To save its dying Native language, Salt River community is changing it

SALT RIVER RESERVATION — Once a month, the elders of Salt River gather to nudge their dying language deeper into the modern world.

Their attempts to save Akimel O'odham from a world overtaken by English had shown few results and produced even fewer fluent speakers. So some of the last speakers started over, diving into the details of their mother tongue to make it simpler to learn.

They picked a new alphabet, re-spelled old words and designed new ones their people had never needed: What, they ask, should be the O’odham word for Christmas tree? For cellphone? Bathroom?

And how could they pass their language on, before the last generation of speakers dies out?

“They’re not trying to change it,” said Raina Thomas, a member of the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community who works in the Culture and Language Department. “They’re just trying to name things that didn’t exist in the first place.”

Like most people in this community of 9,000 east of Scottsdale, Thomas speaks little of her native language. She never needed to learn more than the loose words and phrases lodged in her mind as a girl, when her grandfather spoke to her only in O’odham. Every time, she replied in English.

But now just a few hundred fluent O’odham speakers remain, scattered across four tribal communities — Salt River, the Tohono O’odham Nation, the Gila River Indian Community and the Ak-Chin Indian Community — in the Arizona desert. Year after year they watch their language fade into history, teetering toward the hundreds of other tongues that have forever disappeared.

Trying to stave off demise

A language disappears from the world every two weeks, experts estimate, suffocated by the dominance of a few global languages and the unstoppable reach of technology.

Akimel O'odham isn't even the most endangered language on the Salt River reservation, where two cultures live as one nation. Piipaash, spoken fluently by at most 100 people, is considered by UNESCO to be "severely endangered."

Every funeral of a fluent speaker pushed Akimel O’odham closer to that edge.

For more than two decades, Salt River’s leaders tried to slow the steady decline. They introduced Akimel O’odham into preschools and elective classes, and encouraged elders to speak to their grandchildren in O’odham.

READ MORE: Tribe warns: 'Your language is dying'

"They need to hear it, hear it, hear it, because that's how I learned," said Patricia Enos King, a fluent speaker and O'odham teacher.

She soothed infants with her language, then taught toddlers how to introduce themselves and describe their own bodies, identifying themselves in their people's words. Voluntary language classes sprang onto schedules. Parents and children started bringing her their linguistic debates.

But O'odham didn't come back.

Speeding up evolution

Faced with the same extinction threat that looms over more than half of the world’s languages, tribal members tugged at the roots of Akimel O'odham. Spurred by a June 2017 tribal council resolution, they settled on a common alphabet and tried to blend diverse dialects into one. They tweaked spellings and altered pronunciations.

Linguistic evolution that typically takes decades — if not centuries — to unfold was instead planned in a string of weeknight meetings. é

“Every language does this,” said David Lightfoot, a professor of linguistics and expert on language evolution at Georgetown University. “It’s standard that there will be basically social agreements on what the writing system will be like. And often there are reforms that are made.”

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Salt River’s schools and government now use a version of the popular Alvarez-Hale O’odham system. They modified the orthography to fit their needs, adding letters representing the ‘v’ and hard ‘d’ sounds not found in other O’odham dialects. Even the language’s own name was altered: O’otham and Au-Authm officially became O’odham.

“If you’re O’odham, you’ll say it’s easy,” said Sophia McAnlis, the school system’s Education Native Language Culture director.

“I’m O’odham,” Thomas replied, “and I struggle to learn.”

As Thomas studies her people’s language, one of as many as 30 community members who pile into twice-weekly O’odham classes, the faded memories of her grandfather’s language start to flicker back. She helps her fourth-grade daughter, Iyanna, work through the stack of vocabulary words that fill her folders, and the two of them learn together. Often Iyanna corrects a mistake that had long ingrained itself in her mother’s mind.

Then Iyanna returns to school and its now-required language classes, where her teachers sit around the same tiny tables and take the same lessons.

Bringing in new teachers

Salt River’s schools have included Akimel O’odham programs since 1995, but those traditional methods created few fluent speakers. Classes weren’t required and didn’t count toward the World Language credits required for graduation. There was no specific language or culture department. And almost none of its teachers were Native. Even fewer were from Salt River; only one spoke fluent O’odham.

“For the language to be taught, especially in the high schools, they had to have the degrees of an actual teacher,” Assistant Superintendent Cynthia Clary said. “To find a fluent speaker with those degrees was very hard.”

They turned to the Native American Language Certification Policy, a little-used rule issued by the Arizona Department of Education to help schools fill their classrooms with native-language speakers. Approved before the 2012-13 school year, the rule allows fluent community members to apply for teaching licenses, waiving the requirements that all Arizona teachers have a four-year degree and pass a preparation program.

The new certificates give language teachers the same responsibilities and benefits as fully qualified teachers.

Since 2015, community President Delbert Ray has nominated 11 people for the certificates. But the Salt River school system has just three fluent speakers on staff.

The rest are learning.

'I will learn all things'

In January, the elementary school staff sat for what tribal elders called O’odham 001, where they worked through the basics of the language. School administrators urged them to pepper their daily lessons with O’odham. When students returned for the spring semester, their teachers greeted them with Ske:g Sialik and told them to Daiwuan in their seats.

“I don’t need to know full paragraphs when I’m speaking O’odham,” said Ryan Williams, a language instructor in the early childhood department. “Just teaching them the words they need to know.”

O’odham classes are now required for every elementary student. Every Monday morning now begins with an O’odham greeting over the PA system, and a traditional farewell song follows them out the door on Friday afternoons. And every culture class begins with the same pledge, printed in the new alphabet and hung next to the whiteboard.

“Who remembers what our pledge is about?” asked Annette Rave, a language teacher certified through the community. She picked up a purple pointer and walked to the printed pledge, weaving through the crowd of third-graders that now filled her classroom. Their teacher waved, then settled in for another lesson.

In the back of the room, a girl pushed out her chair. “The directions?” she said, sounding hesitant. “Our instructions.”

“Yes,” Rave said. She jabbed the pointer at the pledge and led her students through the pledge, first in O’odham, then in English.

“Mant sap o neidat, sap o k:ad, dam o ves haiku mai,” the class chanted at the end.

I will see and hear clearly, so I will learn ALL things.

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