One Native Life Email this page Print this page Posted: July 11, 2007 by: Richard Wagamese Learning Ojibway I was 24 when the first Ojibway word rolled off my tongue. It felt all round and rolling, not like the spikey sound of English with all those hard-edged consonants. When I said it aloud, I felt like I'd really, truly spoken for the first time in my life. I was a toddler when I was removed from my family and if I spoke Ojibway at all then, it was baby talk and the language never had a chance to sit in me and grow. English became my prime language and even though I developed an ease and facility with it, there was always something lacking. It never really quite felt real, valid even. It was like a hazy memory that never quite reaches clarity and leaves you puzzled whenever it arises. When that first Ojibway word floated out from between my teeth, I understood. You see, that first word opened the door to my culture. When I spoke it, I stepped over the threshold into an entirely new way of understanding myself and my place in the world. Until then I had been almost like a guest in my own life, standing around waiting for someone or something to explain things for me. That one word made me an inhabitant. It was peendigaen. Come in. Peendigaen, spoken with an outstretched hand and a rolling of the wrist. Beckoning. Come in. Welcome. This is where you belong. I had never encountered an English word that had that resonance - one that could change things so completely. It was awkward at first. There's a softness to the language that's off-putting when you first begin to speak it. It's almost as if timelessness had a vocabulary. With each enunciation the word gained strength, clarity and I got the feeling that I was speaking a language that had existed for longer than any the world has known. This one had never been adapted to become other languages like English had evolved from Germanic tongues. Instead, the feeling of Ojibway in my throat was permanence. I

Preface Richard E. Littlebear Our Native American languages have been oral since time immemorial. Some of them have been written only in the last three centuries. We must remember this oral tradition when we teach our languages. We sometimes negate this oral tradition by blindly following the only model for language teaching we know: the way we were taught the English language with its heavy emphasis on grammar. Teaching our languages as if they had no oral tradition is one factor which contributes to the failures of our Native American language teaching programs so that we now have what amounts to a tradition of failure. Probably because of this tradition of failure, we latch onto anything that looks as though it will preserve our languages. As a result, we now have a litany of what we have viewed as the one item that will save our languages. This one item is usually quickly replaced by another. For instance, some of us said, "Let's get our languages into written form" and we did and still our Native American languages kept on dying. Then we said, "Let's make dictionaries for our languages" and we did and still the languages kept on dying. Then we said, "Let's get linguists trained in our own languages" and we did, and still the languages kept on dying. Then we said, "Let's train our own people who speak our languages to become linguists" and we did and still our languages kept on dying. Then we said, "Let's apply for a federal bilingual education grant" and we did and got a grant and still our languages kept on dying. Then we said, "Let's let the schools teach the languages" and we did, and still the languages kept on dying. Then we said, "Let's develop culturally-relevant materials" and we did and still our languages kept on dying. Then we said, "Let's use language masters to teach our languages" and we did, and still our languages kept on dying. Then we said, "Let's tape-record the elders speaking our languages" and we did and still our languages ke

Return to Teaching Indigenous Languages Home Page....Return to American Indian Education Home Page Index of Indigenous Education and Indigenous Language Web Sites You can use the "Find" option on your browser's pull down menu to search this index (Look under "Edit" for "Find") Go to Tribe/Language Index Activists Panel Summary from Stabilizing Indigenous Languages Adult Education Deborah House & Jon Reyhner Teaching & Learning with [Adult] Native Americans Handbook Affirmative Action NABE News Column The Affirmative Action and Diversity Project UC Santa Barbara Alaska Native Knowledge Network Alaska Native Language Center American Indian Education: American Indian Education Links American Indian Bilingual Education: Some History NABE News Column Changes in American Indian Education: A Historical Retrospective for Educators in the United States Selected Resources on American Indian Education American Indian Language Development Institute (AILDI) School-Community-University Collaborations Archiving Linguistic Resources Assessment Assessment Crisis: The Absence Of Assessment FOR Learning Phi Delta Kappan Article Assessment for American Indian and Alaska Native Learners ERIC Digest by Roger Bordeaux FairTest: The National Center for Fair & Open Testing Fighting the Tests: A Practical Guide to Rescuing Our Schools 2001 Phi Delta Kappa article by Alfie Kohn The Human Face of the High-Stakes Testing Story Phi Delta Kappan article Making Assessment Work for Everyone: How to Build on Student Strengths SEDL Monograph The New Mandarin Society? Testing on the Fast Track Joel Spring's commentary on national testing News From the Test Resistance Trail PDK article by Susan Ohanian Why are Stanford 9 test scores on Navajo and Hopi so low Navajo Hopi Oberserver article 9/1/99 Australia: Aboriginal Languages Web Site Australian Indigenous Language Efforts NABE News Column Bilingual Education: Bilingual Education Links Ameri

Architecture of the World Wide Web, Volume One W3C Recommendation 15 December 2004 This version: http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-webarch-20041215/ Latest version: http://www.w3.org/TR/webarch/ Previous version: http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/PR-webarch-20041105/ Editors: Ian Jacobs, W3C Norman Walsh, Sun Microsystems, Inc. Authors: See acknowledgments (§8). Please refer to the errata for this document, which may include some normative corrections. See also translations. Copyright © 2002-2004 W3C ® (MIT, ERCIM, Keio), All Rights Reserved. W3C liability, trademark, document use and software licensing rules apply. Your interactions with this site are in accordance with our public and Member privacy statements. Abstract The World Wide Web uses relatively simple technologies with sufficient scalability, efficiency and utility that they have resulted in a remarkable information space of interrelated resources, growing across languages, cultures, and media. In an effort to preserve these properties of the information space as the technologies evolve, this architecture document discusses the core design components of the Web. They are identification of resources, representation of resource state, and the protocols that support the interaction between agents and resources in the space. We relate core design components, constraints, and good practices to the principles and properties they support. Status of this document This section describes the status of this document at the time of its publication. Other documents may supersede this document. A list of current W3C publications and the latest revision of this technical report can be found in the W3C technical reports index at http://www.w3.org/TR/. This is the 15 December 2004 Recommendation of "Architecture of the World Wide Web, Volume One." This document has been reviewed by W3C Members, by software developers, and by other W3C groups and interested parties, and is endorsed by the Directo