And now:Ish <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: Navajo Class Tackles Past Wrongs http://www.sltrib.com/1998/dec/12201998/nation_w/68595.htm BY VINCENT J. SCHODOLSKI CHICAGO TRIBUNE ALBUQUERQUE, N.M -- One day when he was 5 years old, Leon Secatero was tending some sheep near his home on the Canoncito Aboriginal Territory 30 miles west of here when a group of men pulled up in a bus and told him he had to come with them. After a brief stop at his home where the barefoot Secatero was given a pair of shoes and a quarter by his mother, Secatero climbed back on the bus and was driven to Albuquerque and placed in a boarding school where he would remain for the next eight years. For the young Navajo boy, the first days in his new environment were a bewildering blur of unfamiliar faces, unfamiliar customs and above all, an unfamiliar language. As part of a program directed by the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs, Secatero and thousands of other American Indians were immersed in an English-language education that for many forever erased their native tongues. That was not the case for Secatero, who managed to keep his Navajo language skills, skills he nurtured when he returned to the reservation as a teen-ager. Now, more than 40 years after that day when he was taken off to boarding school, Secatero is helping young Navajos learn their native language and customs. In a program begun last summer with the help of a federal grant from the Department of Education, Secatero and others are teaching the Navajo language to a younger generation to try to prevent it from disappearing with the passing of tribal elders. ``We want to convince those who still speak the language to speak it because if they don't, the language will disappear,'' said Jennie DeGrout, a Navajo-language teacher in the Albuquerque Public Schools system and the coordinator of the immersion program. Secatero, who is now an elder of the tribe, is among a quickly diminishing number of Navajos who can speak their native language. According to DeGrout, fewer than a third of the 275,000 Navajos living in their traditional territory now encompassed by the states of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah can speak or understand their native language. ``Most of them [Navajos] now live in an urban environment where Navajo is rarely heard,'' said DeGrout. Last summer, 100 students gathered in a school administration building here for a two-week intensive course designed to immerse them in Navajo language and culture. No English was spoken, even though most of the children who attended and their parents who brought them to school each day understood almost no Navajo. Secatero, one of the six teachers who worked with the 100 young students, said that he found that the contact between the children and the elders was important. ``We are trying to instill in them a sense of belonging, [a sense of] of the past so they can live in both worlds as they move into the next 1,000 years,'' said Secatero, who used traditional stories to pass on language and cultural traditions during the summer course. <<END EXCERPT <<<<=-=-=FREE LEONARD PELTIER=-=-=>>>> If you think you are too small to make a difference; try sleeping in a closed room with a mosquito.... African Proverb <<<<=-=http://www.tdi.net/ishgooda/ =-=>>>> IF it says: "PASS THIS TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW...." Please Check it before you send it at: http://urbanlegends.miningco.com/library/blhoax.htm
