Language has power: “Education is the means whereby a culture perpetuates itself and transfers itself to the young"

Can teaching Native languages improve graduation rates in Alaska? https://t.co/NP3TycleBe #AlaskaNative #IndigenousLanguages

— Kaleimamoowahinekapu (@candacekgalla) May 6, 2016

The University of Alaska Southeast graduated its first Alaska Native Languages and Studies majors in 2014. (Photo by Lisa Phu/KTOO)

Many of Alaska’s rural schools are not working. Low student performance and high teacher turnover are just two of more obvious indicators of problems in these mostly Native school districts. Those working in the schools say it’s time for radical changes.

Paul Berg has taught in Alaska for more than 40 years — 10 of them in villages.

“You want to see racism go to a village school,” said Berg. “You’ll see Outside, usually Anglo teachers have the best jobs, the most pay. Vast majority of administrators will be Anglo. It is not working. The statistics and the data are very clear. ”

Berg, now 70, teaches high school students during the summer and works as a cross-cultural specialist for the Goldbelt Heritage Foundation. He, among other educators meeting this month at the University of Alaska’s Natives Studies Conference, describes schools as colonial forces not that much different from the boarding schools of years ago that punished Native children for speaking their languages.

“Education is the means whereby a culture perpetuates itself and transfers itself to the young. Public education has taken this away from the Yupik, the Inupiat, the Aleut and others and given basically middle-class America to these people,” said Berg. “As to the degree that they wish that… that should be their choice but they should have the inalienable undeniable right to transfer the culture and the language to their children. It’s called the right of culture sovereignty and English-speaking nations are among the last on earth to recognize it.

Xh’unei Lance Twitchell addresses a crowd at the 2014 Alaska Federation of Natives Convention. At the event, Gov. Sean Parnell signed HB 216, a bill making Alaska’s Native languages official state languages. (Photo by Jennifer Canfield/KTOO)

“My prayer is that Tlingit is going to live forever because we want our little babies to be talking,” said Xh’unei Lance Twitchell.

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Lost Language, Brain Response #flipthescript #adoptees #NAAM2014

Adoptees' 'lost language' from infancy triggers brain response

Children don't consciously remember Chinese, but their brains still react to it, fMRI shows

By Emily Chung, CBC News Posted: Nov 17, 2014

Chinese children are lined up in Tiananmen Square in 2003 for photos with the overseas families adopting them. The children in the new study were adopted from China at an average age of 12.8 months and raised in French-speaking families. (Reuters) 

You may not recall any memories from the first year of life, but if you were exposed to a different language at the time, your brain will still respond to it at some level, a new study suggests.
Brain scans show that children adopted from China as babies into families that don't speak Chinese still unconsciously recognize Chinese sounds as language more than a decade later.
"It was amazing to see evidence that such an early experience continued to have a lasting effect," said Lara Pierce, lead author of the study published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, in an email to CBC News.

• Summary of the paper in PNAS

The adopted children, who were raised in French-speaking Quebec families, had no conscious memory of hearing Chinese.
"If you actually test these people in Chinese, they don't actually know it," said Denise Klein, a researcher at McGill University's Montreal Neurological Institute who co-authored the paper.
But their brains responded to Chinese language sounds the same way as those of bilingual children raised in Chinese-speaking families.

Children exposed to Chinese as babies display similar brain activation patterns as children with continued exposure to Chinese when hearing Chinese words, fMRI scans show. (Jen-Kai Chen/McGIll University)

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