By BETSY COHEN of the Missoulian
Immersion in native language keeping ancestors' dialect
alive
ARLEE - Two boisterous preschoolers zoom around their classroom wearing Superman capes they made from towels.
The dynamic duo, also known as Michael and Mars, tug and yip at each other as they go, igniting mayhem in the moments before recess.
Salish elder Pat Pierre watches for a moment. His weathered face softens with a wry grin and he calls out: "Monqi," "monqi," "monqi."
The school's six preschoolers at Nkwusm's Salish language school break into endless rounds of giggles.
Everyone in the room but one knows what Pierre is saying, and Tachini Pete, a teacher, patiently explains in English that the sharp staccato sounds translate to "wild monkey."
Five-year-old Isabelle assists the instruction, pointing to a drawing of the animal in the storytelling corner where they learned about it earlier in the day.
Pierre watches the exchange and beams at the youngsters he has helped teach since the immersion school began last fall.
Today, the children know another word. Today, the 74-year-old says emotionally, they are one more day closer to fluency. They are one more day closer to saving their native language and thinking like their ancestors.
Salish is dying because no young people are learning it, and the elders who can pass it on in its fullest nuance are dying, taking the language with them, Pete explains.
"The youngest person in the tribe whose first language is Salish is 40 years old, and there are only a dozen fluent speakers in that generation," he says.
It's a crisis because the loss of language means the loss of a cultural world view and perspective.
In Salish, there are no "ifs" or "buts," there are no words for "goodbye" or "right now."
"There is not a lot of ambiguity to our language," Pete says. "It is very compact and filled with meaning, and it reflects how we see and feel the world as Salish."
Although no official count has ever been taken, it is widely believed that of the 6,915 enrolled tribal members there are fewer than 70 people who speak Salish with authority, and most are elders.
Among the younger generations - the people in their 20s - there is no fluency, and experts believe the language will likely disappear in less than 10 years without a drastic effort to revive it.
Pete, Melanie Sandoval, Chaney Bell and Joshua Brown hope to reverse the trend with their immersion school they named Nkwusm, or, "One Fire."
It opened last fall, but the idea for such a school smoldered for the past five years while the foursome studied Salish each week in the kitchen of their teacher, tribal elder Dorothy Felsman.
And while they each hammered away at other goals: Sandoval and Brown received undergraduate degrees at the University of Montana, Bell earned his Associate Arts degree at Salish Kootenai College and Pete earned his B.A. at Western Montana College, his A.A. in Native American Studies at SKC, and published the official modern Salish language dictionary, which is now used by the tribe.
Despite their academic loads and family commitments, Sandoval says the Salish classes were the priority.
"We wanted to better our own language skills," she says. "We all felt strongly that it was important to us, for our lives and our kids' lives."
As they became more confident of their Salish, so did their talk about building a school.
Immersion, they decided, where everything is taught in Salish, and only Salish words are spoken, would be the most effective. Then they chose to model the program after the Piegan Institute in Browning and incorporate a teaching method called Total Physical Response Storytelling developed by a Spanish teacher in California.
Saving the language, they believe, is work best suited for the tribe's youngest members who are just developing all of their skills.
"The goal of the school is to recreate the process where language is passed on from parent to child," says Joshua Brown. "And to get that, we have to start teaching the youngest in the language."
Their effort, insist the young American Indians, most of whom are in their late 20s, is not for personal gain or glory.
"This is about the whole tribe," Brown says. "It's about revitalizing our culture and ourselves. Language is what holds us together."
Creating an immersion school on the Flathead Indian Reservation is not a new idea. It was tried seven years ago but failed before the school year was out.
Politics, lack of leadership and a complicated mission that meshed the federal government's Head Start program objectives and the Salish-Kootenai Nation's goals bred frustration and forced the school's closure, explains Pete, who was tangentially involved with that school.
This time around, it's much different.
This time the school is solely about Salish.
Nkwusm is fully funded through private donations and the tribal council, classes are taught by Sandoval, and Pete, both of whom are certified teachers, and by Sophie Mays and Pierre, both of whom taught at Salish-Kootenai College and are fluent Salish speakers.
Brown and Bell recruit new students, and teachers, and direct much of the advertising, public relations and grant writing duties.
This time, the school has the full backing of the tribal council.
"This school will work," Brown insists, "because a lot of planning has gone into it and we all have the same philosophy and goals. We have the skills and the abilities, and we are willing to see it through and work out the problems."
And they continue to do their own homework.
On Tuesday evenings, after the children have been collected, the foursome gather around a table for a potluck dinner with their long-time tutor, Felsman, and continue their language education.
The teacher of the teachers beams at her class.
"For these young people, it's a big effort and commitment on their part because they didn't grow up hearing it, so they didn't learn it," says life-long resident of the Jocko Valley.
She has watched other efforts to bring back Salish, but the commitment to those programs crumbled under duress and the enormity of the challenge.
As former home school liaison and teacher for the Arlee School system, she says the biggest obstacle has been time and not enough of it.
"The time slot to teach the language was difficult to work around, and in some cases, classes were 15 minutes a week," she says. "How can anyone learn anything in 15 minutes?"
On this Tuesday evening, Felsman checks in with her four students and asks how everyone is doing - in Salish. As their weekly two-hour session officially begins, she passes a pitcher of orange juice, politely asking "chapoompqua?"
The five of them have spent so much time together over the years, they are like a close-knit family.
Felsman quietly says: "They are like my kids now. I respect what they are doing and I admire their commitment."
"This school," she says, "may be it."
A sense of urgency drives the foursome and quiets their self doubt. They know the window to regain and rebuild the language is rapidly closing. In the past year 10 elders have died.
"There aren't enough people who speak Salish, and time moves so quickly," Pete says. "I feel like I don't know enough of the language or have the confidence that I need or want to be responsible for passing it on."
Brown adds: "We have done good things in preserving the language but not perpetuating it."
Their future plans include establishing an endowment, develop a distance learning program, showcasing the student's emerging Salish skills at public venues, inspiring others to take up the language, producing Salish radio ads and building the school, one child at a time, one grade at a time.
That's the future, Pete says. But today is what matters, and it is full of snags.
Regular attendance remains an issue. Although the school is open five days a week, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., there have been days when no children show up, or just one or two children have attended.
But the teachers remain undaunted.
"As long as we have kids, we'll have class," Pete says. "And we don't close our doors until the end of the day.
"Ultimately, it is up to the parents to keep this going," he says. "The future depends on this class."
Pierre remembers the days back in the late 1940s and early 1950s when Salish started to disappear.
It wasn't sudden but rather a quiet withdrawal like the last light of a summer sunset.
"When I was young, like these little ones, everywhere you went, people were talking Indian," he recalls. "But as I got older, I stop hearing it in the stores and in town. It got to be you only heard it in peoples' homes, and then you didn't hear it so much."
The language went underground or morphed into a Salish slang starting in the 1930s. At the time, and until recently, the tribal community believed it did its young people a disservice by encouraging the old ways, said Joe Pablo, a Salish clinical social worker, and the grandfather of three Nkwusm students.
"The language wasn't discouraged, but it just wasn't passed down," Pablo remembers. Today he is 53, but when he was growing up, he was one of three kids in high school who spoke Salish and the only one that is alive.
Listening to his grandchildren speak proper Salish with him brings tears to his eyes. He says it's a sound he has waited a lifetime for.
The children's precision is due to Pierre and Sophie May's diligence.
Pierre says it makes him owly to hear people speak the shortened form of Salish, and corrects them on the spot every time.
"I have it to teach," he explains, covering his heart with a hand. "I have it in here, and I want to get it out."
He and Mays serve as Nkwusm's word police and help Sandoval and Pete create new words that the Salish ancestors had no use for, like cellular phone, computer and simple commands such as "turn the page."
They still don't have a phrase for "right now," Pete says. With a shy smirk on his face he says he could use the command for the two cape-wearing boys.
But there are words for stand and sit, which Mars now knows well enough to share with his mother, Sarah.
"He's become more confident with the language since he
first began, and now he says bossy words in Salish," she
says laughing. "We have to learn more so we can keep up with
him."
Reporter Bestsy Cohen can be reached at 523-5253 or at bcohen@missoulian.com