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Alabama-Coushatta Tribes Work To Preserve Unwritten Languages Alabama-Coushattas, Texas Indians Alabama-Coushatta [In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material
is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information
for non-profit research and educational purposes only.]
by Mary Lee Grant
In the
sad, old Indian story, two friends argue and destroy their friendship. One, a dove, forever mourns the loss.
Telling the tale, Yolanda Poncho softly imitates the call of the dove, crying for its lost friend, just as her
grandmother used to. The difference is that her grandmother told the story in the Coushatta language, and Poncho
recounts it in English.
Although Poncho can tell the story in either language, many tribal members cannot.
The Alabama and Coushatta tribes, which share this reservation, are working to keep alive their languages, which
experts say could disappear by the time today's children grow old.
"I wish I had recorded my grandmother," Poncho says. "None of this has been written down. If we
want to remember it, we have to pass it down."
Poncho, 33, is the curator of the new Alabama-Coushatta Museum, which opened Memorial Day. A few
blocks away, old men gather at the senior citizens center. They chat in Alabama, a singsong tongue punctuated with
hisses and whistles. Like Coushatta, the Alabama language has never been written down, and few of the tribe's young
people speak it.
Of the 200 Native American languages still spoken, 90 percent are endangered, says Walt Wolfram, a linguistics
professor at North Carolina State University.
Children no longer learn them as their first language, and many Indian tongues are tricky to teach, with numerous
suffixes and prefixes, Wolfram says. In addition, Alabama and Coushatta are tonal languages, similar to Chinese,
in which pitch determines meaning.
Because the languages aren't written, they won't be preserved even as dusty literary artifacts, like ancient Greek
or Latin, Wolfram says. "It is really hard to preserve a language unless it is spoken and written all the
time," he says. "A language disappears very fast. It typically just takes three generations."
The Alabama and Coushatta languages, understood and spoken by both tribes are related to those of the Cherokee,
Creek and Seminole. The two tribes moved from Alabama to the East Texas pine woods in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Always culturally close, they have intermarried and mingled traditions over the centuries.
The reservation's cultural committee offers classes in Alabama for the children, and Poncho is doing what she can
to keep the native tongues alive, recording spoken stories by elderly tribal members and mounting museum
exhibits.
But television, video games and the Internet are heady competition for an obscure Indian language.
"It just doesn't have the appeal for the kids," she says. "Other things are much more exciting."
The Alabama and Coushatta languages are further handicapped by having so few people to speak them;
the tribe is small, just 1,017 members. More than half, 532, live on this Texas reservation, says tribal spokeswoman
Sharon Miller. One other small band of Alabama-Coushatta exists, in Oklahoma, and one Coushatta group lives on
a reservation in southwestern Louisiana.
Outside scholars have compiled dictionaries of the Alabama and Coushatta languages. Using the English alphabet,
the dictionaries try to show proper pronunciation and English translations.
"The old people say the dictionaries are wrong," Poncho says. "No one can agree on the exact meaning
of some words or the one right pronunciation."
A spoken language changes even more often than a written one does, Wolfram explains. With no set standard, opinions
differ about pronunciation and meaning.
Once a language is lost, linguists and anthropologists are without a crucial piece of knowledge to reveal how languages
develop and are structured, experts say.
"For the people who speak it, they lose a way of seeing the world," says Rob Moore, an anthropology professor
at New York University. "Stories are never the same when translated to another language. Nature looks very
different when it is classified by different standards, in a different language."
As a child, Alabama-Coushatta Chief Clayton Sylestine had the run of the reservation. He played in the woods, hunted
and fished and learned the Indian names of nature.
"I know all the words for the trees and plants in Indian," says Sylestine, now 67, "but I'm not
sure I could tell you in English."
Young tribal members can't help.
"I never learned the language. ... A lot of people my age are the same," says Shannel Kopady, 20. "People
move on and off the 'rez,' to find work."
Many move 90 miles south to Houston, where they are rapidly assimilated.
Says Wolfram, "When it is no longer an economic advantage to speak Alabama, there is little incentive for
the young people to keep speaking it."
http://www.texasindians.com/albam.htm
http://www.ontalink.com/native_americans/alabama_coushatta.html
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KOLA Information: http://users.skynet.be/kola/index.htm
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