Author: rossa@uoregon.edu

Remembering Dr. George Wasson who passed Wednesday March 19, 2013

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We as a community at the University of Oregon have been blessed to have been mentored by Dr. George Wasson for so many years. To have been touched by his guidance and his inspiring storytelling – we are particularly fortunate to have experienced his stories just last week at a traditional storytelling event hosted at the University of Oregon’s Many Nations Longhouse.

Dr. Wasson was responsible for launching the Southwest Oregon Research Project where he led the efforts that stitched together tribal history between the 1800s and mid-1900s using thousands of historical documents. As one of the first Oregon tribal PhDs, Dr. Wasson will continue to be an important figure to tribal people throughout Oregon and the Northwest. He was revered for his craft at traditional storytelling.
As the Register Guard details, Dr. Wasson received his B.A in music in 1969, a Master’s degree in counseling in 1971, a Master’s degree in Anthropology in 1994, and then his doctorate in Anthropology afterwards. He worked as an adjunct instructor in anthropology at the UO from 2003-2011 before retiring. NILI offers our condolences to his family and loved ones. Truly, his work and contributions will be valued and remembered into the ages.

NILI at the American Association for Applied Linguistics Conference

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On Monday, March 24, 2014 from 3:35 to 6:35pm at the Portland Marriot Downtown Waterfront, the AAAL Annual Conference will host a special session Supporting Maintenance and Revitalization of North American Indigenous Languages: Collaborations between Communities, Applied and Theoretical Linguists. Several NILI staff will be in attendance and presenting in several different sessions.

Janne Underriner will be co-presenting with Ewa Czaykowska-Higgins from the University of Victoria and Keren Rice from the University of Toronto. Dr. Underriner and her co-presenters will discuss and illustrate language loss, the efforts made by community members, theoretical and applied linguists and educators to reverse this loss, and some of the issues that arise in this work. The partnerships and case studies highlighted in this session demonstrate the region’s exceptionally high level of collaboration, activism and innovation in research methodologies, in research on language loss and reclamation, and in the development and delivery of educational programs within communities and in academic contexts.

Zalmai Zahir will be presenting on Motivation for language learning and use. Motivation is key to language maintenance. If we are not clear as to why we want to learn and speak a language, it is difficult  to establish its use beyond the classroom. This presentation is about how to get learners to discover their own motivations. Joana Jansen and Virginia Beavert will be presenting on community-centered course development for Ichishkiin language classes at University of Oregon. This presentation will describe the Ichishkiin/Sahaptin language course that is taught at the University of Oregon within a framework of mindful collaboration. Tribal language programs and tribal members are stakeholders and partners. Their presentation will discuss how the ongoing development of the course has changed and strengthened due to collaborative partnerships.

Come join them and share your perspective.

Tribal Student Lagging, from the 1/24/14 Register Guard article

Posted on by rossa@uoregon.edu

A recent study points to absenteeism as one major culprit in the underachievement of tribal students in Oregon. Additionally, tribal schools perform poorly in state rankings. The Spirit Mountain Community Fund sponsored this study in collaboration with the Chalkboard Project and ECONorthwest.  Here are some bullet points of the findings:

  • Of the 67,000 students statewide that are solely or part Native American, according to school records, only 3,200 students are enrolled at tribal schools
  • 40% of Oregon tribal students perform at grade level in math
  • 50% of Oregon tribal students perform at grade level in reading
  • In the 2011 class, 59% earned their diploma compared to 72% of all Oregon students
  • In 2011-12, one-third of tribal students missed 10% or more of school – extensive research indicates that chronic absenteeism can have significant negative consequences on attitudes towards school and academic achievement
  • 30% of tribal students are enrolled in under-performing schools compared with 7% of students state-wide

Based on these alarming findings, the study authors urged a community-wide approach to develop solutions and suggested these approaches would need to incorporate the lives of tribal students at home and in school.

Kathleen George, Director of the Spirit Mountain Fund, adds: “It is disturbing to see that so many tribal member kids all across our state are not getting an effective education. We need to help foster a change in culture to help our children understand that showing up in school every day is the path to success in school and later in life.” Perhaps if authentic Native language learning were more prevalent in the educational experience of Oregon tribal students, the desire to attend school regularly would be natural and immediate.

Oral Proficiency Testing and Training from a Native Perspective

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Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde cultural education and outreach program manager and leader of the Chinuk Wawa Language Program, Kathy Cole, flew to Orlando, Florida for Oral Proficiency Interview (ACTFL OPI) training this November. The OPI is a standardized method for the global assessment of functional speaking ability.

The training and testing is available in many widely spoken world languages but not in the Native languages of the Pacific Northwest. Kathy opted to take the training in assessing English with the hope that she could transfer the skills acquired to her own language situation. The OPI is a carefully structured face-to-face or telephone conversation between a trained and certified interviewer and the person whose language skills are being tested.

The training process is rigorous and certification is only granted when the trainee has conducted and rated numerous interviews and the certified trainer is in agreement with the trainee’s ratings. Kathy is contemplating completing the tester certification process. If so, she will be an asset to other tribes wishing to adapt this assessment process to their own languages. She is looking forward to using her new skills and training to assess fellow tribal members in the Chinuk Wawa language.  This will help determine if the testing process needs to be culturally and linguistically adapted for certain Native communities.

For more information on the Oral Proficiency Interview training, please visit: http://www.actfl.org/professional-development/certified-proficiency-testing-program/testing-proficiency

Welcome to the NILI Blog

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NILI is happy to announce a new online tool to share ideas and information. This email is to introduce you to the new NILI Blog! And we hope you like it and will use it.

For those new to blogs, we’ve organized it so that the newest posts come at the top. Older posts are stored lower down in the pages, and all posts are filed by categories for browsing or later reading. We have been working hard to make categories that the various communities we serve will find useful and interesting. So far we have the following: Current Literature and Research; Curriculum Corner; Feature Projects; Language Activism; Native Language Phrases; and Tech Tips. We look forward to adding more ideas under each category and building a valuable resource. If you think of other categories we might want to add we would love to know.

Our goal is to make this a group effort. NILI faculty and staff will be contributing their various ideas and expertise periodically and over time. However, we hope to also have contributions from *YOU* as well. Feel free to send us any ideas, tips, advice, or interesting things you are working on so we can include your voice to the blog. We are happy to work with you on any article ideas. We’d like to limit the postings to a few paragraphs or roughly in the 200-350 word range.

Send postings and ideas to Ross Anderson at rossa@uoregon.edu. If you are not up for an article, we hope you will at least add a comment to some of the articles in the blog.

We look forward to “seeing you” and sharing ideas online! Please visit our website for more information about NILI: http://pages.uoregon.edu/nwili/

Janne and all of the NILI team

Multilingualism: A Northwest Native Social Norm

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I am a student who has been involved with NILI for the last seven years. I recently completed my undergraduate thesis. This thesis is intended to benefit the Native language movement by examining the motivation and methods of Native language learners working together at NILI. Drawing on interviews, my thesis explores what motivates this community of speakers and in doing so provides insight into the significance of Indigenous languages in maintaining Native identity and worldview. My work focuses on home-based learning to demonstrate how methods centered on language use as opposed to accumulation of knowledge create a space for Indigenous languages to exist in daily life and may serve as an effective model for endangered language learners. Lastly, my thesis advocates for collaboration across critically endangered languages through the use of multilingualism as a strategy to create viable speech communities.

Multilingualism has a great deal of potential for critically-endangered language learners because it addresses the most pressing obstacle to increasing language use in daily life: the lack of a speaking community. My research draws heavily from ongoing work at NILI to highlight how multilingual speaking groups, support meetings and workshops have the potential to increase Native language use. Working together between languages is a great opportunity for learners to expand their speaking community, normalize language use, become multilingual, and revitalize a Northwest Native social norm (being multilingual!).

Contributed by Carson Viles

Please contact Carson with any questions at: cviles@uoregon.edu

Why play ‘Go fish’?

Posted on by rossa@uoregon.edu

Getting your family and friends to use language with you can be challenging, and yet is essential for growing language use in your home.  ‘Go Fish’ is one easy activity you can do to get them comfortable with language.  It’s familiar to most people, and it has easy, repetitious vocabulary.  Novice speakers can participate with this fun, non-threatening game and stay in the target language.

How to play

Each player is dealt 5 cards.  The deck is then placed face-down between the players.  The person to the right of the dealer begins (player 1).  Player 1 tries to get a card to match one in his/her hand by asking another participant (player 2), “Do you have a __?” If player 2 has the card, they give it to them.  Player 1 then puts down the two-of-a-kind face-up and gets another turn.  If player 2 does not have the card, they say, “No.  Go fish.”  Player 1 then takes the card from the top of the deck.  If player 1 gets a card that gives them two-of-a-kind, they can put the pair down and go again.  If not, the person to the right of them takes their turn.  The object of the game is to get rid of all of your cards, as well as gain the most points by counting how many two-of-a-kind you can put in front of you.  Each card counts as 1 point.  Points are subtracted by how many cards you are holding in your hand.

Phrases you will need

1) Do you have a __? 2) Yes/No. 3) Go fish. 4) I won! 5) Names for the cards from Ace to King and a word for ‘cards’. Suggested Vocabulary: 6) I do have a __. 7) I don’t have a __. 8) Your turn. 9) My cards are gone. 10) How many points do you have? 11) I am shuffling the cards. 12) I am dealing the cards. 13) Whose turn is it? Suggested card vocabulary: Ace ‘first’, 2-10, Jack ‘teenager’, Queen ‘woman leader’, King ‘man leader’. sbitalə is used in Lushootseed for ‘cards’, referring to a woman’s game played with beaver teeth.  Other optional terms: Heart ‘heart’, Spade ‘arrow’, Diamond ‘rock’, Club ‘leaf’.
Challenge:
Try to play this game with family and friends with NO ENGLISH for 10 minutes.  Let us know how it goes.

Contributed by Zalmai ʔəswəli Zahir, learn more about Zeke at: http://pages.uoregon.edu/nwili/about/staff

Youth Language Activist and Leadership Program

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High School youth from the Confederated Tribes of Grande Ronde in Oregon and the Snoqualmie and Suquamish Tribes in Washington attended NILI’s 2013 Summer Institute for teacher training and language learning. The project will continue throughout the year to include high school youth from the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation’s language programs. They will work with Robert Elliott of NILI to learn how to develop language materials for preschool learning and their own learning using technology. Youth will attend NILI’s 2014 Summer Institute and it is our hope that they will be joined by youth from other tribes. This project is wholly in line with our mission to support Native language teaching, and mentor youth to become leaders in their communities.

The project uses a participatory, project-based research model in which the youth and tribal mentors play a central role in: designing the project; gathering the data to address the issue of language loss; and mentoring leadership skills. By engaging in authentic, meaningful activities participants will build their understanding of language loss, teaching and revitalization, and to develop skills needed to be language mentors. Youth will form hypotheses about what will work as they teach preschoolers and how they can use this opportunity for their own learning as well.

The project is supported by: Wildhorse Foundation; Sociological Initiatives Foundation; Spirit Mountain Community Fund; AMB Foundation; The Susan A. and Donald P. Babson Charitable Foundation. We are most grateful to these foundations for supporting a change in the education and lives of Native youth.

Ichishkiin Culture and Language as Protective Factors: A Foundation of Wellness

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Funded by Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), this project is a collaboration between NILI, the Yakama Nation Language Program, the Yakama Reservation Wellness Coalition, and two high schools on the Yakama Nation; its goal is to increase self-esteem, cultural pride and drug and alcohol free lifestyles for at-risk teenagers. Together with assistance from the Native American Center for Excellence (NACE) Service to Science evaluators, we developed the Ichishkiin Culture and Language as a Foundation of Wellness Survey.

As well as being the first step to evaluate if language and culture function as protective factors, the project lays the groundwork to begin evaluating  (1) the effects boarding schools have on language and culture loss and (2) Native people’s attitudes on learning to speak their families and communities language(s). The survey is designed as a model that other tribes can adapt for their use and has the potential to benefit many communities and youth. If you are interested in our survey, preliminary results and process, please contact us.

Welcome to NILI!

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Situated at the University of Oregon in Eugene, OR, the Northwest Indian Language Institute (NILI) provides Native language teachers and community members with training in language teaching, materials and curriculum development, benchmarks creation, and linguistics. With tribal partners, NILI supports and strengthens language preservation and revitalization efforts by establishing collaborative, on-going projects which meet the specific needs and desires of each language community.