Reznet

Speaking Salish

By Rob Chaney for the Missoulian | Audio Slideshow by Wayne Smith

ARLEE, Mont. (AP) — In a language immersion school, every object has a label to remind students how to describe the world around them.

So in a sense, the expansion project going on at Nkwusm Salish Language Revitalization Institute here is adding to its dictionary. From a single classroom and hallway kitchen six years ago, Nkwusm now is filling a former bowling alley with white boards, desks, student art and recording equipment.

From that time just six years ago when only a couple children showed up for class, Nkwusm now has 39 regular students in preschool through high school grades. It's divided into three multi-age classes, each with a certified teacher, a fluent Salish speaker and a teacher's aide.

"We tried this once before in 1994, but it failed for lack of experience and direction," said Nkwusm co-founder and director Tachini Pete. "Now we start kids when they're 3, 4, 5 years old. That's when they learn most easily. We do math and science and all the other areas, but the main focus is language."

 

And the Salish language is everywhere, from the gathering songs the children sing in the morning to the labels on every counter, fixture and picture in the building. When Salish elders and language specialists Pat Pierre and Stephen Small Salmon lead a call-and-response exercise, the children yell with gusto.

The Salish alphabet has 39 letter sounds. There's no R or B, but there are four variations of C and three of K. Nkwusm's Web site offers a downloadable font so computers can properly display all the pronunciation marks.

Head teacher Pat Pierre added that Salish's concise power relies on the speaker's facial expressions and hand gestures.

"You can express a paragraph in a single line," he said. "It comes in the motion of a hand or the tone of voice. If I tie my hands behind me and try to tell a story, I'd have a hard time."

For example, the word Np/pncut means "to act like a coyote." But Coyote is a major character in Salish folklore, allowing the speaker to allude to an entire story according to the context of the conversation.

On the other hand, Salish speakers also like its descriptive power. Aspen Smith, a 15-year-old Arlee resident who's studied at Nkwusm for two years, said she can puzzle out a word's meaning by which part of the body it's linked to. The Salish word for bald eagle, pl/qeyn, ends in a suffix referring to the head (white head). Golden eagles are known as "dark tails" and their name, ml/qnups, ends with a suffix for tail.

Other suffixes refer to the chest, legs, hands and other parts. In addition to physical location, they imply ideas about use, strength, flexibility or other characteristics.

Pete pointed out other advantages. In math, Salish compresses the ideas of add, sum and addition into a single term: CtxWum. That gives young learners an easier time focusing on combining numbers instead of learning multiple ways of saying the same function.

And getting young learners is key to the survival of the Salish language. When Pete started his efforts to open an immersion school in 1994, there were 200 fluent Salish speakers in the community. Today, that number has dropped to 57, and the average age is 76 years old.

"We've had language revitalization efforts since 1974, and none of them has produced a fluent speaker," Pete said. "We preserved a lot of the language, but the programs come and go.

"But now when our kids are making presentations to the elders and they're seeing our kids out there speaking the language, you can see it's almost like we're taking a weight off their shoulders. There's a glimmer of hope in there now."

Rob Chaney is a reporter at the Missoulian newspaper in Missoula, Mont., which originally published this story. It was distributed and made available for re-publication by the AP Member Exchange.

Wayne Smith, Blackfeet, is a senior studying photojournalism at the University of Montana in Missoula. He is a graduate of the Freedom Forum’s 2006 American Indian Journalism Institute and interned as a photographer at the Rapid City (S.D.) Journal.

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