The Akwesasne Freedom School

[asakiyume]

Language is an amazingly powerful thing--it's not for nothing that we conceive our deities as creating the world with language--or that we also imbue the spoken word with the power to summon, curse, and destroy. There's no more effective way to kill a culture (short of genocide--that works pretty well, too) than to destroy its language, whereas if you can preserve language, you preserve the possibility of access to all sorts of other aspects of culture.

All through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there have been attempts to suppress and wipe out First Peoples' languages in North America. These days, there are also attempts to nurture, preserve, and support them. One, among the Akwesasne Mohawk (in their own language, Kanien'kehá:ka), is the Freedom School, a Mohawk language-emersion school in the Akwesasne community (population 24,000), which straddles the US-Canada border at New York State and the Province of Quebec.



Mushkeg Media, which describes itself as an Aboriginal media company, made a documentary about the school: Kanien’kehá:ka - Living the Language, which you can watch if you click on the link. [ETA: No longer--the link was dead so I unlinked it (2/25/2018)] Most of the video is in Mohawk, and subtitled. Beautiful to hear.

The school was founded in 1979, during a land dispute among a couple of Mohawk factions. A traditionalist faction set up an armed encampment, which the New York State government then laid siege to (I think I vaguely, vaguely remember this from my childhood). This situation went on for two years, and being afraid that outside authorities would swoop in out of concern for the children's education, they set up the Freedom school.

The curriculum is based on the Thanksgiving Address, a ceremonial address that's given at every Mohawk gathering. The Thanksgiving Address is recited at the beginning and end of each day.



They learn traditional activities as well as mainstream curriculum.



One of the faith keepers explained:

Many people don't know that if you don't show them the traditional way with the language, then the language becomes that much harder to learn

Here he prepares to show them how to cook muskrat:



Theresa Kenkiokóktha Fox talked about being the youngest of fourteen siblings, and how only she and her next-up sibling couldn't speak Mohawk, and how disappointed this made her father, who couldn't speak much English. Now, though, she sings in Mohawk.

Iohonwaá:wi Fox, now in college, summed up the importance of the Freedom School beautifully:

It made me more aware of who I was and made me have a strong foundation, and that helped me throughout high school, and even now, for university.

I wish that more people would have been able to go to the Freedom School ... because I think it's so important to have our language and our culture and out traditions strong, so that you know who you are. Because you have so many people who are lost, because they don't know who they are.

postscript One thing you'll notice if you watch the video is that the subtitles are very brief, seeming to say only a little, whereas people talk for quite a bit. Mohawk seems to be a language in which much gets lost in translation, as you can hear on this page, if you listen to the words for cool, frost, snowdrifts, winter coat, and mittens. "Frost" and "snowdrifts" are both seven syllables. They share a same first phoneme, io, with "cool," but what more are those syllables saying, that, in English, gets ignored?

Comments

[ann-leckie.livejournal.com]

It's my understanding--and I could be wrong about this, because NA languages are not something I know a whole lot about--that quite a few Native American languages work by adding suffixes or prefixes, where we would add verbs or prepositions or whatnot, so that you get potentially very long words that in English we would have divided up to a word with a number of modifying words. So that might be what those extra syllables are. Just a guess, I haven't actually watched the video.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

The stuff in the postscript isn't from the video, it's from a page on language that lets you listen to someone saying those words, first slowly and then at ordinary speed. I understand about agglutinative languages, but when you add suffixes and prefixes, those things usually add meaning. I'm just wondering, when the term seems to be something that's a simple noun (like frost), what actually is being expressed. Maybe it's "water that's chilled and white and that forms on the ground and on all surfaces"--something like that. I'd love to have a chance to think thoughts in that language.

[ann-leckie.livejournal.com]

Gah. That'll teach me to do any commenting at all before I have had an entire cup of coffee. Sorry.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

No need to apologize! The point's still perfectly interesting and valid! It's just that granted that the language no doubt *is* agglutinative, I just wonder about what meaning those extra syllables carry that isn't getting translated.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I especially love the song to the four beings.

Thanks for that post--it's lovely.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Always my pleasure ♥

[queenoftheskies.livejournal.com]

Thank you so much for sharing. It's almost magical to see how language defines a culture.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Yes, and how magic creates the world differently.

[agentmaly.livejournal.com]

I completely agree with you! It's something that's fascinated me for years, and what I wanted to major in in college, until I determined that there was no way I was going to get that emphasis from my university. Of course I couldn't take every language on offer from every possible teacher, so it's possible that I surrendered too early, but after multiple languages and a linguistics class I figured that the language-culture intersection was not my school's strong point, if it was ever mentioned at all. In fact the professor of my linguistics class seemed to deny that it even existed except anecdotally, which having grown up bilingual and as a Third Culture Kid made me really mad.

(Speaking of which, all of a sudden I've had an associative window into the feelings of people of alternate sexualities and various hidden minorities whose existence gets ignored or denied. Valuable insight.)

Now that I have a bachelor's degree in Biology I'm trying to figure out if I should backtrack and get back in line with what I actually wanted to do with my life.

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

That's quite surprising from your university. I've always thought the relationship between language and culture was self-evident.

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

Interesting, thanks! Also, interesting (according to Wikipedia) that the same language was used in Assassin's Creed III.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Yes, I'd heard that! I guess they wanted to pick a language that not many people spoke, but which wasn't hard to get speakers of to help them learn it/work with it? There are lots of languages with not many speakers, but for many of them, the speakers live in really isolated, hard-to-reach places (well, when seen from an outsider's perspective).

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

It's a pleasing thought that a language with just a few hundred speakers left would suddenly get exposed to millions via a video game. Although I haven't played the game and I don't know how much is actually used. I guess it could be no different than some of the Aboriginal-derived placenames here, which are used by millions but quite often, it turns out, no-one really knows what the words meant anymore.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I haven't played the game either--I somehow have the impression, either from Wikipedia or maybe from someone who *has* played the game--that it only features in the beginning, as a voiceover describing the situation. (But, as I say, I'm not sure how I have that impression; I could be totally fabricating it--maybe it's my imagination; maybe I just thought, "Oh, it's probably like this," and now have "remembered" possible evidence to support that fact.)

Another thing the faith-keeper said was that when he got the kids out visiting various old folks in the community, they'd be surprised and delighted to be hearing new words they'd never heard, and it was because in the schoolroom context, some words just didn't come up, but when you were in the community, in the situations in which they might arise, they would. They'd tend to be words related to traditional activities, unsurprisingly.