Native American urges steps to save languages
Renee and Richard Grounds share a passion to save their native Euchee language.
A UMNS photo by Kathy L. Gilbert.
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By Kathy L. Gilbert*
Oct. 11, 2007 | ANADARKO, Okla. (UMNS)
Native American languages have been under "extreme and direct attack"
for generations and many are in danger of extinction, said the director
of a project working to save the Euchee language.
Richard Grounds, project director of the Euchee (Yu-chee) Language
Project in Sapulpa, Okla., works with the five remaining fluent Euchee
speakers left in the United States. His daughter, Renee, a board member
of the United Methodist Commission on Religion and Race, has dedicated
her life to helping him keep the language alive.
Speaking in Euchee, Renee introduced her father to members of the
commission at Ware Chapel United Methodist Church before his
presentation on the project.
Commission members were taking a day during their Oct. 3-7 board
meeting in Oklahoma City to visit Kiowa Native American United Methodist
churches and to hear from Native American United Methodists.
Caroline Botone and Henry Joseph Willis greeted the group in their native languages of Kiowa and Choctaw.
"This is really a pretty special event," Grounds said. "We are
hearing from our elders at this meeting in their own languages. This is
what their mother spoke to them, and that's why they speak it to you."
Under attack
Grounds said the World War II generation still speaks their native
languages, and most of that generation is slowly dying, taking the
languages with them.
"In this state where 25 indigenous languages are still spoken, only
four of those are being learned by children; all the rest are only
spoken by elders," he said. "The words you heard from my daughter,
Renee, speaking the language of my grandmother are extremely unusual."
"We want our young people to be proud of their languages."
-Richard Grounds
The commission funded Grounds' Euchee project from 2000-2004 through
the Minority Group Self-Determination Fund. The fund was established by
The United Methodist Church to empower racial and ethnic minority people
within and outside the church.
The tradition of passing down native languages was "crushed through a
very ugly, sorted, intentional process" that took young people out of
the tribes and put them in boarding schools where they were forced to
speak English.
"I would guess billions of dollars were spent destroying our
languages, breaking down our ceremonial ways, assaulting our
traditions," he said.
Misguided faith
Churches have been complicit in the dispossession of Native
Americans, he said. He told the group that Methodism founder John Wesley
came to Georgia in 1835 and met the Creeks, Muskogee, Chickasaws
and Euchee. Wesley wrote "really ugly things about these native
nations," Grounds said.
"But he really saved his most cruel remarks for the Euchees, saying
that the Euchees killed their own children — things that were not really
true and things he didn't really have a basis for making the claims,"
Grounds said.
"Colonialism is taking other people’s resources to service your own
interest. It’s taking the richness of others in order to build your own
wealth. It was a fairly ugly process. In the context of the United
States, it was done under the name of U.S. expansion, a lot of patriotic
fanfare, often with a Christian veneer over it."
The use of Native American mascots and names points to the same
thinking today that says "if it’s Indian, it’s ours. It’s no longer just
the resources. It’s no longer just the land. It’s literally the name.
It’s literally the identity," he said.
"We want our young people to be proud of their languages."
Globally, Grounds said, the next 20 years likely will see the loss of
half of the world’s languages and, in the United States, about 70
percent of indigenous languages are projected to die out.
"This is the core, the heart, of who our peoples are. This is the
diversity, the alternative that is unique about people. It is all coded
in those languages."
* Gilbert is a United Methodist News Service news writer based in Nashville, Tenn.
News media contact: Kathy L. Gilbert, Nashville, Tenn., (615) 742-5470 or newsdesk@umcom.org.
Audio
Richard Grounds: "I think this is the United States of Amnesia."
Profile
Renee Grounds
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Resources
United Methodist Commission on Religion and Race
Oklahoma Indian Missionary Annual Conference
Native American News |