hen Brian Maracle returned in his mid-forties to the Mohawk community he had left when he was 5, he had no job and knew few people.
But perhaps the biggest challenge was that he did not speak or understand kanyen’keha, the Mohawk language. More than a century of efforts by the Government of Canada to eradicate indigenous cultures had left many indigenous people without a language.
Now, 30 years later, Maracle is helping to revive Mohawk and other indigenous languages through its transformation of teaching methods.
“I never studied linguistics, I don’t have any teacher training, my parents were non-speakers,” he said in his office at an adult language school he founded some 20 years ago in his community, the Grand River Six Nations territory, at Southwest Toronto. However, academic conferences in linguistics today include him as a speaker.
Innovative approaches like Maracle’s are crucial, experts say, to overcome the suppression of indigenous languages and cultures in Canada.
Restoring indigenous languages is now a component of Canada’s effort to reconcile with its indigenous peoples. Four years ago, the Government recognized the importance of these languages and provided funds to teach them.
But there was no help when Maracle, now 76, arrived at Six Nations. He said the problem with his first failed lesson was that the instructors, Mohawk patriarchs with no training as language teachers, were throwing out “whole words.”
“They just hoped that by saying a word to you and saying it louder, you would somehow figure it out,” Maracle said. They “didn’t understand” how the language is structured.
He found his answer some 25 years ago in the office of David Kanatawakhon-Maracle, no direct relation, a professor at Western University in London, Ontario.
“Little bits of paper covered a big table,” Maracle recalled. The professor told Maracle the words he longed to hear: “I think I have a new way of teaching language.”
The 60 or so bits of paper “were the Rosetta stone” in deciphering the Mohawk, Maracle said.
Kanyen’keha is a polysynthetic language, where a single word can function as a sentence. Words are made up of morphemes, elements that change meaning depending on how they are combined.
The little pieces of paper contained the morphemes, the building blocks of language.
Maracle found that learning Kanyen’keha requires “looking at the world through Mohawk language eyes,” he said. The objects in it are described by what they do. “Computer,” for example, means “answer your questions.” So the speakers of it, Maracle said, analyze the world in terms of action rather than objects.
IAN AUSTEN
THE NEW YORK TIMES
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6681304, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-04-26 19:10:06
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