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The Akwesasne Freedom School
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:
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:
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?
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?