Indigenous Languages - Science topic

Another relevant link.

https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/learning-in-indigenous-languages_e80ad1d4-en

As a retired teacher in drawing didactics at a teacher training college for visual teachers, I tried to approach the question from my daily practice as a drawing teacher in Secondary Education in the last century.

I hope that my answer does sufficient justice to the question and the possible underlying expectations of the questioner.

What is the pedagogical relationship between visual arts and indigenous language acquisition?

In my opinion, this relationship can show two facets, starting from Visual Education:

Reflective Visual Education, in which images of indigenous art from the past and present are taken as a starting point. This reflection can take the form of speaking engagements, writing an essay or answering written questions about one or more images from the own culture by students in class or during a visit to a museum or gallery.

Produktive Visual Education also includes texts that relate to self-invented contents that are presented individually or in groups in the form of posters in the form of printed or written texts. In the Netherlands, for example, making short texts on paper with self-cut or existing letterforms or script characters on a large format is a visual method for acquiring language ('Taalwerkplaats'). When forming words and texts, visual concepts such as composition, color and form, but also linguistic aspects such as letter shape, spelling and grammar are discussed. The content of the message can relate to a presentation of students' own visual work in the school as well as to an exhibition of visual artists in a gallery or in a collective space. Of course, the geographical location of the school or the relationship of the school with the historical and contemporary identity of the country or region can also play an important role.

Another approach, falling under Productive Visual Working in combination with Language Acquisition, can be making a short comic strip (individual or as group work in class) about a (regional) national historical event.

Collaboration with a fellow lecturer who has language-related expertise is recommended.

The most important requirement is to achieve a significant group of people who love and feel proud of the language concerned. This could involve actively promoting and publishing the literature, stories, poems and songs contained in its cultural legacy. There are unfortunate examples, on the other hand, where a government attempted to force its population to embrace a particular language, creating a reaction against it. There are also instances where the authorities deliberately tried to suppress a language spoken in their country - sometimes [but not always] successfully.

In South America, encouraging youngsters to learn an indigenous tongue might be an uphill struggle - because many of them probably prefer to devote their time and efforts to studying English.

Annika provided good resources. I would like to make some addition : https://www.kdnuggets.com/2021/05/awesome-list-datasets.html

What we call "globalizations", namely global social networks and similar, have developed great contributions to preserve countless traditional languages. English is a trade and sciences global language, but not naturally the language of oceanic traditional cultures. We need to preserve those cultures that are living libraries and forget global languages: we don't really know that two or three centuries from now mandarin or Spanish will become global languages. I don´t really care since it is a question of time to have in our Iphones an app able to translate, speak and write most world languages.

You have already Bahasa Melayu Sarawak or Sarawak Malay language dictionaries available online as at https://borneodictionary.com/melayu-sarawak/

I think it is much better to cooperate with an ongoing project rather than starting your own one.

Good Answer Willow Brown

The 'will' of the speakers is most important. Without 'wil'l there is little hope. To promote 'will' the language should be contextualized as a pragmatic tool in important aspects of daily life. To contextualize the language in todays modern society one must employ deliberate research to assess where language use would be maximized in a fluid non-academic space.

Please let me know your thoughts. Thanks.

thanks for your response.

Nice work! Congratulations!

Hope this can be useful;

Have you applied any survery or interview to your participants?

Colonialism plays a great role on these kind of situtions. Globalization has another important part (world Englishes).

There's a John Benjamins book about eliciting metaphor in educational discourse which might prove helpful. One of the chapters, for example, offers a 7-step procedure for eliciting metaphors.

I did so - from a rather Foucaultian perspective and working on Sumak Kawsay or Buen Vivir. Now, I don't work with the concept of traditional knowledge (I would say that does not fit a discourse analytical approach) - so I don't know if I am being helpful...

Ah, but at least some generals: I find Hobsbawn and his invented traditions quite helpful to understand the political use of "traditional knowledge", the same goes for Spivak and the subalterns.

Indigenous languages or dialects (for this matter) should be the major forms of communicating development messages to specific audiences considering the English literacy of your targets for example.  Development practitioners and communicators usually include in the project framework or development goals a way of being "culture-sensitive".  Thus, one way is to adapt to the common people's way of talking or speaking (including dialect), their way of expressing themselves as that would be  part of their norms and culture.  Thus, thorough development would be highly affected by how stakeholders or audiences will understand you and your level of commitment will also be gauged by how well are you with their language.  I affirm to the question, a very good one as one just work on indigenous languages but never put into a dialogue before

Wisconsin gives (Progressive era, Univ. of Wisconsin) and it takes away (McCarthy). Not much has changed.

Swadish apparently  turned lemons into limonada, and I love limonada..

In Aotearoa - New Zealand, perhaps this might be of interest to you: 

Skerrett, M.E. (2012) Counter colonization through Maori language revitalization in Aotearoa/New Zealand. University Park, PA, USA: 20th Reconceptualizing Early Childhood Education Conference, 4-7 Nov 2012. Access via UC Research Repository. (Conference Contributions - Full conference papers)

and

Skerrett, M. (2012) Deterritorialising geopolitical spaces and challenging neoliberal conditions through language revernacularisation in Kohanga Reo. MAI Journal 1(2): 146-153. http://www.journal.mai.ac.nz/ content/deterritorialising-geopolitical-spaces-and-challenging-neoliberal-conditions-through-languag. Access via UC Research Repository. (Journal Articles)

and Norman Anaru (2011) - http://www.tetaurawhiri.govt.nz/assets/Uploads/Research-Library/Anaru-2011-A-Critical-Analysis-of-the-Impact-of-Colonisation-on-the-Mori-Language-through-an-Examination-of-Political.pdf 

It's the word order SOV.

Regards,

Joachim

For your consideration if you have not yet accessed this material

Magnus,

Thank you for the references. I will examine them for inclusion. I frequently work with a AmeriCorps volunteer in Tucson, Arizona  who faces this issue daily with migrants,  and graduated from your academic institution; so appropriate that we are further informed by good works from that institution.

I have an article titled: Teaching sustainable development from the perspective of indigenous spiritualities of Ghana.

This article is in: Cathrien de Pater and Irene Dankelman (eds.) Religion and sustainable development opportunities and challenges for higher education., 25-39. Berlin: Lit Verlag.

 This article and others in that vol. can be of help.

Try to contact the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) International. There may be an Achuár Chícham New Testament translation by one of their missionaries.

As an anti-colonial, non-Indigenous social work researcher, I believe it is important to begin such research with understanding how research has served to pathologize, colonize, and oppress Indigenous peoples. Non-Indigenous researchers have built their careers on this kind of research. From this, I have learned that we need to be deeply reflective about our personal and research values before considering embarking on such research, if we want to avoid perpetrating continued harm. I believe we also need to approach it with humility and the willingness to be very uncomfortable most of the time. 

Personally, I will only do such research as an ally. I work with Indigenous researchers whom I know well and where we have developed a longer term trust relationship. I have learned that as a non-Indigenous researcher, I need to be willing to be taught by my Indigenous colleagues and that it is very disconcerting to dismantle my identity as an expert and be truly open to listening and learning. I have learned that most Indigenous people communicate the things I need to know in a gentle and often indirect manner, so I need to know how to listen in a different way from the norm in the academy. If I don't pick up the cues, what happens is a subtle withdrawal. The literature recommends that those of us who engage in such research participate in ceremonies (that are open to us) and doing so has not only greatly enriched my life, but it has helped teach me how to be respectful, to learn more deeply, and to build understandings and relationships. I've learned that I need to just show up and to open my whole self, not just my mind, to learning, as Indigenous learning is holistic. I find it very hard to unlearn how I have been taught as an academic, so I really value my trust relationships with Indigenous colleagues and keep having to remember that it's hard to be so far out of my comfort zone of expertise.

I know that doesn't directly answer your question, but as a non-Indigenous researcher, I wanted to first position myself. I also want to mention that my current university is situated in a former Indian Residential School, which represents one of the key Canadian Government policies to destroy Indigenous peoples in Canada. In a sense, I am working at ground zero and my office is located in the former boys' dorms. Not a day passes that I am not aware of the historical realities and this has profoundly shaped my scholarship as an Indigenous ally.  Now... to your actual question...

In my own Canadian social work context, we tend to use anti-colonial theory rather than CRT. In fact I don't think I have seen a Canadian Indigenous scholar in my field use CRT... Although there is an overlap between the two theories and Indigenous peoples are clearly racialized, there is much more going on than just race. There is a whole history of land-grabs and genocide and colonizing policies and processes that are not well-enough explained by CRT, in my opinion. I believe that the relationship with the land is of highest important when thinking about any issues related to Indigenous peoples. 

Thanks for asking the question and I look forward to other people's thought on the topic.

The knowledge structure of Indigenous peoples is different from Western peoples. Unfortunately, computer systems have generally been developed with little understanding of this. Apps can be developed for mobile phones that make them more culturally appropriate to specific Indigenous communities. One feature of mobile devices particularly useful for retaining indigenous knowledge is the geolocation sensors. These could be used to identify and describe significant geographical features. There are many other possibilities.

I don't use actual teacher interviews or other qualitative data in the direction of monitoring classroom behavior, but some years ago I wrote a piece trying to document the excitement in recent years on reserves and reservations around indigenous language recovery pedagogy ("corpus retranslation").  The bibliography of that piece contains citations of some truly inspiring research on the part of teachers and scholars working to recover and expand indigenous languages.  Perhaps you might take a look:  “Translating Sovereignty: Corpus Retranslation and Endangered North American Indigenous Languages.” Translation Studies. 2.2 (2009): 115-132.  Good luck.

Hello Agnes, I totally agree with your remarks. And, we may agree that as long as the money or submission are the only interest for governments or some researchers, investigations would be biased in some degree. Regarding the big question you rose, what I know based on the book I referred to is that the money is used to buy computers and Internet connection services. Governmental authorities are the intermediaries, of course. Then, the natives becoming aware the world offers by means of Internet, decide to make enough money to migrate to those places they have seen through web sites. Yes, and what about the language? I do not know.

As is clear from the responses above, the question you pose, Che-Wei, is an excellent one that would not have been asked not so many years ago. I agree with Hugo that "research is research" - seeking for knowledge and sharing knowledge are human pursuits. Research is done in a cultural context, whether one uses Western paradigms and methodologies or Indigenous/decolonized approaches. Smith and many other proponents of Indigenous research paradigms don't deny the usefulness of Western methods, including the emphasis on empirical evidence. Instead, they call for us as researchers to place Western methods and paradigms into the appropriate cultural context, which includes the colonial project and the valorization of those same ways of knowing. Recently my colleagues and I had to respond to concerns that our graduate program, where students earn an MA in Indigenous Governance, is quite arduous in its requirements. We successfully argued that our students must be trained in Indigenous and Western paradigms and methodologies. It is exciting to watch these emerging scholars pushing the boundaries but they can only do so from an informed and contextual standpoint. Another important point to remember is that there is a healthy range of positions among Indigenous scholars/researchers/applied practitioners about what Indigenous research really is. Duane Champagne, for example, points out that all research questions do not have to be community-generated, which is counter to many descriptions of Indigenous research paradigms and methods. Other questions/issues that have come up, including in my own research, include: who speaks for Indigenous communities/who gives consent; problems with institutional ethics review boards; perceived legitimacy of Indigenous research paradigms re: funding, tenure and promotion, publications; Indigenous research in urban settings, etc.

Tanja:

Thank you for sharing the references. All of this is very useful to me.

This is the working definition of culture I came up with for my studies of Mesoamerican pictorial manuscripts (translated here from Castilian): "The ideas, values and collective behaviour patterns of a determined human group; culture consists of a complex of interrelated subsystems, the borders of which are generally blurry and don't coincide; these cultural subsystems are transmitted and learned, and are continously being adapted to changes in the geographical and social context of the group."

The reason I became interested in the relations between language and culture is that the evidence I was looking at suggested the existence, in the central highlands of Mexico and adjacent regions at the time of the Spanish conquest, of a relatively homogenous central Mexican culture shared by speakers of languages from very diverse families (Yutonahuan, Otomanguean, and the isolate Tarascan). There was -and still is- a rather naive belief that linguistic borders tend to coincide with the borders between other cultural subsystems (like diet, religion, dress, social organization and others). The influence of Whorf, direct or indirect, seems to be behind this naiveté. I came to the conclusion that Whorf's postulate that language determines culture greatly overestimates the role of language in determining cognition and culture. Lera Borodistsky tries to prop up Whorf's view, and does indeed show some cases where languages can cause differences in thinking between one language community and another, while cognitive differences can cause linguistic contrasts. She concedes that cognition seems to be a complex of linguistic and extralinguistic processes, while insisting that language plays an important role in most of our cognitive processes.

It is these extralinguistic processes that interest me, especially those related to images, since central Mexican pictorial writing is essentially a translinguistic pictorial notational system, semasiographic in nature, that was shared by speakers of very diverse languages (although this system lends itself to the occasional language-specific glottograph, through homophonic word plays using the "rebus" principle). Central Mexican pictorial writing goes beyond iconography in its conventionality, its complexity, and its use as a mnemonic device to reinforce oral discourse and transmission. It straddles the blurry border between Western semantic categories of "writing" and "painting/sculpture". Indeed, if one looks up "writing" and "painting" in colonial dictionaries with Castilian words glossed in native languages, one invariably finds the same native word for both lexical items.

I also found that cultural subsystems were shared across linguistic boundaries, by comparing lexical items within semantic fields (like social structures, calendrical terms, toponyms, anthoponyms, and others), including metaphorical couplets where the combination of two concepts produces a new concept that goes beyond the sum of its parts.

All of this work led me to the conclusion that the role of language in culture is often exaggerated, especially in anthropological studies dealing with Mesoamerica. The role of mental images has been underestimated. Recent studies in neuroscience are shedding some badly needed light on this area of research.

This time I'm afraid I have gone beyond what Luis was trying to elicit with his question!