A culture and language that has taken centuries to develop has rapidly faded away in the span of a few years. A culture and language of value, respect, and beauty, of a people that have educated us on how to survive, people that we owe not only our lives to, but the lives of our ancestors to. A form of Native American English called Lumbee English is a language primarily spoken in Robeson County North Carolina by a tribe known as the Lumbee Indians, who are the largest group of Native Americans East of the Mississippi River. According to research conducted by linguists Walt Wolfram and Clare Dannenberg, Lumbees make up forty percent of the county’s population where they live amongst African Americans and Europeans, who they receive a lot of …show more content…
Wolfram stated that one unique grammatical convention of Lumbee English is the use of I’m instead of I’ve. Some examples are: “I’m told you all that I know” and “I’m been there before.” Another grammatical convention noted by Wolfram is the use of be instead of is, a grammatical convention similar to African American Vernacular English. One example is “he never bes there,” which means he never is there. Additionally, Wolfram brings to attention that Lumbee English adds a- prefixes to verbs. Some examples of this are “She’s a-fishin,” “She’s a-runnin,” and “He’s a-swimmin” (Wolfram, 2006). Lumbee English also has its own particular vocabulary that includes words like “budges,” which means a nervous irritation, “juvember,” meaning a slingshot, and “ellick,” which is a cup of coffee (Brewer & Reising, 1982). These unique grammatical conventions and vocabulary carry more weight in Lumbee culture than many know, because people of their tribe see Lumbee English as a representation of their history and of …show more content…
The American public 's reaction to Lumbee English were negative and they tried to erase the language and their culture. In 1880 the government established Indian boarding schools where Native American students were treated harshly and were forbidden to express their culture or speak their language. A direct quote from one of their headmasters was “Kill the Indian, save the man”(History and Culture "Boarding Schools," 2016). The boarding schools served as more of a “correctional facility” than a school and imprisoned children of all ages. These boarding schools did not close until 1932, and in that time many children were whipped, mentally scarred, and some even died. There are hundreds of reported cases of Native American students dying in schools and there are even more that are not on paper. With time people have become more accepting of other cultures but the stigma towards Lumbee English still exists. The standardization of American English has created a lot of tension with other dialects of English present in the United States. Presently outsiders see Lumbee English speakers as uneducated because it is not the form of English they learn in schools, but the issue is slightly more complex. North Carolina’s dialect of English has southern routes that give it a different accent,
“To kill the Indian in the child,” this was one of the many atrocious quotes which were spoken during the peak of residential schools from 1913 to 1932. Residential schools were government-sponsored, church ran schools established to assimilate Aboriginal children into Euro-Canadian culture. This quote means what it simply says, to remove the Indian culture out of a child. There were many quotes which outlined the goals of residential schools in Canada; some of them as shown in source II for example, were made by Duncan Campbell Scott, the Deputy Superintendent General of the Department of Indian Affairs between 1913 and 1932. The quote depicts his Eurocentric views towards the Indians and his intentions on what to do with them. The first Source
In Marianne Mithun and Wallace L. Chafe’s article “Recapturing the Mohawk Language”, the two authors focus on an important aspect of language that I strongly agree on. Mithun and Chafe demonstrate how native Mohawk speakers acquire unconsciously all necessary rules of the Mohawk language. I find that their discovery can be used as an argument to prove professor Ray Jackendoff’s first fundamental rule: mental grammar.
The rhetor for this text is Luther Standing Bear. He was born in 1868 on the Pine Ridge Reservation. He was raised as a Native American until the age on eleven when he was taken to Carlisle Indian Industrial School: an Indian boarding school. After graduating from the boarding school, he returned to his reservation and now realized the terrible conditions under which they were living. Standing Bear was then elected as chief of his tribe and it became his responsibility to induce change (Luther Standing Bear). The boarding schools, like the one he went to, were not a fair place to be. The Native American children were forced to go there and they were not taught how to live as a European American; they were taught low level jobs like how to mop and take out trash. Also, these school were very brutal with punishment and how the kids were treated. In the passage he states, “More than one tragedy has resulted when a young boy or girl has returned home again almost an utter stranger. I have seen these happenings with my own eyes and I know they can cause naught but suffering.” (Standing Bear 276). Standing Bear is fighting for the Indians to be taught by Indians. He does not want their young to lose the culture taught to them from the elders. Standing Bear also states, “The old people do not speak English and never will be English-speaking.” (Standing Bear 276). He is reinforcing the point that he believes that they
“Standard English was imposed on children of immigrant parents, then the children were separated from native English speakers, then the children were labeled “inferior” and “ignorant” (Hughes 70) because they could not speak Standard English. In addition to feeling inferior about their second language skills, these students also felt inadequate in regard to speaking their own mother tongues” (qtd in Kanae)
The Indian Boarding School Experience sanctioned by the U.S government decultralized Native Americans through Anglo Conformity which has led to a cultural smudging of the Native American mores generations later, disrupting centuries of cultural constructions and the norms and values of the Native American people.
This school was significant because it changed the way they lived for the rest of their lives. The boarding school’s mission was to help Native Americans adjust to American culture by influencing upon their children white lifestyles, or what was close to it. However, this did not seem to help Native Americans. Many of the children weren’t welcomed back home because some of them could no longer remember the life they used to lead and were therefore thought of as a shame to all Native Americans and their heritage. Many came back not knowing how to speak their native tongue, or even not knowing their tribes’ rituals. In some ways, the Americans did accomplish what they set out to do, they did change many Native Americans, but there were cases in which they didn’t. Some students disobeyed the rules and continued to speak their native tongue and practice rituals in secret in school. This was resistance inside the school, and resistance also happened outside of the school. However, if children were caught disobeying the rules they were punished. Some parents were angry that they weren’t allowed to see their kids when they wanted, so few would resist allowing their children to go back after breaks. Others would run away with their children and families, though this was a tough choice to
It is apparent that there are many types of dialect within American English. The coexisting of two or more languages, either serving together in the same area or servicing different areas, is as old as language itself (Pei 106). This has happened throughout time and appears to be inevitable. It is impossible to believe an entire country could conform to one language, and then only one dialect of that language. Throughout history societies have survived for some time using different languages until these language barriers tore territories apart. It is apparent how, in America, barriers between dialects separate black men from white men even more than physical conditions.
In the book the Cajuns: Americanization of a people by Shane k. Bernard talks about how they were not allowed to speak to the teachers in French. If French words were spoken, “they were turned over to the principal’s office, where the principal had a set of rubber tubes tied together and we were whipped. The girls caught were punished different, as they were forced to walk around the flagpole with bricks in their hands”(Bernard, p.19). In my last interview Mrs.Winola comments that “school was fun at first but the teachers didn’t want us speaking French while on the school grounds so if we were caught speaking the language we would be punished.” She also says how her and her brother were caught speaking French and were forced to write lines “we will not speak Cajun French while on the school grounds.” Because of the very fact of the children being disciplined for speaking the only language they really knew this had caused them to not pass down the language to the different generations and teaching making the language die out little by little. In another one of my resent interviews Mrs. Debbie Johnson says one of her grandfathers barely spoke any English because of this and her not being taught Cajun French she rarely communicated with her grandfather making her not have a close relationship with him. Mrs. Debbie Johnson also stated in the interview “I
In the late 1800s, the United States proposed an educational experiment that the government hoped would change the traditions and customs of Native Americans. Special schools were created all over the United States with the intention of "civilizing" Native youth. This paper will explore the history and conditions of Native American boarding schools and why they were ultimately unsuccessful.
Speech is a very influenced africanism in America. A word commonly used today by all races in America is the word “okay”, a Mande and Wolf term that means “that’s it” (Holloway 57). Ebonics is often tied back to african roots of west african language. Both lack the sounds and final consonant clusters (e.g. past), and that replacing or simplifying these occurs both in US Ebonics and in West African English varieties spoken in Nigeria and Ghana. Moreover, they argue that the distinction made between completed actions ("He done walked") and habitual actions ("We be walkin") in the Ebonics tense-aspect system reflects their prevalence in West African language systems and that this applies to other aspects of Ebonics sentence structure.
The Iroquois includes many Indian tribes speaking a language of the Iroquoian family, such as the Huron, Mohawk, Onondaga, and Seneca among others. However, the Huron is often spoken of separately. The Iroquois differs from the Iroquois Confederacy, also known as the Iroquois League. All of them were affected by the arrival and colonization by Europeans. While Iroquois have a reputation of being violent, they were at times peaceful and were employed by different European companies; they also spread their culture and some European ideas with them. The Iroquois League has been said to have influenced the Founding Fathers, but is that true? Another question is whether the Iroquois were cannibals. They believed in witchcraft, but witchcraft
In 1887 the federal government launched boarding schools designed to remove young Indians from their homes and families in reservations and Richard Pratt –the leader of Carlisle Indian School –declared, “citizenize” them. Richard Pratt’s “Kill the Indian… and save the man” was a speech to a group of reformers in 1892 describing the vices of reservations and the virtues of schooling that would bring young Native Americans into the mainstream of American society.
At these boarding schools, Native American children were able to leave their Indian reservations to attend schools that were often run by wealthy white males. These individuals often did not create these schools with the purest of intentions for they often believed that land occupied by Native American Tribes should be taken from them and put to use; it is this belief that brought about the purpose of the boarding schools which was to attempt to bring the Native American community into mainstream society (Bloom, 1996). These boarding schools are described to have been similar to a military institution or a private religious school. The students were to wear uniforms and obey strict rules that included not speaking one’s native tongue but rather only speaking English. Punishments for not obeying such rules often included doing laborious chores or being physically reprimanded (Bloom, 1996). Even with hars...
In connection to the story A Short History of Indians in Canada, the “Indians” are dying repeatedly due to the fact that in history, they were forced to go into residential schools and were
Crawford, James. Effective Language Education Practices and Native Language Survival. Reyhner, Jon. Montana:8m (NALI) Institute, 1990. Print.