8. Much is made of the fact that, rather than greet the Nishiyuu at the end of their heroic march, Prime Minister Harper chose to fly to Toronto to welcome the arrival of two giant pandas on loan from China instead.
9. In April 2016, the Northern Ontario First Nation of Attawapiskat declared a state of emergency when 11 members attempted suicide in a single day, in a community of 2,000. Suicide rates among Canada’s First Nations youth are staggering: twenty-one times higher than the national rate for females and ten times for males. In the United States, the rate is at least three times the national average overall and up to ten times within some nations. According to the Washington Post, Native youth also suffer twice the rate of abuse and neglect as any other race and are twice as likely to die before the age of twenty-four.
17
The Mother Tongue
A LONG WHITE SCHOOLHOUSE STANDS AT THE FAR END OF A WOODSY road. Parking in its gravel lot, I follow the trail of painted rocks to the door. Several dozen students are seated on benches lining the hallway, yet they do not make a sound. They peer up at me, wordlessly. Many of the boys have shaved their heads in the traditional fashion. Realizing I have interrupted something, I apologize and duck inside the nearest room. It turns out to be the administrative office. A woman wearing a St. Lawrence University shirt stands to greet me. Her name is Okiokwinon. Though she is—at age twenty-two—essentially the principal, her title is “office manager” to emphasize the fact that parents collectively run their school. With a Dunkin’ Donuts iced mocha in one hand and a cell phone in the other, she joins me beneath a poster that says LET’S NOT LOSE IT: LET’S SPEAK MOHAWK. Her glossy brown hair hangs in a ponytail; multiple rings dangle from her lobes. Her energy is ebullient.
As we talk, parents bearing tribal tattoos drop in, their children peeking behind them. Several of the fathers wear the same hairstyle as their sons. Okiokwinon addresses the children in Mohawk and the parents in English because, while the children are fluent in both, most parents speak only the latter. That’s why they’ve enrolled their kids here: to keep the mother tongue alive.
The Akwesasne Freedom School is the phoenix that flourished from the ashes of the 1979 standoff at the Thompson homestead on Raquette Point. During that armed confrontation, traditionally minded parents decided they could no longer send their kids to local public schools. (The latest indignity: a school pageant in which Mohawk children were dressed up like Christopher Columbus and George Washington and instructed to dance about, celebrating America’s discovery.) They devised a holistic educational system that promoted indigenous ways of being and built a schoolhouse shaped like a traditional longhouse. The total Mohawk immersion program now serves pre-kindergarten through eighth grade.
Every day, the Freedom School opens and closes with the Ohen:ton Karihwatehkwen, with students taking turns expressing gratitude to the life forces that construct the universe. (This was the ritual I interrupted with my arrival.) They then move through courses in science, social studies, history, reading, art, and math interpreted through a traditional Mohawk lens. In social studies, they learn about the clan mothers instead of the Founding Fathers and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy instead of Congress. In science, they study the growth cycles of medicines and how and when to harvest. They walk down to the river to try out ancestral methods of fishing, to the forest to tap maple trees, to the community garden to tend vegetables, to the orchards to press cider. They descend upon the longhouse to usher in each new season with ceremony. Every activity is intended to empower them to be the best possible leaders seven generations into the future. Only in their final two years do teachers incorporate English into their curriculum, to prepare their transition into public high school.
“We have given others ideas on how to turn their culture into curriculum too,” Okiokwinon says, stirring the last of her mocha. “Cherokees took our idea. The Maori came here and hung out for a month. Now they have two schools like ours.”
After the schoolhouse empties, Okiokwinon offers a tour. Fifty-three students have registered for classes this year, she says, and the hall’s walls showcase their artwork and murals. Seedlings grow by the windows. Tobacco dries in the sills. The brightly painted classrooms display educational posters that, upon closer inspection, show signs of alteration.
“Whatever teachers buy at Office Max, they cover up the English and add in the Mohawk,” she says. “Any book we have must be translated, too. We have an adult language program, and their final project is to translate an entire book so we can use it.”
The last room is an industrial-size kitchen where parents take turns cooking stews and porridges each day. Meals eat up the bulk of student tuition, which is $500 plus a quilt each year. I actually caught the final bidding war of the school’s annual quilt auction a few months ago. The last quilt was extraordinary: a swirl of turquoise stars shooting out of golden arrows alongside bursts of drifting feathers. As I debated whether or not I could part with, say, $350, the woman behind me opened with a bid of $1,000. Someone countered with $1,250, and in less than a minute the bid reached $5,000. Then a girl who couldn’t have been over eighteen hollered the figure no one could beat: $6,500. What had originally sounded as quaint as a bake sale raked in almost $40,000 in under an hour. Yet despite the generosity of parents and supporters, the Freedom School struggles financially, as it refuses federal and state aid. Teachers earn just $18,000 a year here, Okiokwinon says.
She shows me the outside garden that yields sunflowers and tomatoes each summer. Farther away are a performance stage and a playground. As we stroll about the wooded area, I ask about her own tenure here. She enrolled in 1994, when she was four. Tension over gambling still lingered. “Some teachers wouldn’t talk to each other. Parents, too. It was hostile to be in school,” she says. “But it wasn’t until I started asking questions when I was in sixth grade that I started to understand why. I wanted to go to someone’s house for a birthday party and my mom said I wasn’t allowed because it was at Snye. My parents were antis, they were traditionalists, and you could see a lot of Warrior flags hanging out of my friend’s house.”
Her older siblings eventually dropped out of Freedom School, but Okiokwinon continued on through eighth grade. She is now the only fluent Mohawk speaker in her family, as well as the most knowledgeable about tradition. Adjusting to English-only high school in nearby Fort Covington proved more annoying than challenging. “I walked into my first class and was like, what the fuck? I hadn’t had any white friends before then. But it was pretty easy to make friends because I played on a lot of different sports teams.”
After graduating from eighth grade in a class of six, she was unaccustomed to the number of students at the high school, but at least Mohawks constituted the bulk of the body. When she enrolled at SLU four years later, she had to contend with being one of only thirteen Native students on the entire campus.
“The second week of class, this [white] girl asked me how I got out. She was like, ‘Isn’t there a wall at the reservation?’ I told her I dug a hole for two weeks before I escaped, and it was really hard because I had to wake up at 1 A.M. and dig a hole underground and all I had was a spoon. She was so shocked. Finally, I said, ‘I drove out, just like you did.’”
Even worse was the night some club threw a “Cowboy and Indian”–themed party and drunken students milled about wearing war paint and feathered headdresses. Yet Okiokwinon managed to devote herself to studying and graduated last year. Law school is next on her list, as she hopes to practice treaty law someday. Until then, she plans to work where she found her Native consciousness.
“I always had it in mind that I would come back here as a teacher,” she says, picking up a maple leaf and twirling it in her palm. “This is my home; I grew up in these classrooms. I figured out who I was as a Mohawk woman.”
ALTHOUGH 187 NATIVE LANGUAGES are currently spoken in the United States and Canada, scholars estimate that children are learning only about 20 percent of them. Without serious inter
vention, many will go extinct within the next few decades. At Akwesasne, only about 1,000 people fluidly converse in Mohawk, along with 2,000 more in Kahnawake and beyond. The majority are elderly.
Multiple forces propelled Mohawk’s decline. First was the century of compulsory enrollment at Indian Residential Schools, where staff literally beat the language out of children with whips and clappers, food deprivation and chores, and other humiliations. Many survivors opted not to pass on the tongue that caused them misery. The opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway and the influx of companies like GM to the region in the 1950s further prioritized English. Parents taught their children accordingly. Public school and Hollywood, CNN and MTV, Grand Theft Auto and reality TV have provided the latest fusillade of distraction.
Any new language is difficult to learn post-childhood, but Mohawk is notoriously intricate. Carole Ross, one of Akwesasne’s most reputed teachers, told me, “You must reconfigure your mind to speak Mohawk.” It has only 11 letters—A, E, H, I, K, N, O, R, S, T, W—but they emit 400 distinct sounds. (English, by comparison, has only 44, despite containing twice as many letters.) Moreover, Mohawk words tend to be phrases that are at least 15 letters long1 and are peppered with diacritic apostrophes, colons, and accent marks, making it daunting to pronounce. And there isn’t just one Mohawk language but three: one for everyday life, one for formal occasions, and a sacred one for ceremonies.
Yet its rewards are immense. For starters, the language is fantastically descriptive. Rather than assign a single noun to an object, Mohawk conjures an image of it. Refrigerator is “that which makes things cold,” while rabbit is “that with two ears side by side.” The names of the months predict what will happen within them: April is “when the leaves start growing,” June is “that time when berries start to ripen,” and December is “when the cold sets in.” It is also a precise language, with ninety different words to pinpoint familial relationships and twenty-six for baskets. Mohawks contend that their language is much funnier than English. Stories seem fuller somehow, more vivid and true. Language is also the touchstone of their culture, the primer on ways of being. Its very structure implies respect for the winds and for the rains. Matrilineal heritage is emphasized, as is agricultural tradition. And because so many words place objects in relation to the self—chair, for instance, is “the place where you put your thighs on”—Mohawk reinforces a sense of interconnectedness.
The Akwesasne Freedom School is one of several tribal initiatives to preserve their language, and the most rigorous for children. For adults, the tribal governments on both sides of the river sponsor free language classes for public employees. Kahnawake is even more aggressive about reviving Mohawk: in 2006, its council hired Rosetta Stone to develop software for the language and then invested in thousands of CD-ROMs for community members. Classes have been compulsory for public employees there ever since.
One afternoon, I visit the adult school on Cornwall Island. The instructor is Dorothy Lazore, a lovely woman in her mid-sixties wearing a snakeskin-patterned jacket and a long floral skirt. Over lunch, she tells me that her grandmother attended an Indian Residential School but never disclosed it to her children. Dorothy only recently found out when she turned the page of a book she was reading about the school system and saw a photo of her grandmother there. Fortunately, that was not the end of their linguistic lineage. Dorothy grew up speaking Mohawk and upholding all of its traditions except the Longhouse. “That was considered taboo when I was younger,” she explains, adding that the Catholic church in St. Regis used to warn parishioners that Longhouse ceremonies were a form of devil worship. Only later in life did Dorothy begin exploring traditional spirituality.
Dorothy started teaching Mohawk when she was twenty-four years old. There were no educational aids back then. For her first job, she had to write her own textbook. “I didn’t even know how to write Mohawk; my mom had to teach me. I searched for books and found a Mohawk dictionary and then I got a French language book and followed the pattern.”
She has since developed a curriculum that she’s taught at Akwesasne and Kahnawake and presented at conferences around the world. She’s also helped Native Hawaiians develop their own pedagogy. “Our Native people have always had to own up to other people’s standards,” she says, spooning a bite of spaghetti. “We had to live up to Catholic standards. We had to live up to someone else’s education system, someone else’s health system, even someone else’s government system. Even the language isn’t our own standard. We are not living our natural life through our own language. It’s a wonder that we survived as a people.”
Back at the school, I join Dorothy at a table that is shaped like a horseshoe and surrounded by white boards, language charts, and a flat-screen TV. Five energized older women file in, along with a younger woman who seems shy. They launch into a discussion that sounds serious with its mile-long words and ethereal inflections. After a while, Dorothy leans over to whisper-translate: “They are talking about last night. This woman says she made a pot roast with carrots, and that one said she watched the Big Bang Theory until she fell asleep.”
When the lesson begins, she hands me a workbook so I can follow along. I thumb through pages of sentences like “The bear is over there at the back of an airplane” and “I see two yellow birds flying and I see four white canoes.” Accompanying illustrations include a decapitated moose (ska’nionhsa, or “he that has a big nose”) alongside a slab of steak and a bloodied knife.
Class concludes with the women taking turns reading aloud the essays they wrote the night before. The youngest one wrestles with every word. At one point, she grows so frustrated, her entire face flushes. The older woman seated beside her lays a hand on her shoulder. “It will come back to you,” she promises. “Just keep on going.”
The other women nod in agreement. I glance over at Dorothy. She smiles in return, as if acknowledging that yes—there will, in fact, come a point when her students find their ancestral rhythms and it will be like they’ve known Mohawk all along. Because, in a way, they have.
I WOULD LIKE TO THINK Spanish is buried inside me too, but I’ve had a hell of a time extracting it, despite twenty years of trying. Like many Mohawks, I can also pinpoint where it died in my lineage: the South Texas public education system of the 1950s. One story I have been telling audiences for years is how my mom got pulled out of her chair one day and marched to the front of her elementary school classroom. Her crime: speaking Spanish. Her punishment: a bar of soap, which the teacher shoved into her mouth.
I couldn’t visualize this more clearly if I’d witnessed it myself. I can practically smell the lye in the soap. Yet I just recently asked Mom for more details, and she has no recollection of it ever happening to her. I insist that she told me once, but she does not remember that, either. How, then, did I acquire so much rage about it? Is it a case of memory repression, memory inheritance, or memory invention? I do not know. Yet every time I have shared this story with Tejanos, at least one elder has nodded and said her mouth was publicly washed out, too.
And that wasn’t the only humiliation they endured. In the town of Driscoll in 1956, a second grader who spoke only English got placed in a Spanish-speaking class because their skin tone matched her own. When her parents complained, they were shunted aside. Although the Supreme Court had outlawed segregation, Texas schools still found ways to divide the races. The 2013 documentary Stolen Education depicts how Tejanos were forced to repeat first grade three times2 because administrators did not want the “retardation of Latin children” to hinder the education of white children. Many Tejanos didn’t graduate until well into their twenties (if at all). And so, the girl’s parents rallied families together and—with the help of the American G.I. Forum—filed a class-action lawsuit against the school district. During the federal proceedings, eight children testified against their teachers at the witness stand. Incredibly, they won the battle.
I can’t say they won the war, though, because three decades later I too wound up
in a predominantly Spanish-speaking class in South Texas, despite knowing hardly a word. I’ve written reams about this before, but here are the pertinent details. One morning, our teacher announced that our class was too large and needed to be split in two. All the brown kids got sent to one side of the room while all the white kids went to the other. When asked if I was Hispanic or white, I froze. Mom was Mexican; Dad was white. What did that make me? Since most of my friends were in the brown group, I ran to their side. That felt right until the new teacher asked us to read aloud. Hearing my classmates stumble with their English was worrisome. If I stay with them, I will fall behind. Afterward, I begged the teacher to put me in the white class. She agreed.
That was the first time I crossed my inner borderline. It changed the way I moved in the world. Prior to that experience, all my friends had long silky hair and melodic names and invited me to homes brimming with brothers and cousins and parakeets and mothers stirring habichuelas on the stove. After that experience, my friends’ houses smelled like Lemon Pledge and their mothers zapped everything we ate in the microwave—hot dog, bun, and all. For years, no Mexican ever asked why I acted white, and no one white ever questioned if I was Mexican. My senior year of high school, however, a guidance counselor urged me to claim a Hispanic “H” on my transcripts to better position myself for scholarships. Though this felt dishonest—I’d been checking the “W” box for White for years—I did as she suggested and was shocked by the results: a college education, free of charge. I enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin in a state of elation—until I started meeting other scholarship recipients. Some were the children of farmworkers. Some had been involved in a gang or barely escaped its violence. Many sent portions of their scholarship checks to families back home.
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