
(47:19):
were learning. And so while people often talk about Maudi
being you know this or that and language revitalization, I
often look at it the other way and think, well,
we had the opportunity to talk with you and feel
your pain and feel your the things that you have
been going. And so I credit our inspiration to international
indigenous people teaching us. We at the moment are in
(47:43):
this ground swell of positive movement which I feel so hopeful.
There's a downside to that, but at the moment there's
just this ground swell of people who want to engage
with this language Aguitahgwannu. Whether it's it's a little bit,
a lot, the whole nation really is banding around the
(48:04):
language at the moment in a really beautiful way, and
that is really hopeful and really positive. Of course, up
against that, we have the current political climate, which is
I don't think it's unique to Old Theodore and New Zealand,
where we're seeing the most right wing extremist governments around
the world in colonized spaces, and those set the colonial
(48:25):
governments are far more extreme than we've probably maybe ever
seen in quite some time or seen on our own land.
We're certainly experiencing that here and so there are some
moves to try and take away from from the language
to the ground that has been made in recent memory.
One of the things that I cling to is that
(48:45):
it's been a lot of non Mildi people who are
pushing it forward anywhere for us, and so I'm thankful
for that. We're still in a space where where we
don't have enough speakers. We don't have enough people who
are really trying to work on our language in the home.
We're still sitting somewhere around that. You know, that low
percentage of people who are speaking the language every day,
(49:07):
And so as part of that, I think a lot
of us who work with families and different cultural spaces
and even workplaces and schools, and we sit down and
we talk about language. Some themes are certainly starting to
emerge that I'm quite keen for us to explore, if
not change. And a couple of them are like really
hard I think to grapple with. And I think the
(49:28):
reason they're hard to grapple with is that I feel
like I almost start sounding at times like I'm really
like pro English, and it's hard I think to dissect that.
And one example is like like bilingualism and centering our
language efforts around bilingualism. I think I've learned that centering
our language efforts wholly around MILDI. While it has some
(49:50):
good positive benefits, it has some downsides. And one of
them is like you gestured to it for around like
really overt correction. Because people love the language. People love it,
and they hold it so dear to treasure, and that
can mean when somebody makes a mistake or does something
that they don't think is quite native or natural, that
there's quite heavy criticism that comes along with that because
(50:12):
they feel like their treasure has been something's happened to it.
Professor Dewinia Higgins here and out There or calls it
the golem effect. It's like the more you the more
you sit with your treasure, the more it kind of
just starts to change your thinking into that like unwavering
need to protect it against all costs, even at the
expense of itself. And so I feel like that's part
(50:35):
of this possibly, like clinging so carefully to Mildy, is
that every time somebody does something that we don't think
is quite there, it will come with that sort of
really heavy, heavy criticism. Some of those things that people
do are really really natural, normal behaviors of a bilingual
or a multi lingual. You know, there's billions of multilinguals
(50:56):
all around the world and they're all doing these things.
And so I started to think, I'm not sure whether
clinging to this like column is actually paying off for us.
I think we need to explore about what life might
be like if we center our revival around being excellent
bi linguals, amazing multi linguals, and how freeing that could
(51:19):
be for us. And I think I've observed that as
I've started talking about it among people who don't currently
speak Maori or still learning, they get that it resonates
with them. So there's there's kind of those little things
that hasn't always gone down well, the sitt in pocket
of society, of our society who are not keen on
that idea because of what it allows in you know,
(51:40):
we have we have to make space for English. If
we're going to center revival around multi lingualism, that's scary.
And I understand that's I'm not disagreeing, but I think
that at the moment, it's that need for us to
just step out a little bit, like you say, and
have a look at the forest itself. Think, well, we
(52:01):
spent fifty years chasing the Mildi language everywhere all the time.
There's no room for Era. We've done that for quite
a while. And if that's contributed to us sort of
being in this space where we still don't have our
critical mass, perhaps it's time to change something. So that's
kind of the angle that I come from today, and
(52:21):
I wouldn't say that that's always been my belief. I'm
a bit of a famous language purist of old. I
would call myself a recovering language purist. And I'll share
one quick story. But when I was younger learning MILDI
and I had learned that it was bad to have
transliterations from English. We should have our own words because
(52:42):
to mixed languages, that's so bad. It's such a terrible
thing to do. It really affects the life of a language,
and we need to stop doing it. And that's what
I had been fared as like a language attitude. And anyway,
I went to my ancestral Mara, ancestral home at age
twenty two for the first time, and I've been learning
(53:04):
Mali for about four years at that point, the first
time I'd ever been exposed to my ancestry, my fuck Opaba,
my ancestral meeting house, my lands, and I learned that
my great great grandfather adopted a surname, the first one
to adopt a surname, and he adopted a transliteration for Friday,
(53:25):
but I eat it. And so here was me talking
about how transliterations were bastardizing my language and all of this,
you know, holding those attitudes and then realizing that quite literally,
the most proficient native speaker at my family it's ever
had in recent memory adopted one as his name. And
I think what that really taught me that day was
(53:45):
the language attitudes that people hold are not necessarily language
attitudes that feed the health of a language. And I
really started to challenge all of my language attitudes at
that point, because I wanted the language attitudes that made speakers,
that created people who felt comfortable to push their identity
in little ways that included the language in them. And
(54:08):
I started to realize that some of the attitudes that
the language community held I didn't think fed the language
like they could. And I wanted the ones that fed it.
I wanted those things that made people wake up in
the morning and think, Yeah, this language history that we've
had is horrific. But I don't have to sit and
wallow in that. I can feel that and move through
(54:29):
it at the same time. I can process it, feel
sad about it, and reclaim it at the same time.
And it was little inklings of things like language attitudes
around transliteration, and there's a bunch of others that we
have for our language. That really made me question. Ever
since then, I started to realize that I think what's
holding us back in an Old or New Zealand is
(54:51):
our pursuit of language attitudes that really truly feed us,
that allow us to move past the goal of effect,
to see our language as treasure. But that treasure is
not just the treasure of the museum that you put
it in the case and you look at it. It's
the treasure that you eat with. It's the treasure that
you use every day, those meaningful things and the attitudes
(55:14):
that surround them, And that's where I would love for
our people to be considering, thinking, to be sitting at
that table having those discussions. But as I say, whether
that's something that actually does last the distance, I'm not sure.
I mean there's people who think like that too, but
there are definitely people who are like, no, it's got
to be you know, we need to not let space,
(55:34):
we need to not let English. And I actually do understand. Well,
so yeah, we've got those trajectories going on, and who
knows what will happen.
Speaker 1 (55:42):
Yeah, well, going to cheese, I think going to choose plain.
I want to thank you so much any viny Olsen reader,
I'm looking forward to your podcast coming out. And when
you connect with someone as far as like ideologies and
approaches and stuff, it's so exciting but also feels like
this is just going to be Apple so one of
ninety nine and so I could we keep going, but
(56:03):
we're gonna have to wrap this show up. So one
thing I was thinking of, there's an elder named Charlie
Joseph who was doing a lot of work here. He's
gone now, he's been gone for quite some time. He
was Cogwanton. He was in the Sitka, Sitka area, and
at one point he has said kotiktulitzine tusha giu ti
(56:32):
and and the translation for that is from long ago,
we have held our grandchildren up above ourselves. Yes, we
cherish them, even these things that we don't want to share.
We offer up to them, the ones who will become
our grandchildren. And I think of that because, yeah, the
(56:53):
the Gollum effect, Like I was just sitting here trying
to think of how could I do you know, like
some kind of Gollumn voice or something, but to just say,
sometimes you can clutch it so tight that it feels
like other people can't get a piece of this thing,
and then sometimes you end up not sharing things and
you hide things, and or you end up saying to people,
if you can't say it right, don't say it at all,
(57:15):
which is sometimes just shutting the whole thing down. And
I don't think that's people's intentions. But there's so much fear,
there's so much loss, there's so much on the line
that I think we really got to create these spaces
where we say, you know what, there's no mistakes, it's
all just learning. It's all part of learning in this journey.
And we have confidence in ourselves, we have confidence in
(57:37):
each other, and we have confidence in you that we
can get it corrected over time. And the biggest thing
right now is just use and becoming familiar with this
thing that has been taken with us at such an
immense level that it becomes a foreign object to our
own peoples, and to renaturalize ourselves within our language. I
do think takes acts of medicinal purpose, of feeling of unity,
(58:02):
of just saying you can do the thing, and you
should do the thing, and you can do the thing,
and you will do the thing. And as we move
forward together we reach our hands out across the ocean.
We reach our hands out across the internet and we say, oh,
you guys are doing the thing. Yeah, we're doing the thing.
These are different things, but there's so many similarities, and
a lot of those similarities are and how do we
(58:25):
keep the thing growing at this rate That sometimes seems impossible,
But I think that impossible as a colonial construct and
I think that indigenous futures are the things that we
continue to focus on. So Gonna Cheese, I'm really looking
forward to your podcast coming out. We'll put the title
in the description and in future episodes we'll put a
link out when it does come out. So Gonna cheese.
(58:46):
Plane for being with us, and for all of you
out there doing the language work. Keep on going, Believe
in yourself, believe in each other, take a little break
when you need a little break, give someone else a
break when they need a break, and just remember the
collective vision of creating a space reserved for future generations.
The Tongue Unbroken is a project of the Next Up Initiative.
(59:06):
Check out other podcasts and iHeartMedia Network. Check out Indigenous
peoples making podcasts all around the world and taking control
of media and putting our voices out there, Lil chishin
Yoda
They tried to colonizes, try to genocide. Yet we're still
here with the tongue on broke. And just to cut
you on yeah eighteen ye ny a Cajun talk catchwood
(00:39):
to Stein. You did sten eighteen whans you do a
sock way Pacific Ocean. Welcome folks to the Tongue unbroken.
This is episode eleven. I'm super excited because we are
reaching across what we call which is raven black. I
(01:02):
guess is how that translates and eighteen e khannach so
across the ocean to a dear friend and relative. It's
been five years since we've seen each other. We both
do language work, and I'm excited to have a conversation
with Eana. Vinnie in Alta Roa working in the Maudi
language and is working on a podcast of his own.
(01:23):
So I'm excited today to go international. We're going across
the waters, We're going across time. It's tomorrow for him,
and so I'm excited to just visit with you for
a bit and hear what you've been up to and
what's going on over there. I just want to recognize
the Maudi peoples as an origin point for so much
stuff for global language reclamation movements. The language Nest movement
(01:48):
has its origins in New Zealand and among the Maudi
people and the Hawaiians sahed and replicated it, and then
we've been studying with the Hawaiians when we've been replicating
what they've been trying to do. And so I just
want to get have a lot of a lot of
love to to your peoples and to your side of
the world. And why don't you tell the people who
(02:08):
you are and about a little bit of your language journey.
Speaker 2 (02:13):
Na koto kordo or Hey, good morning everybody. Thank you
(02:50):
so much for giving me some space and your podcast
to talk about some things with your listeners. A big,
big thank you to you, and thank you to everyone listening.
But also it's just so nice to see you after
so long. I have such incredible memories from my time
visiting the Indigenous people of Alaska in twenty nineteen, and
(03:14):
I can't wait to get back. But thank you so
much the hospitality I felt, so I felt so home
over there, and I think for that I've just felt
this sense like I really want to get back over
and see you all in person. But for now, it's
great I'm dialing in from weynuior Matha, Wellington Old the
Greater Wellington area is quite big, and weynuior Matha is
(03:36):
a part of that smaller city called Lower Hut. My
name is Vincent Vinni. My milder name is Ednie. And
a little speech that I opened with just at the
beginning there there's a pope pot of Butter and it's
from home, and there's kind of a little saying that
if you can understand our top potter butter, our ways
(03:57):
of introducing ourselves in our ancestral spaces, you get to
know us pretty quick. So the place names that I
listed around the end that I come from in the
Todunga region of the North Island of Zealand, and all
of those place names the places that I it's lovely
to spend some time and looking for chats killed cheesh. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (04:19):
So we were hanging out in the Kenai area in
dinna Ina Country in twenty nineteen. The Alaska Native Studies
Council had gotten some funding to do two sessions. One
session was language specific and we brought you over in
Kiki Kavaia from Hilo and just had a wonderful time
talking about languages and planning and what we can do.
(04:42):
We had probably twenty or thirty folks from all over
Alaska who were there, some of them who have language
schools and programs built, and some who have maybe fewer
than ten speakers remaining. It was a really diverse group
of people in terms of their backgrounds and what they're
working on in their languages. And it was just a
wonderful time. We had incredible weather, We had people who
(05:03):
took us out onto the land for a bit. We
went hiking down by the water, and so it was
really wonderful and it was really great to meet you
and to see some of the things that you're doing
and working on. And then after that we had a
session maybe a month or two later with Graham and
Linda Smith and they came to Anchorage and we got
into this little cabin and just brainstorm on how to
(05:25):
possibly decolonize a university, which is it might not be
possible sometimes and maybe it is possible, but it is
a journey, it is work. At our university. We have
some people who sometimes whisper in meetings that maybe we
shouldn't even been used in the word decolonization, and so
that to me, tells me, we've got a ton of
work to do, but thinking of language journeys and thinking
(05:47):
of things that unite us because we're on the opposite
sides of the world, and there's some things we have
in common. We all met this dude named Cook who
floated around a boat and apparently buried coins somewhere and
would like say it now that land belongs to the
king or the queen or whoever. And so we've seen
some colonizer some of the same ones. And we've also
(06:08):
seen colonization through a real similar process and through various
forms of language restriction, and also attempted cultural genocide and
taking of land, taking of resources, abuse of people. But
I think more importantly the things that unite us now
is this reclamation of time and space for our identity
and for our languages. So I started learning thing it
(06:31):
when I was about twenty. On my father's side, I'm
also Ubik and Sami, and there were yuchten speakers in
my family. There were Sami speakers in my family. If
you go back Thlingett speakers go back to only my
grandparents generation and then hei to speakers same thing. So
I'm clink Itt Heida Upik and Samie, And so when
I turned twenty, I started to learn thing it and
(06:51):
also started to realize just how endangered languages are around
the world. My focus started with North America, but then
I started to sort of look globally, and when you
look globally, there's a lot of things that point towards
our Tatoa and the things that have happened there. So
could you share a little bit about your individual language
journey and also the journey of your people's corney.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
I didn't actually realize that you yourself had pursued your
language as an adult, and I resonate with that having
started my own language journey at aged eighteen when I
entered my university and decided to start studying it there.
So that was my language trajectory, and so I really
resonated with your order it or about indigenoused universities, because
(07:37):
that is, weirdly, strangely the space that I began to
sort of foray into the world of indigeneity. So I
entered Victoria University of Wellington to heading o Waka at
aged eighteen in two thousand and eight, and I went
to enroll in a music program and I really liked
(07:58):
the idea of being a musician, and I wanted to
study jazz and those beautiful and I had a free
space and my first trimester, and I could fill that
with the language. I've always wanted to find out a
little bit more about my ancestry. I hadn't really participated
in my culture at all up until that point. I
grew up with my mother, my wonderful mother and her
(08:21):
own mother, who were English speaking, and that's where I
spent most of my time. My father's side, there was
some MILDI language spoken. I remember hearing it had some
family gatherings, but not in a very big way, and
so I never really thought about it all that much
until I got into that sort of seventeen eighteen year
(08:41):
old frame of mind. And I think naturally a lot
of us start questioning a lot start questioning a lot
of our peers, of our teachers at school, of the
adults in our lives. And I'd had some experiences that
kind of showed me, actually, I'm not sure these adults
really know what they're doing. I'm not sure they really
at the same what they're talking about. And so some
(09:04):
of the negative things that i'd hear about Mardi people
in Mali culture, I started wondering, is that really true.
I'm not sure that's true. It's not very representative of
my world. It's not very representative of the only other one.
I'm going to go and find out. And so I
enrolled in my first Mardi language course in two thousand
and eight and absolutely fell in love with this language,
(09:26):
to the point that I dropped out of music and
just followed the El Maudi Marti culture at my institution
and just did those as core courses. And I think
I learned a couple of things pretty quickly about the
trajectory of Maldi, which, as you say, is not unlike
your own language. A couple of things I learned where
(09:49):
we had a really intense and quick period of loss
for our language. It was possibly within a generation or so.
I had always been taught up until that point that
my people sort of gave the language away, you know
that we just kind of thought, oh, that English that
looks pretty cool, Like you say that cook guy who
seems pretty cool. We might just like rock over there.
(10:12):
And it was quite confronting to learn about actually the
education system, even the European education system established here in
eighteen sixteen was purely Maldy speaking. You hang on, I
thought these schools were I thought they came in like
they used the education system to colonize my life, but
they were Mildy speaking. I didn't learn that that is true.
(10:35):
They did use the education system, but they started it
in Todal Mildi sort of gestured it towards English over
a period of time. They did the same thing with broadcasting,
although back in the day it was newspapers they were
all being written into They all Mildi, even Westminster Government.
When all of those things were being done, they were
being done in Mildi at the outset, and then very
(10:58):
slowly changed into being English. And I think that taught
me the quest of colonialism at the time was to
be a little more covert, and so that trajectory in
Old del a lot of it feels covert, and my
observations of other language backgrounds around the world that sometimes
(11:18):
it was more overt. That has meant that here we've
had to think quite deeply about unpacking, like what is
actually going on here, because it's quite hard to tell.
So that was one thing I learned pretty quick was
a what I had learned when I was growing hadn't
actually happened like that, but b it had been this
kind of subffuge over a period of time. And I
(11:38):
guess one other thing that I learned, which was surprising,
is I had actually thought that I was the only
Mildy person who couldn't speak Mildy. I thought, and it
was just me, this is my sister and I, you know,
were the only ones who could, and literally everybody else could.
They just did it. That was my assumption. It wasn't
until I got into class that I realized that ninety
(11:58):
six percent of the nation has no Mildi language skills
whatsoever beyond a couple of words. And I was sort
of part of that ninety six But there was hope
in that for me. And there was hope in that
once I understood that I wasn't alone, that everybody in
this room was here with me, they were on my journey,
(12:19):
and that we could become part of four percent, and
that enough of us, if enough of us became part
of that percent, we could become part of the ever
percent comes to me. And so I felt hope in that.
And so while learning about all of the things that
happened here. I think it was an episode that you
had with Brain Taken Alone and Doctor Walkee. Those two
(12:41):
episodes are very reminiscent the loss of language and the
experience some of their schooling experience is very reminiscent. And
so I learned about all those things while at the
same time seeking these little elements of hope. And it's
been the hope that I've clung to it difficult times.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
Cheese for sharing, Yeah, and I can relate to so
much of what you just shared with us. And so
one of them is having sympathy for the adults because
I pretend like I know what I'm doing. We have
a verb it's autriae, which is, well, they pretended like
they knew what they're doing, but they didn't really know
what they were doing. And the neat thing about it
is the verb root for that is raven. And I
(13:23):
feel like that probably ninety percent of the time, it's like, Okay, well,
I'll just act like I know what I'm doing. And so,
especially when you get into the realm of language teaching
and language learning, and there's so much depth to indigenous
languages and there's so much that needs to be done
to replace what we have lost and so among the
thing get people, we have maybe one hundred people who
(13:43):
can speak our language. If you just said, okay, well
who could just function entirely in the language, it probably
gets down to fewer than twenty. And then if he said, well,
who could do everything in the language like the old
people used to do long time ago? And it's about
seven and so these are critical times for us, and
sometimes we are making moves and we are building motivation.
(14:07):
But it's such a thing like the tide goes up
and back down, but it seems to be going lower
every time. And so sometimes at a high tide kind
of level metaphorically, people will feel really good and they'll
stand up at some of the meetings of our indigenous
leadership here and they'll say, I'm so glad we almost
lost everything and now we're in a good safe space.
Speaker 3 (14:25):
You know.
Speaker 1 (14:26):
And I'll just look around the room, thinking, what is
this space? Where does it exist? Because I'm panicking every
single day. And so but I think also, as you're saying,
if you have four percent like for us, it's probably
I would say fewer than one half of percent of
Clinget people can speak their own language, and so it's
probably similar numbers for our neighboring folks around us, like
(14:48):
Simshian and height of peoples, and so to try and
transform those things because colonization is so sneaky and tricky,
like it's deeper than some of the things that we
might even imagine, Like as you're saying, some of these
things that you just sort of are taught, and like
I don't remember ever hearing in school what happened to
indigenous languages, but I remember coming out with some assumptions,
(15:12):
and I don't know where those come from, Like, oh,
I guess people just stop speaking. Oh I guess, And
there's a lot of people who live on our lands
who would probably say the same thing. Oh, they just
it wasn't useful, so they stopped speaking it. But it's
so interesting because I don't think teachers have to actively
teach like that anymore. It's sort of deeply ingrained into
the fabric of the colonial society. And so as we
(15:33):
embrace decolonization and as we embrace language reclamation, it's a
constant tug and pull between trying to raise awareness and
then try not to make people feel too bad because
they're not doing enough right now. And so it's tricky
business to sort of say, okay, can we get to
one percent, and then can we get to two, than
to three, than to four because for us we have
(15:55):
most of the speakers that I worked with a lot
as my fluency was re in a climbing stage over
the past ten years, especially those they were all in
their nineties, and so I knew when I was working
with them I had such a limited time. So I
would just keep asking questions and say, translate this, translate this,
do all this, do all that, And I'm so thankful
that they did. I made sure they were paid, and
(16:16):
I really tried to take care of them and bring
them gifts and just elevate them. But they taught me
so much stuff in those last years of their life,
and I would usually just say to them, dasa to
a sagukubuk, so I said, what do you want your
grandchildren to know? If you tell me, I will try
to teach it to them. And so those were such
(16:38):
precious moments. And so it's a bit of a balancing
act to raise awareness but to not make your own
people feel guilty. I try, I really try. Sometimes I
don't try that hard. I'll just get up there and
just be like, well, just card carrying white people now,
and I'll sit down. And someone said, you said you're
going to be positive. I was like, yeah, that was
I want to snuck in there. So but I do
(16:58):
try to like really be encouraging. But it's sometimes I
mix the messages up.
Speaker 2 (17:02):
Oh that makes that maybe last. Sorry. I So I
absolutely resonate with you we're saying we I feel like
we are very much in the same boat when it
comes to attitudes around language and maybe the way our
communities view safety. And I definitely feel that same frustration.
(17:25):
I suppose one thing that I've tried or I try
to impart to anyone around here who will listen, is
I guess there are two ways of talking about language health,
and perhaps among circles of scholars and linguists and people
who are able to talk about language loss in a
(17:48):
scholarly way, there's still very much that sentiment of being
concerned and being frustrated that we're not moving quickly enough,
and being sort of just keenly aware of how too
much much positivity might transfer as complacency. I don't know
if that makes sense, Like if we're too positive about it,
people might get complacent, and so we don't want to
(18:08):
do that. We want to just like you know, keep
nudging them just hey, like we're not we're not in
the clear yet. On the other hand, I do feel
like when I'm in public, spending time with my community,
spending time with my people, I observe here, and I'm
not sure whether it's the same thing. I observe that
the more we share our concerns about loss with our communities,
(18:29):
the more they think, Wow, that looks too hard. Then like,
if you guys can't do it, what am I going
to do? To hell, I'll just keep living my life.
Because it's that, or maybe maybe it's that I've observed
that when we're a little too negative, our communities start
to go, well, okay, what do we do. It's all
about the kids, right, It's all about the children. So
(18:51):
we'll make them do it, and we'll just be a
bit more stern with the children. And I can see
that that doesn't work either, because the children go, whatever
you guys are doing as adults, that looks too hard.
I'm not going to do it. I'm going to speak
English because that's where the fun is. And so I
guess I like I sit on this constant see saw
of am I doing the right thing and pushing and
(19:12):
like a message about loss or relentless positivity. And I
think between my two communities, one scholarly one you know,
community based with less of the academic background but more
of the actual do you know or if they're actually
doing every day, it's these people on the community side
that I just I think I've just clung to relentless positivity.
(19:34):
But people do disagree with that here and I'm not
sure how you feel, my friend, but it's relentless positivity
the thing to cling to because does it do I
then validate that complacency of ah then he says it's cool,
and he says everything's great.
Speaker 1 (19:49):
Right, And you know, it's tricky because I think I
saw just some silly ad on social media just this
morning where it's like talking about toxic positivity and it
says like if you go and break your leg and
you go to a doctor and the doctor says, okay,
you need to go get five hugs every single day,
and you know, and so but at the same time
you have people who are it's people in peril, you know,
(20:12):
and so the people are already they've been beat up
for generations just about the horror of colonization. And so
one of the things I was doing some work in
Havea III, and I was we were just sort of
in this free flowing conversation mode in a class, and
I said, well, sometimes I feel like my language it's
like the Titanic and the movie The Titanic when the
(20:32):
ship breaks in half and it just really sinks and
all these people are in the icy waters screaming, and
it's like there's a boat that's going around with a
big bullhorn yelling why didn't you learn how to swim?
Speaker 2 (20:43):
You know?
Speaker 1 (20:43):
And so I don't want that to be me like,
because sometimes I feel like there's a real harshness there,
which you know, it's we're hard people. Like we've always
been pretty hard people because we've had to survive and
the elements we've had to be ready to fight, and
that is part of our history. But a strong part
of our history is well. So there was an elder
named Kawu Cyril George, and he used to tell a story.
(21:05):
He said there was a village and these people came
to raid the village one time and take people into
slavery and so there was slavery on the northwest coast,
and everybody ran and they ran up into the woods,
and this one man he got away, but then he
heard the cries of his son, and his son had
been captured, so he ran down to be captured. And
he'd rather be with his son as a slave than
(21:27):
to be free without him. But he would use that
as an example of love. And another one he said,
this person went to visit someone and they gave him
some soup, and when he would take the soup, he
would put his hand under the spoon, and they said, oh,
don't don't burn your hand. And he said, well, I
don't want to waste one drop of your love and hospitality.
And so I think also that supreme love is there
(21:48):
within our peoples. And so colonization tries to trick us.
I'm sure it does this to you where it talks
about just how vicious you guys are, just warring with
everybody and eating people and you know, all kinds human sacrifice.
But I think that's a trick to get us to
not think about how much we love each other and
how much we want to hold each other up, and
how that was the unifying force I believe and that
(22:11):
that's the unifying force that moves us forward. And so
we're gonna talk about this and a whole lot more,
but we got to take a little break and we'll
come back so excited to be visiting with Na across
the ocean that unites us. We'll be right back, little cheesh.
Speaker 3 (22:40):
One or two or three times. You try any rounds,
you run all around without joy, struggle yesterday, you struggle.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
Still today now.
Speaker 3 (22:58):
But your find a broada away my brother sisters, don't
you know what about the way to wait?
Speaker 2 (23:10):
Hit back for those who call.
Speaker 1 (23:15):
Believe in yourself now bullieve in us?
Speaker 4 (23:20):
Somehow?
Speaker 3 (23:22):
Donnadi call Thenasi.
Speaker 1 (23:39):
One of our elders to ease Hermann Davis, he used
to say he would kind of lament. He would go
into this really sad moment where he'd talk about what
it was like going to a boarding school and what
it was like to watch all this watch the language
lose all of its speakers and to see him become
one of the few remaining. And he's talking about how
sad it was, and I remember or down how I
(24:00):
should say, ginach couch its isoka tungi. It's like it
blew out of our hands, and she said it's like
a parachute that just got carried off into the wind.
But then it was Herman Davis who said it's echoing back.
It's echoing back now. So to be part of these
language movements, I think coming back to positivity is you
got to keep yourself positive as well, and sometimes relentlessly
(24:24):
like you were saying. And so I really appreciate you
sharing a lot of that wisdom and knowledge with us
here today, and you have a new platform to carry
this stuff out. So I'm excited there needs to be
a lot more Indigenous people making podcasts. It's a tricky
thing to talk into microphones and to edit this stuff
and to put it out there, but I think we're
trying to indigenize all the spaces, and podcasting is one
(24:47):
of those spaces. So could you talk about your upcoming
podcasts and just tell us a little bit.
Speaker 2 (24:51):
About Koda and thank you for giving me some space
on your own own podcast to talk about another win.
For the last year and a half, perhaps have been
on a bit of a journey to talk about some
of these things a little more openly with my language community.
Then I may he was in the past. Some of
(25:12):
the things that I think and feel about language are
not the same as my elders, and not the same
as some of the really well known people work on
my language around around the land. So I held back
a lot for a while, and just recently have felt like, no,
(25:33):
I think this line of conversation or that line of
conversation needs to be heard, and if my community don't
like it, they'll say so. At least they get to
hear it. And so I started a platform called Mind
Your Tongue, which was trying to really get people to
think about how they mind their languages, their heritage languages,
their ancestral languages. And I did that for a while,
(25:56):
and then one day my fiance and I were talking.
We were on this beautiful by the beach and we
were just having language conversations about what we idealized for
our own family and what we wanted for our lives
for our languages, and my fiance had this like it
was such a genius idea to start a podcast that
(26:19):
doesn't just talk about these issues that I had been feeling.
You know, I guess as a language scholar and as
a participant in my language, but as a family unit
and she had this idea of recentering the discussion around
a home and that was because we had been talking
about things like intergenerational transmission and what it means to
pass a language around your family and to different family
(26:43):
news and what is involved in that. And I harked
back to something I heard in twenty seventeen, which was
of the people in out there or who could have
Mildi as the main language of their home, only two
point six percent of them at shall he do so?
Even those who could have Mildy as the main home
(27:04):
language ninety seven percent are not doing so why not?
They should be the group of people who can if
any of us can. So what's going on there? What
are the things to uncover? And just this beautiful idea
kind of just permeated out from my about what it
would look like if the two of us sat down
(27:26):
and talked about it. From the perspective of being a
couple who share a family, who share a power dynamic.
One as a teacher, one is more of a learner.
We've had different language experiences growing up that inform how
we feel now in terms of the positive and the
negative language trauma that we've managed to let go of
(27:47):
and overcome. And then after all of that, how do
two people turn around and say, all right, this relationship
that we have right now, I love it, but I
want it to be in a different language, and what
does that look like? And then we have different ancestral
languages as well. I'm Mildy, my fiance is Maldi and
from long How does all of that work? And so
(28:10):
you know, the idea for the podcast is who Wholly Hurts.
We are about to finish filming season one. We're doing
video and audio. We'll put little bits of it on
social media. It's going to be called two Couple to
cord It or we're just jumping out there with some
things that we're going to try and start talking about
our community. Are we able to change the language of
(28:33):
our home become part of that two point six percent?
Or are we already too embedded in our ways as
a home to family as they're too much at play?
Is there too much at stake for us a couple
to be able to cord it or in our home?
So that is the trajectory of the podcast, and it
will be out, we hope, around April, and it will
(28:55):
be going up into Apple platforms Spotify, So it should
be going into all of the kind of key areas
and people as podcast content. But what we really hope
is that it will just spark people to think, oh,
actually I can do something positive or even some of
(29:16):
the things that we talk about our experiences, language experiences, neative.
Oh man, I just did that yesterday to my family,
or just criticized them this way or just corrected them
this way, and actually I'm hearing on this podcast that
may not be the next way. So that is the
podcast two couple too caud it or are we atly?
It's going to be set up in the nineties because
(29:37):
we're nineties skids, so other designs and nineties that kind
of take off the nineties tracksuit clothing that was popular here.
I'm not sure where he was popular over there as well.
The cartoons that we were watching. It sort of like
follows that tradictory and we're so excited.
Speaker 1 (29:53):
That's wonderful. Yeah, I just got a new track suit
just the other day, so well, my son is bringing
it back, and so all the things that you know,
everything that's retro is now it just circles through. This
is what we're hoping for our languages is bringing them
back into the home. And first thing, one of the
things that I noticed was we hadn't raised kids in
(30:15):
our language for several generations. Right we go probably sixty
years from the last birth speaker to the new current
birth speakers that we have. And so one of the
things that we realized is if your language loses all
the places where it's spoken, so these domains, these social
or physical spaces, one of the last strongholds is usually
(30:36):
the ceremony. And so one of the things I think
that happens is your language, every language act becomes an
active ceremony, which means your language is not going to
be used on a day to day basis, because once
you start raising kids and stuff, you have to start saying,
you know, wipe their butt, and did you go to
the bathroom, and did you poop your pants? And you
got to go to the bathroom here, and so there's
(30:58):
a lot of stuff that you don't You don't usually
say this stuff to adults, and so what happens as
well is that becomes very jarring for even some of
our elders. They said, we don't use our language that way,
And I said, but how did we how did people
learn how to do all this stuff like just go
in the bathroom and taking care of yourself, And there
must have been ways, because every language functions like that.
(31:19):
There's stuff that you do inside the home that's different
than once you do outside of the home, and so
what we've had to do is reconstruct some of that stuff.
One of the things that did happen with our language
was not just an enormous amount of language loss, but
then some of the folks that came to start documenting
our language were missionaries, and so the missionaries, it kind
of depended on those individuals, like how much did they
(31:42):
want to wipe everything out and replace it and how
much did they want to sort of incorporate it into
Christianity basically. And so we were fortunate here some of
the main missionaries that we had that did a lot
of language work, they were okay with the language existing.
That's what it seems like when you read their materials.
They weren't trying to convert everything. But they also just
(32:03):
have a strong sense of maybe embarrassment when it comes
to pooping and peeing and sexual activity and so all
of that stuff is absence. So I remember one of
my mentors was talking about this verb dictionary and slaying it,
and he said, they got all of them. They got
all the verbs. I said, this book is wonderful, but
they did not get all of the verbs. And he says, well,
what do you mean. I said, well, if I just
(32:25):
use this, I can't poop, I can't pee, I can't
make more people. And my aunties and uncles they taught
me how to say all that stuff. And so the
other thing is trying to get back to a whole language.
And so whole language means we have to re envision
what our language even is and what our language is.
It's a method to communicate everything, everything about the world,
and everything about ourselves and everything about our peoples. And
(32:48):
then also the challenge that we found is And I
thought of this because a legislator said, when we're talking
about language and education, Indigenous languages and education, and she said, well,
how do you bo it's the ancient of the Alaska
Native language and the modern of English. And I thought, okay,
I'll laugh at this question, but it's also so I said, well, okay,
(33:11):
there's a bit of a stereotype here that I just
want to point out that English is modern and Alaska
Natives are ancient, and there's some dangerous stuff with us
being frozen in time, but there's also some reality there
because our language was actively banished. There was a war
on our language for eighty years, so we weren't allowed
to be part of the conversation about science and technology
(33:32):
and everything that's going on, and so we didn't have
a chance to make the words that everyone else has
made words for this there's so many words in English
that didn't exist one hundred years ago where you could
go back, and it's not just stuff on social media.
It's a lot of science and technology concepts. If you
just hopped into a time machine and went to eighteen
(33:52):
eighty is that how many gigabytes? Is that, they would
look at you like you're crazy, and so same thing
for indigenous languages. We have been prohibited from these spaces.
So I'm so excited about your podcast because these are
the topics that we also need. Is how do you
get the language back home? Because I remember we would
focus a lot on teaching it through the university and
teaching it through the elementary schools and the high schools
(34:14):
and the preschools, and some of our own people would say,
that's not it. You got to get it into the home.
I said, yes, but it's not a one thing or
the other. We have to teach people the language so
they can bring at home. We can't just say everybody
speaks think it at home, because nobody speaks it. Twenty
years ago maybe grandma and grandpa did, but now hardly anybody.
And so it's not so limited that we only pick
(34:36):
one spot like, we got to bring it back everywhere.
So I'm excited. I'm excited about the podcast. How has
it been recording episodes and cutting them up and doing
that kind of stuff.
Speaker 2 (34:45):
Oh my gosh, there's so much that you just said
that I would just love to dive into. I'll start
with the podcast and then and then I feel like
if we can come back to it, that's so great.
Things that you were talking about. I was just thinking
about something to say. It's language, it's treasure. Language is
told that, and I guess considering what else might be
treasure to us. So you've got your you know, you've
(35:07):
got your ceremonial, which is that language that you hold
so tightly mostly, but then seeing something else, like you know,
a mug, a drink, bottle, a knife fork, seeing all
of those things as treasures too that are functional, and
what kind of language is encapsulated and the toilet paper,
(35:28):
all of those beautiful. It's been such a cool process
working on this podcast together. It's been a lot of fun.
We decided, because it was home based, that we would
report it all in our lounge. We wouldn't go into
a studio, we wouldn't use any online platforms for this season.
We would sit in our lounge with all of the
(35:51):
stuff that comes with that, like garbage trucks outside and
the cat being just an absolute pain everywhere she goes.
If she sees a camera stand or tripard holding a
phone or a camera, and she'll go and you know,
try and knock it over because it's new and exciting
and so all of those things we thought would be fun. So,
(36:13):
you know, I'm sitting in my lounge at the moment,
and this is where we recorded it. We wanted it
to be really based centered around ourselves and how we
are as a couple, and we wanted to be silly
and say nerdy things, and so we decided to do that.
And when we got to interviewing guests, we also tried
to keep that as much as possible. So we did
(36:34):
interview some guests, one couple who are raising their family
in both Maudi and Tongan. And then we wanted to
step just outside of the Pacific, so we interviewed some
friends of say Sri lank And. We wanted to talk
to all of these people about how do you reinstate
(36:55):
intergenerational transmission, but we wanted to step into the reality
of it. A lot of I think a lot of
us when we think about intergenerational transmission, we just think
about the one target language. But the reality is for
us as a couple, we've got at least two to
think about dadel Maudi and Tokla for our dadel Maudi
(37:16):
Dongan family. We saw that as being a beautiful example
of how do you actually do that got multiple languages
going on? What is what happens? You know? What? How
do you think? How do you feel? What are all
the beautiful code switching moments that your children are making.
So that was great from the perspective of the Sri
Lankan fine note, we wanted to know, well, you are
(37:38):
in New Zealand born or you've been here living here
for a long time, you've got children, you've got parents
still here with you. How have you managed to maintain
your language transmission as an intergenerationally transmitting family on the
same lands that I am, And we're breathing the same air,
(37:58):
we experienced same well similar kinds of oppression from the outside.
We have the same external factors, we have the same
English pressure. How have you managed to dodge it? Because
we've talked about this so much, and Maldi communities talk
about this so much every day, how do you do it?
How do we get over it? How do we get
over this hump? How do we stop this from happening?
(38:19):
How do we control and do you guys even talk
about this? I'm not even sure that you do. So,
you know, we got to we got to sit down
with them and say do you actually talk about it?
They're like no, and then you know, so we get
through the podcast, they're like, now we will. You know,
For me, it was like seeing that no, these families
are maintaining their languages, they are not giving them just
(38:43):
up to anybody, and it is it feels so comfortable,
the way that they move in and out of languages
and where and where they don't accommodate you know, so
like for myself as a stranger to the family, they
don't accommodate me. And that's something I think that Maldi
communities often struggle with because we come from a background
(39:04):
of hospitality, so we want to accommodate, you know, we
want you to feel coved. And I think we've got
to a point in time and certainly after seeing that
family and talking to them and seeing how they maintain
their languages without accommodating me, and I didn't feel uncomfortable.
It's beautiful. I love, I still felt welcome, I still
felt all the hospitality and thinking and maybe we accommodate
(39:26):
too much and maybe that's a barrier. So all these
little things are just you know, amazing. So working on
the podcast has been beautiful, going out to their home,
otherwise sitting at home cutting it together, you know, from
a file with a team of people who are just awesome,
beautiful company Mildi owned production company called Ata. They do
(39:46):
an amazing star It's been so much.
Speaker 1 (39:48):
Fun, fabulous, and we need more indigenous voices that are
out there and looking at around the world. There are
so many languages that are trying to do the exact
same thing, like it's it's a different language and it's
a different situation, but it's a similar thing where a
group of people have come and tried to destroy your
language and tried to replace it with something else, and
(40:09):
so trying to sort of now, look and say, okay,
well can we do We could do both, We could
do both, that's okay, but then trying to sort of
redefine some of these spaces and sometimes redefine some of
these relationships. Like so if you said, okay, well now
we're going to do this all in thing it. And
so my wife and I we we decided when our
babies were born that I would speak to them entirely
in thing it. And it was for myself it was
(40:31):
a huge challenge just to look at this little baby
and think, what am I guys say to you baby?
Like what now? And so it's you know, because so
much of my language journey had been how are you good?
How are you good? How's the weather fine? And then
you know, then switching to English after that it's a
handshake language. And so having this these babies and then
really talking to them and then seeing that they can
(40:53):
communicate just fine. It's like whatever language you pick and
you could pick multiple languages and they'll they'll be just fine.
And so we're gonna talk about a lot more of
this when we come back. We're gonna take our second break.
I'm so excited to hear about your podcast. I'm so
looking forward to listening to it, and I'm so glad
that you folks are making it.
Speaker 2 (41:11):
Jeesh, we'll be right back. He hed.
Speaker 4 (41:26):
Ah yah yah, not say oh God, oh a kara
(42:04):
is away.
Speaker 1 (42:28):
When cainsagu.
Speaker 2 (42:34):
To us a.
Speaker 1 (42:37):
Yage. So sometimes folks are canoe runs aground, and when
it runs aground, it takes a lot of work to
get that canoe back in the water and going again.
We have a verb for something like that, for a
canoe to run aground or for a car to get
stuck could be the same verb, and then people got
(42:59):
to work real hard to get that canoe back in
the water. But we have another verb which talks about
when everybody is really paddling, just completely synchronized and paddling
with such rhythm and strength, that that canoe just starts
gliding across the water. So that's our metaphor for this
next part of our conversation, which is when you get
stuck as an individual, and when you get stuck as
(43:22):
a collective, what's the next step? And these are always things.
If you're working in indigenous languages, odds are you're probably
just up every night trying to figure out the next
thing you're trying to solve in terms of how do
I make this easier for people, how do I make
this more incentivized, how do I bring the people back,
how do I get the people to care more deeply
and to be more committed, But also how do I
(43:43):
help heal the people, and how do I heal myself
because maybe I'm being mean to people just over correction
or correcting with meanness. You know, one time, we're learning
a lot from our Hawaiian language teacher and he teaches
us all the time, and sometimes we're just correct this
kind of harsh, but laughing, and we were all in
the same sort of space that it wasn't offensive, it
(44:04):
wasn't hurtful, it was it was all in good fun.
And I think I came back and maybe tried that,
but it wasn't. I was maybe upset and I was
frustrated that someone didn't know something, and I really hurt
their feelings by the way that I corrected them, And
I'm not trying to blame it on anybody, but sometimes
the energies that we bring we might not understand in
our own selves how that can be harmful sometimes. And
(44:27):
so some of the areas that I think about is
like what's next for us? Because if we look at
Maori for thinking people, where you're like, they've they got it,
they figured it all out, they've done the thing. We
just have to be like them. But I'm sure if
I came among you, it would probably be something else,
like who has figured it out? We're stuck on this thing,
(44:47):
you know, and so when you're in the woods, it's
hard to see the forest, and then when you're in
the forest, you know, sometimes it's hard to see where
to go next. So I want to ask you your
thoughts on where things are at, sort of with the collective,
with you and as an individual, and what your current
strategies are on getting that canoe back in the water
(45:07):
and getting that speed up again.
Speaker 2 (45:09):
Yoda, that's a that's an awesome intro. I was thinking
while you were talking. We have a proverb that's sort
of similar waka, and it's it is about the collective,
but it's sort of like choppy waters can still be
used as gliding waters of everybody's paddling in unison, And
that's kind of the crux of that proverb. And I
(45:29):
think that really harks to parks back to where we
are in our language situation. I've often heard on my
travels with international communities that they look to my language
as I guess a point of inspiration, and I think,
I think you're you're right. It might be that I'm
not seeing the forest for the trees. Potentially. I know
(45:50):
that there are things about our language journey that have
been different from the colonial experience of others, which means
that forms of oppression have been different. There are some
I mean, I would never say lucky, but there are
some parts about our colonial history and settler colonial history
here and all that I have observed are less intense
(46:13):
than what other languages have undergone or other cultures have undergone.
That's not luck. That's actually I don't know if what
you'd call it, but it means that a lot of
people look to our language and think, man, those people
have it sorted. And I just think we just happened
to be in a different part of the world at
a later period of time that by the time Cook
(46:33):
arrived and all of these horrific things started happening, colonial
powers had become a little more conscientized and a little
more enlightened previously. And so that's the if there's any
luck in it, it's that distance and time we have
been in some respect. So I use that word luck
like just for complete lack of a better term. Our
(46:56):
language came to a point where it was one generation
away from having no native speakers, and about the nineteen seventies,
which is quite a lot later than other languages that
I've visited. By that time, we were able to talk
with other communities and see what that had been through.
You know, this is the nineteen seventies. There's opportunities to
talk across the water, across the seas, and so we
(47:19):
were learning. And so while people often talk about Maudi
being you know this or that and language revitalization, I
often look at it the other way and think, well,
we had the opportunity to talk with you and feel
your pain and feel your the things that you have
been going. And so I credit our inspiration to international
indigenous people teaching us. We at the moment are in
(47:43):
this ground swell of positive movement which I feel so hopeful.
There's a downside to that, but at the moment there's
just this ground swell of people who want to engage
with this language Aguitahgwannu. Whether it's it's a little bit,
a lot, the whole nation really is banding around the
(48:04):
language at the moment in a really beautiful way, and
that is really hopeful and really positive. Of course, up
against that, we have the current political climate, which is
I don't think it's unique to Old Theodore and New Zealand,
where we're seeing the most right wing extremist governments around
the world in colonized spaces, and those set the colonial
(48:25):
governments are far more extreme than we've probably maybe ever
seen in quite some time or seen on our own land.
We're certainly experiencing that here and so there are some
moves to try and take away from from the language
to the ground that has been made in recent memory.
One of the things that I cling to is that
(48:45):
it's been a lot of non Mildi people who are
pushing it forward anywhere for us, and so I'm thankful
for that. We're still in a space where where we
don't have enough speakers. We don't have enough people who
are really trying to work on our language in the home.
We're still sitting somewhere around that. You know, that low
percentage of people who are speaking the language every day,
(49:07):
And so as part of that, I think a lot
of us who work with families and different cultural spaces
and even workplaces and schools, and we sit down and
we talk about language. Some themes are certainly starting to
emerge that I'm quite keen for us to explore, if
not change. And a couple of them are like really
hard I think to grapple with. And I think the
(49:28):
reason they're hard to grapple with is that I feel
like I almost start sounding at times like I'm really
like pro English, and it's hard I think to dissect that.
And one example is like like bilingualism and centering our
language efforts around bilingualism. I think I've learned that centering
our language efforts wholly around MILDI. While it has some
(49:50):
good positive benefits, it has some downsides. And one of
them is like you gestured to it for around like
really overt correction. Because people love the language. People love it,
and they hold it so dear to treasure, and that
can mean when somebody makes a mistake or does something
that they don't think is quite native or natural, that
there's quite heavy criticism that comes along with that because
(50:12):
they feel like their treasure has been something's happened to it.
Professor Dewinia Higgins here and out There or calls it
the golem effect. It's like the more you the more
you sit with your treasure, the more it kind of
just starts to change your thinking into that like unwavering
need to protect it against all costs, even at the
expense of itself. And so I feel like that's part
(50:35):
of this possibly, like clinging so carefully to Mildy, is
that every time somebody does something that we don't think
is quite there, it will come with that sort of
really heavy, heavy criticism. Some of those things that people
do are really really natural, normal behaviors of a bilingual
or a multi lingual. You know, there's billions of multilinguals
(50:56):
all around the world and they're all doing these things.
And so I started to think, I'm not sure whether
clinging to this like column is actually paying off for us.
I think we need to explore about what life might
be like if we center our revival around being excellent
bi linguals, amazing multi linguals, and how freeing that could
(51:19):
be for us. And I think I've observed that as
I've started talking about it among people who don't currently
speak Maori or still learning, they get that it resonates
with them. So there's there's kind of those little things
that hasn't always gone down well, the sitt in pocket
of society, of our society who are not keen on
that idea because of what it allows in you know,
(51:40):
we have we have to make space for English. If
we're going to center revival around multi lingualism, that's scary.
And I understand that's I'm not disagreeing, but I think
that at the moment, it's that need for us to
just step out a little bit, like you say, and
have a look at the forest itself. Think, well, we
(52:01):
spent fifty years chasing the Mildi language everywhere all the time.
There's no room for Era. We've done that for quite
a while. And if that's contributed to us sort of
being in this space where we still don't have our
critical mass, perhaps it's time to change something. So that's
kind of the angle that I come from today, and
(52:21):
I wouldn't say that that's always been my belief. I'm
a bit of a famous language purist of old. I
would call myself a recovering language purist. And I'll share
one quick story. But when I was younger learning MILDI
and I had learned that it was bad to have
transliterations from English. We should have our own words because
(52:42):
to mixed languages, that's so bad. It's such a terrible
thing to do. It really affects the life of a language,
and we need to stop doing it. And that's what
I had been fared as like a language attitude. And anyway,
I went to my ancestral Mara, ancestral home at age
twenty two for the first time, and I've been learning
(53:04):
Mali for about four years at that point, the first
time I'd ever been exposed to my ancestry, my fuck Opaba,
my ancestral meeting house, my lands, and I learned that
my great great grandfather adopted a surname, the first one
to adopt a surname, and he adopted a transliteration for Friday,
(53:25):
but I eat it. And so here was me talking
about how transliterations were bastardizing my language and all of this,
you know, holding those attitudes and then realizing that quite literally,
the most proficient native speaker at my family it's ever
had in recent memory adopted one as his name. And
I think what that really taught me that day was
(53:45):
the language attitudes that people hold are not necessarily language
attitudes that feed the health of a language. And I
really started to challenge all of my language attitudes at
that point, because I wanted the language attitudes that made speakers,
that created people who felt comfortable to push their identity
in little ways that included the language in them. And
(54:08):
I started to realize that some of the attitudes that
the language community held I didn't think fed the language
like they could. And I wanted the ones that fed it.
I wanted those things that made people wake up in
the morning and think, Yeah, this language history that we've
had is horrific. But I don't have to sit and
wallow in that. I can feel that and move through
(54:29):
it at the same time. I can process it, feel
sad about it, and reclaim it at the same time.
And it was little inklings of things like language attitudes
around transliteration, and there's a bunch of others that we
have for our language. That really made me question. Ever
since then, I started to realize that I think what's
holding us back in an Old or New Zealand is
(54:51):
our pursuit of language attitudes that really truly feed us,
that allow us to move past the goal of effect,
to see our language as treasure. But that treasure is
not just the treasure of the museum that you put
it in the case and you look at it. It's
the treasure that you eat with. It's the treasure that
you use every day, those meaningful things and the attitudes
(55:14):
that surround them, And that's where I would love for
our people to be considering, thinking, to be sitting at
that table having those discussions. But as I say, whether
that's something that actually does last the distance, I'm not sure.
I mean there's people who think like that too, but
there are definitely people who are like, no, it's got
to be you know, we need to not let space,
(55:34):
we need to not let English. And I actually do understand. Well,
so yeah, we've got those trajectories going on, and who
knows what will happen.
Speaker 1 (55:42):
Yeah, well, going to cheese, I think going to choose plain.
I want to thank you so much any viny Olsen reader,
I'm looking forward to your podcast coming out. And when
you connect with someone as far as like ideologies and
approaches and stuff, it's so exciting but also feels like
this is just going to be Apple so one of
ninety nine and so I could we keep going, but
(56:03):
we're gonna have to wrap this show up. So one
thing I was thinking of, there's an elder named Charlie
Joseph who was doing a lot of work here. He's
gone now, he's been gone for quite some time. He
was Cogwanton. He was in the Sitka, Sitka area, and
at one point he has said kotiktulitzine tusha giu ti
(56:32):
and and the translation for that is from long ago,
we have held our grandchildren up above ourselves. Yes, we
cherish them, even these things that we don't want to share.
We offer up to them, the ones who will become
our grandchildren. And I think of that because, yeah, the
(56:53):
the Gollum effect, Like I was just sitting here trying
to think of how could I do you know, like
some kind of Gollumn voice or something, but to just say,
sometimes you can clutch it so tight that it feels
like other people can't get a piece of this thing,
and then sometimes you end up not sharing things and
you hide things, and or you end up saying to people,
if you can't say it right, don't say it at all,
(57:15):
which is sometimes just shutting the whole thing down. And
I don't think that's people's intentions. But there's so much fear,
there's so much loss, there's so much on the line
that I think we really got to create these spaces
where we say, you know what, there's no mistakes, it's
all just learning. It's all part of learning in this journey.
And we have confidence in ourselves, we have confidence in
(57:37):
each other, and we have confidence in you that we
can get it corrected over time. And the biggest thing
right now is just use and becoming familiar with this
thing that has been taken with us at such an
immense level that it becomes a foreign object to our
own peoples, and to renaturalize ourselves within our language. I
do think takes acts of medicinal purpose, of feeling of unity,
(58:02):
of just saying you can do the thing, and you
should do the thing, and you can do the thing,
and you will do the thing. And as we move
forward together we reach our hands out across the ocean.
We reach our hands out across the internet and we say, oh,
you guys are doing the thing. Yeah, we're doing the thing.
These are different things, but there's so many similarities, and
a lot of those similarities are and how do we
(58:25):
keep the thing growing at this rate That sometimes seems impossible,
But I think that impossible as a colonial construct and
I think that indigenous futures are the things that we
continue to focus on. So Gonna Cheese, I'm really looking
forward to your podcast coming out. We'll put the title
in the description and in future episodes we'll put a
link out when it does come out. So Gonna cheese.
(58:46):
Plane for being with us, and for all of you
out there doing the language work. Keep on going, Believe
in yourself, believe in each other, take a little break
when you need a little break, give someone else a
break when they need a break, and just remember the
collective vision of creating a space reserved for future generations.
The Tongue Unbroken is a project of the Next Up Initiative.
(59:06):
Check out other podcasts and iHeartMedia Network. Check out Indigenous
peoples making podcasts all around the world and taking control
of media and putting our voices out there, Lil chishin
Yoda
Host
X̱ʼunei Lance Twitchell
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