taking me to the kaâtsina dances at the village plaza before I could walk. I heard the hummah-hah stories from Aunt Alice and Aunt Susie. My sisters and I were never baptized in any church.
Grandma Lillie grew up at Los Lunas where they spoke both English and Spanish in the house. Why didnât she learn to talk Indian after she married Grandpa Hank? Was it because her family in Los Lunas was uneasy about her marriage outside the Church to a Laguna Pueblo man? For Grandma Lillie to learn to speak Laguna would have caused a stir among the wealthier Los Lunas relatives who fancied themselves too good to associate with Indians. After all, our Los Lunas relations had been merchants of everything at one time, including Indian slaves.
Grandma Lillie spoke Spanish to her mother, Great Grandma Helen, and to her Los Lunas relations, but she did not teach Spanish to my father or his brothers, just as Grandpa Hank did not teach my father and his brothers to speak Laguna.
Over the years, whenever I tried to learn a language, all the ghosts of the past reappearedâthe anxiety and sense of guilt and inadequacy and the loss. Whenever I try to speak, I go into a slow panic and my hearing becomes scrambled by anxiety. Years ago when I taught at Diné College I tried to learn a few Diné greetings and phrases but I couldnât do it. How could I learn Diné when I never learned Laguna?
CHAPTER 9
I never felt alone or afraid up there in the hills. The hummah-hah stories described the conversations coyotes, crows and buzzards used to have with human beings. I was fascinated with the notion that long ago humans and animals used to freely converse. As I got older, I realized the clouds and winds and rivers also have their ways of communication; I became interested in what these entities had to say. My imagination became engaged in discovering what can be known without words.
Stories themselves have spirit and being, and they have a way of communicating on different levels. The story itself communicates with us regardless of what language it is told in. Of course stories are always funnier and more vivid when they are told in their original language by a good storyteller. But what I love about stories is they can survive and continue in some form or other resembling themselves regardless of how good or how bad the storyteller is, no matter what language they are told or written in. This is because the human brain favors stories or the narrative form as a primary means of organizing and relating human experience. Stories contain large amounts of valuable information even when the storyteller forgets or invents new details.
So I found myself left with English and some Spanish but only a meager number of words in the language of Kaâwaik, the Beautiful Lake place. When I started to write short stories in creative writing class at the beginning of my second year at the University of New Mexico the challenge for me was to make English express or evoke the experiences of hearing the stories told when I was a child.
My sense of narrative structure, of how a story needs to be told, all this came to me from the stories Aunt Alice, Aunt Susie and Grandpa Hank told me. They carefully chose the English words that best evoked the stories as they heard them told in the Laguna language when they were children, before they learned English.
Linguistic diversity is integral to the cultural diversity that ensures some humans will survive in the event of one of the periodic global catastrophes. Local indigenous languages hold the keys to survival because they contain the nouns, the names of the plants, insects, birds and mammals important locally to human survival.
As important as the nouns are the verbs that denote the actions, the activities, the states of being or consciousness that are important to human survival locally. Indigenous languages contain this knowledge; the survival information is encoded in the grammar of the
Grandma Lillie grew up at Los Lunas where they spoke both English and Spanish in the house. Why didnât she learn to talk Indian after she married Grandpa Hank? Was it because her family in Los Lunas was uneasy about her marriage outside the Church to a Laguna Pueblo man? For Grandma Lillie to learn to speak Laguna would have caused a stir among the wealthier Los Lunas relatives who fancied themselves too good to associate with Indians. After all, our Los Lunas relations had been merchants of everything at one time, including Indian slaves.
Grandma Lillie spoke Spanish to her mother, Great Grandma Helen, and to her Los Lunas relations, but she did not teach Spanish to my father or his brothers, just as Grandpa Hank did not teach my father and his brothers to speak Laguna.
Over the years, whenever I tried to learn a language, all the ghosts of the past reappearedâthe anxiety and sense of guilt and inadequacy and the loss. Whenever I try to speak, I go into a slow panic and my hearing becomes scrambled by anxiety. Years ago when I taught at Diné College I tried to learn a few Diné greetings and phrases but I couldnât do it. How could I learn Diné when I never learned Laguna?
CHAPTER 9
I never felt alone or afraid up there in the hills. The hummah-hah stories described the conversations coyotes, crows and buzzards used to have with human beings. I was fascinated with the notion that long ago humans and animals used to freely converse. As I got older, I realized the clouds and winds and rivers also have their ways of communication; I became interested in what these entities had to say. My imagination became engaged in discovering what can be known without words.
Stories themselves have spirit and being, and they have a way of communicating on different levels. The story itself communicates with us regardless of what language it is told in. Of course stories are always funnier and more vivid when they are told in their original language by a good storyteller. But what I love about stories is they can survive and continue in some form or other resembling themselves regardless of how good or how bad the storyteller is, no matter what language they are told or written in. This is because the human brain favors stories or the narrative form as a primary means of organizing and relating human experience. Stories contain large amounts of valuable information even when the storyteller forgets or invents new details.
So I found myself left with English and some Spanish but only a meager number of words in the language of Kaâwaik, the Beautiful Lake place. When I started to write short stories in creative writing class at the beginning of my second year at the University of New Mexico the challenge for me was to make English express or evoke the experiences of hearing the stories told when I was a child.
My sense of narrative structure, of how a story needs to be told, all this came to me from the stories Aunt Alice, Aunt Susie and Grandpa Hank told me. They carefully chose the English words that best evoked the stories as they heard them told in the Laguna language when they were children, before they learned English.
Linguistic diversity is integral to the cultural diversity that ensures some humans will survive in the event of one of the periodic global catastrophes. Local indigenous languages hold the keys to survival because they contain the nouns, the names of the plants, insects, birds and mammals important locally to human survival.
As important as the nouns are the verbs that denote the actions, the activities, the states of being or consciousness that are important to human survival locally. Indigenous languages contain this knowledge; the survival information is encoded in the grammar of the
Similar Books
