Voices of the Land: Saving Native American Languges

The best way I explain the signficance of Native language is to think about the influence of Latin to the languages of the world.

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It's estimated that 60% of our common everyday English vocabulary is derived from Latin via French. It has been woven so deeply into the world's culture in so many ways, its difficult to try to think about functioning in the world without it.

Think about these words; trangress, progress, digress - what they mean to our culture. Cultures based on "progress". Forgiveness of transgressions. Before I digress, all have the root word "gress", meaning "to walk" in Latin. The word in itself relates to our concepts of movement, how we "walk" in the word. It orients us in subtle ways to our environment and cultural values.

If we were to loose the use of Latin all together, or dictionaries (dict=latin for "to say", any and all references to the old language were destroyed. Disappeared. If we were left only with remnants of it, enough to know that it was there but without any deeper understanding of it, how would we relate to our world?

That's as close as I can get to describing what Native nations are struggling with - the loss of their languages and urgently trying to preserve the remnants that are left - at a time when perhaps it most important to all of us that these languages are kept alive.

If you've ever witnessed people in love. They begin to blend, even breathe together.

In Ofelia Zepeda's video, if you listen closely to her poems, she talks about breathing with the land. As you become part of your environment, you begin to breathe with it. You become part of it and it becomes part of you.

The old people say that the land shapes the people, the language of a people is also integrated with the land and the culture.

You can see it mostly with native speakers, the breathing, the rhythm of the language is different. When they sing, that same rhythm is in the songs. All of them are intricately woven with the land and the culture.