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by Michael “Malulani” Maertens-Odegaard (modegaard@gmail.com)
The American tradition of “race” was designed as an assimilative process that alienates its indigenous peoples from their distinct tribal and national identities. Genocide theorist Raphael Lemkin recognized forced assimilation of linguistic minorities into a dominant culture as an important characteristic of cultural genocide, and Richard Jaulin clarified that linguicide need not be intentional for language suppression to be an effective means of ethnocide. As a result of failed English language assimilation policies that characterized North American governance through the mid-20thcentury, minority linguistic rights in North America were finally recognized in Canada in 1969, and in 1990, the United States government began to fund indigenous language revitalization efforts.
Most Californians are probably aware that linguicide was a central and overt policy in residential schools throughout the North American continent and have heard stories of indigenous children being routinely brutally punished in residential schools for speaking their language. While itis assumed that linguicide died with the closure of the last residential schools, actually linguicide continues as a covert policy today. As Roland Chris john stated, “Residential schools never ceased operation; they merely changed their clothes, and went back to work.” Though it is no longer as easy to openly punish California Indian students for speaking their language, the ongoing dominance of colonial languages over indigenous linguistic groups continues to fuel linguicide.
Policy makers in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s began to experiment with integrating California Indian children into dominant language-only public schools, but now we know such integrated education for children has been a disaster, since such education requires a certain degree of assimilation on the part of the child. Far too long, educators have blamed the high dropout (or “push out”) rates of California Indian children in public schools on the children themselves, in addition to their families, cultures, and socio-economic conditions.
While schools can no longer get away with physically punishing children for speaking their indigenous languages, they still practice effective linguicide by imposing a dominant language as the medium of instruction by ignoring, stigmatizing and effectively displacing California Indian languages. This effect is called “subtractive language education” since it subtracts from a childʻs linguistic repertoire, instead of adding to it. The subtle message is that California Indian languages are not useful or necessary, and that it may even hurt children to be able to speak it. Subtractive language education is also accurately called “submersion education” to the extent that it submerses California Indian children in both an alien language and an alien culture; full proficiency in the dominant language is rarely achieved because children are not given the chance to first become fully proficient in their first language.
Submersion education has been linked to serious mental harm, including social dislocation and other forms of psychological and cognitive harm which leads to disproportionately high rates of poverty, addiction, incarceration and suicide of California Indians and its resulting social, economic, and political marginalization. The links between these conditions and the common experience of submersion education have led linguistic rights scholars such as Skutnabb-Kangas to conclude that the imposition of dominant languages as a medium of instruction is a “weapon of mass destruction,” which fits the UN definition of Genocide and Crimes against Humanity.
In many tribal schools today existing core programs of 30minutes a day of language instruction are useless for maintaining or creating fluency, as 90 percent of the school day and all of the “real” subjects are conducted in the dominant language, sending the implicit message that indigenous languages are not important or worthy of the same linguistic rights as the dominant language. Thus the internationally recognized right to speak one’s indigenous language proficiently is violated by the simple fact that there is generally no option for education in California in the medium of the indigenous language. The imposition of dominant languages on indigenous children is now considered the single most important factor in the shamefully high push out rate among indigenous youth who don’t have access to indigenous language medium education, generally known as “language immersion” education. While initial costs of establishing immersion programs may be large, the overall benefits of immersion education include greatly reduced social costs of poverty, addictions, incarceration, and suicide, and increased self-sufficiency, health, and decolonization.
In 2007, when the United Nations affirmed the human right of indigenous peoples to pass on their languages to future generations through education and public media as well as to be free from any form of propaganda that would prevent them from using their languages or maintaining their distinct identities, indigenous linguistic rights were finally established in international law. When Hawaiʻi legislated official status for its indigenous language in 1978, there were only a few hundred speakers of Hawaiian remaining in the state, but today the number of speakers of Hawaiian is now estimated to be over 30,000, and that state’s residents’ right to indigenous language medium education is constitutionally guaranteed. Hawaiʻi’s indigenous language revitalization success inspired Alaska to enact legal recognition of its 20 indigenous languages in 2014, and South Dakota did the same with all three dialects of the Sioux language in 2019, the same year Governor Newsom acknowledged the Genocide of Native Californians during the Gold Rush leading to statehood. However the California constitution has yet to establish official status of the State’s indigenous languages or to otherwise acknowledge the State’s role in ensuring the revitalization of the languages of California Indians. While this year, Maui County, Hawaiʻi has begun to transition into bilingual governance, California Indiansʻ right to be served by governance in their indigenous languages, regardless of their English language capacity, has yet to be established.
As a result, California Indian families remain invisible to most other California residents, and many California Indians continue to be alienated from not only their languages but also from each other; the California Indian women demographic class experiences the highest rates of missing and endangered status. The California Indian’s choice between being educated or fluent in their indigenous language must come to an end! However, this is only possible if California Indian languages are not only recognized bylaw but also if the State’s educational mission is expressly inclusive of indigenous language medium education from preschool through PhD. Likewise, all economic definitions of sustainability require equal inclusion of California Indian languages in all documentation and deliberative regulatory procedures as the capacity to serve the public in the State’s indigenous languages develops.
