Tehatiwennathe’tányons: They shine a light on the languages

The Onkwehonwe of Turtle Island, the Original Peoples of North America, have undergone immense change over the past five centuries. The one enduring element that ties our past to the present is language. But some of our languages have died. Elements of these languages have survived as word lists, recordings and geographic names but our languages are no longer the glue that holds our communities together.

Many, if not most, of our languages, are struggling to survive with a shrinking number of increasingly elderly speakers. Even the few “strong” languages on Turtle Island are in trouble, including those with thousands of speakers. Our communities are not creating new speakers and children are growing up not being able to speak their ancestral language.

Efforts to redress language loss began decades ago, focused on children in elementary schools. In recent years this has greatly expanded and now includes students in universities and community programs.

But the massive effort to teach our languages, almost without exception, has not reversed language loss in our communities. Despite an increasing number of language programs, teachers, apps and websites, our languages continue to wither. There is a lot of teaching going on and a lot of language is being learned. Students are learning conversational phrases, vocabulary, songs, speeches and expressions but they are unable to talk with one another about everyday life or about our peoples’ history, traditions, protocols or beliefs.

The problem is twofold: one has to do with the structure of Onkwehonwe languages (they are polysynthetic) and the other has to do with the method required to teach them. Single words in polysynthetic languages are composed of several different grammatical elements (morphemes) so that one word is often the equivalent of a multi-word sentence in English.
Teaching English-speaking Onkwehonwe students to speak (and understand) the language means that they must learn to assemble several morphemes correctly, in their head, to create single words that are the equivalent of English sentences.

This is what Onkwawenna Kentyohkwa (OK) began to do when it began teaching a full-time adult immersion program on the Six Nations Grand River Territory in southern Ontario in 1999.

Over the past 25 years, OK has become increasingly successful in enabling students with no prior language exposure to become highly proficient speakers of Kanyen’kéha (the “Mohawk” language). Many of our graduates are now teaching the language and creating speakers. A few are raising their children to be first-language speakers. The surge of new speakers has had a significant impact on the Six Nations community. OK graduates established an elementary school that teaches a Kanyen’kéha immersion program. Other graduates established a Kanyen’kéha-speaking longhouse where traditional ceremonies and cultural activities take place in the language. OK’s success has spread to four of our sister languages which are now being taught using our Root-Word Method (morpheme-based curriculum).

-Owennatekha (Brian Maracle), founder of Onkwawenna Kentyohkwa