Sheilah Nicholas has been working to preserve Indigenous languages for her entire career. But her exposure to it started long before her career started.
Nicholas is a University of Arizona professor and director of the UA's West Region Native American Language Resource Center. The center recently got a big grant from the U.S. Department of Education to build a new resource center there aimed at language revitalization efforts. It’s one of four new centers doing similar work at other colleges — from the University of Hawaii to Little Priest Tribal College in Winnebago, Nebraska.
Hopi, like a lot of Indigenous languages, is an oral language that goes far beyond just speaking the language. The literacy part of it — the reading and writing — was developed much later. And Nicholas credits that to her uncle.
Full conversation
SHEILAH NICHOLAS: I was born into Hopi culture and the Hopi world. For the first six years of my life totally immersed in that world, that culture, that language. And then I went to school at age 6 in a local school on the reservation where I learned English.
But those first six years were all about hearing and speaking the language, learning about the culture through the traditions, through the practices. Everything that is Hopi.
So my … uncle is or was a research anthropologist at the University of Arizona and also a self-taught linguist. His interest in Hopi language because he was a fluent speaker. He was very interested in thinking about Hopi language as a written form. And he spent a lot of his professional and academic life working on creating an orthography for the Hopi language. And before his passing, published a 30,000-word dictionary in the Hopi language.
LAUREN GILGER: That's fascinating. So tell us what did that mean to you? I mean, this came literally from your own family and what does it do to the language and to the preservation of it when you have something like a dictionary, when you've taken this oral language and turned it into something that can be written.
NICHOLAS: Hopi still is primarily an oral language. So within the whole population, there are not that many who are, what we would say, able to read and write the language in, in the, you know, sort of Western form of alphabet, reading and writing. There are just a handful. It is something that is very new.
So I also want to clarify this idea of literacy because Hopi and probably other tribal communities have literacy. It's more of an expression through symbols and of their semiotic perspectives and processes. So everything that is represented and expressed of our experiences with the language and the place where we, we became a people, you see on clothing, ceremonial artifacts, some of our utilitarian objects, ceremonial objects, all those kinds of things.
GILGER: It sounds like the, the language has always been very connected to the land itself, like the place, the physical place.
NICHOLAS: Yes, that's very true.
GILGER: Is that a challenge in trying to preserve it today because so many people have moved off of the land?
NICHOLAS: It can be. Once you leave the reservation earlier, let's say at the time that I left the reservation back in the probably late ‘50s and ‘60s.It was a challenge but 60 miles is not that far away and you could go back and you participate in all that is Hopi.
But if you move farther away, yes, the diaspora has created a bigger challenge because then you are trying to maintain that language in all of the way of thinking about a Hopi way of life immersed in an English environment. And the people that you might speak to or speak with are no longer there. So it definitely becomes a challenge to maintain that.
GILGER: Yeah, that makes sense. So I read this quote from you that you said that you talk about your language as asleep and not extinct. Can you explain that?
NICHOLAS: Well, I think the idea of that is that the discourse of extinction or moribund, all of the, our loss all have come to us from the external, you know, perspectives of our languages. Because we don't speak them or it's not heard anymore, we think they are lost, they're dead, that kind of thing.
But if you take cases like the Wampanoag in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, that language was preserved through documentation in written form early. And one individual, through dreams that her ancestors, you know, presented to her with this calling, became a linguist and went back to those documents and brought them back to life and raised her own children in that language. So a community of people now are speaking that language, that means that, you know, it didn't die, it didn't go extinct, it just went to sleep.
And so we are reawakening our languages because we believe, using the Hawaiian analogy, is that, that's our life spirit and it's our Maori, it's within us. And what we have done over the years is we have sort of snuffed out the life by all these external kinds of experiences that took away the life spirit or the oxygen or the air. And so we just have to take away those experiences, rethink them and give new life and oxygen and air to our languages, our life spirit.
GILGER: That's a beautiful way of putting it. Let me ask you lastly about this new grant to fund this work for another five years here kind of across the Southwestern region. Talk a little bit about the goal with that. Like this is sort of a continuation of work you've been doing for a very long time. Is the goal to preserve these languages, but in a way like you're talking about where it's something that can be spoken in everyday life, like to make it something that people really use.
NICHOLAS: Yes, that's the outcome. I think it's, over the years, we have had to really spend a lot of time observing, rethinking because we have been really, I guess informed by current research in this field. But previously, what we did was we, use the Western model that centers the word teaching, the discourse of teaching. And we never taught our languages before. We just use them.
And so now when you think about teaching, you're thinking of formal spaces specific times, certain time allotted to it, reading and writing materials have to be developed versus just using it, right? And so that's been the challenge.
And I think over the years, we have been able to see and we are totally informed, fortunately and gratefully, to communities have already started to use the spaces of school and created immersion schools because they have instead taken their languages to be the medium of instruction for culturally based content in these schools. So they're bringing it all together in, in these formal spaces only because that's where time is allotted, funding is allotted, the work can be supported, you know, today, because it has to be connected to funding.
But you know what happens in those schools is hoping that because that language becomes a language of the school, then it will be transferred into the home and community. And in the immersion schools, that does happen to a large degree because the people who are involved in that community, those community schools are actually the parents and grandparents and it's been intergenerational. So that's how they're building capacity using the school system in order to bring it back into the community and family.
