UMATILLA RESERVATION, Ore. –
For many, language is a way to pass culture, information and history on to future generations. For The Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation and other native peoples, the language they used to speak is losing speakers faster than people learning become fluent.
“Without language there’s no culture, no culture there’s no people,” Damien Totus, Umatilla Language instructor at Nixyaawii Community School, said.
Totus has been a part of the language program for about 12 years and said teaching the Umatilla language is an important part of keeping Umatilla ceremony, tradition, and culture alive.
Something he wasn’t sure he would be able to do at first after seeing how his father was treated when first starting.
“Seeing the things that he went through was kind of, I’m not sure if I want to be part of it,” Totus said.
Totus’s father, Thomas Morning Owl, started as the Umatilla language coordinator for the program in 1996. At the time, elders of the tribe challenged some of the ways the language would be taught and who it could be taught to.
“Some of the elders at the time were really selective at the time on who can learn. Who the teachers, the apprentices they had, were allowed to teach,” Totus said. “They couldn’t be white, they couldn’t be Black, Hispanic couldn’t be, they had to be part of the people.”
Morning Owl said that restriction changed the focus at the time to preserving and documenting the language from the elders and first language speakers.
“Since the passing of a lot of our elders that were involved with that at the time it’s now turned towards a more educational based program that is geared towards teaching the language to non speakers,” Morning Owl said.
Morning Owl also said he would hate to see thousands of years of culture and history through oral tradition end in just 150 years of contact.
Part of the difficulty is the number of first language speakers for many native languages is going down, often faster than new speakers learn, combined with the already difficult task of learning a language.
“The difficulty of learning that language and developing a new identity becomes daunting to some of our students and they begin to start shying away from making that commitment to really really go forward in the language study,” Morning Owl said.
He said for those trying to learn the language, life can get in the way and language study isn’t prioritized.
“That’s the struggle we face a lot of the times with our own people. They don’t realize its, you know how precious it is,” Totus said.
Students in the language class said they want to keep the language alive for future generations.
“I don’t want native people to become not really cultured and not know what their native tongue is and not speak it down the road,” student Neveah Moore said.
“I definitely don’t want it to die out, there’s not very many speakers, like I probably know like three speakers in this community that can do it. So it’s like, you want to learn everything you can from them in hopes that you can pass it down to other people,” student Grace Moses said.
Totus said he hopes to teach well enough, “to continue on in hopes that I have, in the 12 years that maybe there’s one or two students out there, past students will one day be able to take my place and do what I’m doing here.”
