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- Volume 9, Issue 1, 2019
Book 2.0 - Volume 9, Issue 1-2, 2019
Volume 9, Issue 1-2, 2019
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Opportunities and challenges in preserving and revitalizing the Tibetan oral literature Shépa in Chone
By Bendi TsoThis article explores the ongoing Shépa preservation and revitalization in Chone County of Kanlho Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, China. Shépa is an expansive collection of Tibetan cultural wisdom composed as oral poetry and performed in antiphonal style in Chone. It captures the most salient aspects of Chone Tibetan cultural identity and linguistic practices. Yet, along with the erosion of the Chone Tibetan language, the inter-generational transmission of Shépa has been seriously interrupted. Given this picture, since 2016, various efforts have been made by the stakeholders (local community members, Shépa narrators, language and cultural activists, and Chone County Government) to preserve and revitalize Shépa. These efforts include but are not limited to the transcription and teaching of Shépa through Chinese, the establishment of Chone Shépa Cultural Association in 2017, the government-funded Shépa performance both within and outside Chone County and so forth.
Through using qualitative research methods, including participant observation and semi-structured interviews with all stakeholders, this article first documents the processes of how Chone Tibetans reclaim and revitalize their oral tradition, Shépa. It also examines the tensions derived from the processes and explores how local communities negotiate and manage these challenges. The research results will contribute to the conversation on the importance and complexities of oral tradition preservation in Indigenous communities in Tibet and beyond.
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Sustaining Sherpa language and culture in New York
More LessSherpas moved from their original homeland in Solukhumbu district of Nepal to adjacent mountain districts and later to urban centres such as Kathmandu and Darjeeling over several generations. By the end of the twentieth century, many had also moved permanently to North American and European countries. Now, after Kathmandu in Nepal, the largest concentration of Sherpas can be found in Queens, New York, and the surrounding boroughs. The case of New York Sherpas is unique because for the first time in history, thousands of Sherpas from different parts of the Himalayas are living together and sharing a new home. Earlier, these Sherpas were separated for generations by geographic obstacles, great distances and international boundaries. Although the process of adapting to a new sociocultural environment is not novel, this article argues that the kinds of challenges and opportunities that New York has presented for the Sherpas are different from their experience elsewhere.
Sherpas are acutely aware of the risk of losing their language and culture in their new homes in the United States, especially when it comes to transmitting cultural knowledge to the next generation. Many are therefore actively involved in the preservation of their language and culture through community mobilization in the form of kyidugs.1 Based in different cities across the United States, Sherpa kyidugs uniformly emphasize the significance of promoting their language and culture within the community. A shared place of worship and gathering is key to Sherpas’ efforts to preserve and practice their culture, and so the kyidugs recognize the need for a community building, where they can gather to perform religious rituals and festivals, offer language classes or simply gather.
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Ni kaakiihtwaamaan itootamihk waapamishoon aan mii wiichaytoowuk: I am practice reflected in relationships
More LessMichif-Métis denotes a way of life that is bound to specific political, historical, cultural and linguistic ethos, with specific ties to complex kinship systems with humans, earth and cosmological beings. As a Michif woman, growing up away from my relatives and land in Manitoba, I had always felt that the tether that connects my spiritual being to my ancestors was frayed because I did not grow up in a close-knit Michif community. I realized that it is not necessarily where you are that matters, but it is about how we are practising the relationships in the places we find ourselves. Through an animate and kinetic journey expressed by layering text and photos, this article is an attempt to peel back the layers and reveal some of the nuances and con/textualizations of being and becoming Michif. I explore my own expressions and practices of my self-understandings through my interactions within places in and near Mohkinstsis, Calgary, that allow me to express and affirm ni kaakiihtwaamaan itootamihk waapamishoon aan mii wiichaytoowuk – ‘I am practice reflected in relationships’.
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Stories with deep roots: Cultivating community–university relationships to facilitate the creation of Gwa’sala-’Nakwaxda’xw children’s stories
Authors: Lucy Hemphill and Daisy RosenblumBak'wamk'ala is a language spoken on north-eastern Vancouver Island and on the islands and along coastal waterways nearby. One of the joys of life in these territories is the abundance of delicious berries that ripen throughout the summer: ťsagał (‘thimbleberries’), k'amdzakw (‘salmonberries’), gwadam (‘huckleberries’), ʼnak'wał (‘salalberries’) and more. Kwakwaka'wakw culture includes a long tradition of knowledge and technologies related to berry-picking: special baskets, protocols for picking, songs and stories. Children accompany their parents while berry-picking as babies in carriers and gradually walking alongside with their own small baskets; for this reason, berry-picking is an especially suitable topic for a children’s book seeking to highlight and foreground Kwakwaka'wakw culture for Kwakwaka'wakw children (and others). We share here the text of a children’s book about picking thimbleberries by Lucy Hemphill (Gwa’sala-’Nakwaxda’xw), and a reflection written by Ms Hemphill and Daisy Rosenblum, a professor in the First Nations and Endangered Languages Program at the University of British Columbia, which describes the iterative process of including Bak'wamk'ala in the English version of the story, and planning for the Bak'wamk'ala language version of the book. Through our reflection, we discuss the choice of the story’s theme, the value of written resources created for languages with previously oral traditions and the challenges inherent in such processes of creation.
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Linguistically and culturally relevant education on the roof of the world: The collaborative creation of a Ladakhi storybook
By Patrick DowdThis article describes the creation of a culturally and linguistically relevant storybook written for 10–12-year-old children in the Ladakh, a high-altitude region of the Indian Himalayas. Formerly a part of the Tibetan Empire, Ladakh came under Indian rule in the mid-nineteenth century but maintained strong autonomy and close ties with its neighbour to the north until China closed the Ladakh-Tibet border in the late 1950s. In the 1970s the Indian government opened the Ladakh to tourism which resulted in rapid change, transforming the preindustrial, largely agrarian society into one heavily dependent on tourism. In a region where the total population is less than 275,000, in 2016 alone nearly 240,000 tourists visited Ladakh, almost 200,000 of whom were Indian. Language shift from Ladakhi to Hindi and English, as well as a profound sense of cultural alienation, are among the unintended consequences of the tourist industry and thorough incorporation of Ladakh into the Indian market economy.
Having interviewed numerous teachers, principals, and education activists in the summer of 2016, they nearly unanimously argued that the lack of culturally relevant, Ladakhi-centric material was a major reason young Ladakhis failed to learn their language well and the cultural values embedded within it. I returned to Ladakh in August 2017 to work with a team of local Ladakhi university students, writers and illustrators to produce a children’s storybook rooted in the people, landscape, language and culture of Ladakh. 1,000 copies were printed in February 2018 and are currently being distributed in Ladakh by the Himalayan Cultural Heritage Foundation. The article describes the collaborative research, writing and illustration that produced the book, as well as how we navigated the delicate balance of honouring colloquial Ladakhi while still respecting the grammar and spelling of the literary Tibetan language on which it is based.
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The role of libraries in Indigenous language revitalization: A te reo Māori perspective
More LessTe reo Māori (Māori language) is the Indigenous and an official language of New Zealand. As such it is unique and considered a taonga (treasure) by Māori. It is the language that describes the land and its geographic features, acknowledges the feats of ancestors and is at the core of mātauranga Māori (‘Māori knowledge systems’). Although it is not as endangered as other Indigenous languages, te reo Māori continues to struggle for survival due to low levels of fluent speakers. The purpose of this article is to first provide some background about why te reo Māori is considered to be under threat and describe the importance of the revitalization initiatives implemented by the New Zealand government and the Māori education sector. The main body of the article will then focus on the contribution that the New Zealand library and information sector is making to te reo Māori revitalization efforts. This will include descriptions of specific initiatives and an assessment of the impact that these are having on the revitalization process overall. The final part of the article discusses opportunities for future initiatives, and provides information about forthcoming research related to the role that libraries and other cultural institutions have in the revitalization of te reo Māori. In the years after widespread colonization started (1840 onwards), te reo Māori became a language that was repressed through the assimilationist policies and practices of successive governments (Simon 1998; Walker 2004; Winitana 2011). These practices included paying subsidies to mission schools to teach their Māori pupils in English. When Native schools were established in the 1860s, they were expected to teach a curriculum that was based on the English system of education, actively discouraging any aspect of Maori culture and including a preference for the English language. The Native Schools Code of 1880 (Appendix to the Journals of the House of Representatives 1880) further reinforced these practices. Generations of Maori pupils were forbidden from speaking their own language at school. This was reinforced through corporal punishment. Although there was a loosening of the restrictions on cultural elements from the 1930s, te reo Māori continued to be discouraged. Although te reo Māori is now recognized as an academic subject in New Zealand schools, it is not a compulsory subject, nor is it available in every school. By the 1970s, the number of native speakers of te reo Māori had declined to the point where the language was in serious danger of becoming extinct. In the 1980s, Maori-initiated language initiatives led to a range of educational and societal innovations that has helped to rebuild the strength of the language. In order for te reo Māori to survive and recover further from the decades of repression it is necessary for it to be spoken all of the time in a variety of social and educational situations. This involves moving language conversations into everyday contexts, providing opportunities for the speakers of the language (at all levels) to engage and interact with it as a normal practice. As most libraries in New Zealand (except special libraries) are public institutions that attract a high numbers of visitors, they are in a unique position to provide visible evidence of how te reo Māori can enhance and contextualize cultural experiences and understanding. Over the past 30 years, the New Zealand library and information profession have demonstrated a strong commitment to embracing and integrating Mātauranga Māori (‘Māori knowledge systems’) into their collections and services, including te reo Māori and tikanga Māori (‘Māori customary practices’). This article documents how this has been achieved. It will also highlight the opportunities available to continue to improve how libraries and te reo Māori initiatives engage with each other.
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Clearing space: Language reclamation, decolonization and the Internet
Authors: Kristen Tcherneshoff and Daniel Bögre UdellPerhaps the greatest misconception about cultural diversity is that the Internet has been a barrier to its sustenance by swallowing up smaller cultures in a torrent of English, Spanish and other mass media languages. However, the Internet has equipped people with the possibility of sustaining their ancestral tongues by expanding media access and creation, making it possible to use minoritized languages on a daily basis and promote them in a global context without external support. This article explores the historical relationship between language assimilation and colonization and, by extension, the central role that language reclamation plays in decolonization; and the recent groundswell of online language activism through geographically diverse case studies, including Tunica, Kernowek and Võro. This article initiates an unwritten history of language activism in the twenty-first century and demonstrates the foundation of a roadmap for leveraging the Internet in contemporary language revival.
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A succession of dialogues: François-Marie Luzel and his contribution to the Breton folk tale
More LessFrançois-Marie Luzel (1821–95) was one of the most significant French folklorists of his day and champion of Breton culture. He mainly collected folk tales in his native Lower Brittany and published prolifically, including three volumes in the monumental Contes populaires series, published by Maisonneuve and Charles Leclerc in 1887. On the one hand, Luzel was a man of his time, adopting the philosophies and approaches of his fellow folklorists and antiquarians. However, many of his methods, in particular his insistence on authenticity and fidelity to the spoken word, and his realization that traditional cultures are enriched and preserved not through cultural isolation, but by interaction with other cultures, seem out of step with the attitudes of many of his contemporaries and rather seem to anticipate twentieth-century developments in folk tale collecting practice. Furthermore, Luzel often courted controversy and regularly came into conflict with many of his colleagues in the Breton cultural and political establishment around his insistence on publishing in French and his attitude towards the literary ‘Unified Breton’ and the associated debates around what constituted an authentic Breton culture. This article will place Luzel in his historical context and explore his approach to collecting and publishing his folk tales and the controversies that he courted. It is followed by a companion piece – a new translation of one of Luzel’s tales – ‘Jannic aux deux sous’ (‘Tuppenny Jack’) – a Breton variant of ‘The Frog Prince’.
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Writing the self, decolonization and gaining through translation
By Janet HujonThe Khasis, who refer to themselves as Children of the Seven Huts, are an Indigenous ethnic group in Meghalaya (‘the abode of clouds’) in north-eastern India. As early as 1824, the Baptist mission in Serampore had translated a portion of the Bible into Khasi using the Bengali script. But Khasis found the script difficult to read and further efforts were discontinued. So, until the arrival of the Welsh Mission, when Thomas Jones transcribed the Khasi language into the Roman Script in 1841, the language remained primarily oral. While reading and writing ensured progress in literacy, the use of English as the medium of instruction and the accompanying imposition of western values had serious cultural consequences. The mother tongue was considered inferior, oral traditions that had long been channels of a unique world-view were marginalized and the old ways of thinking based on a profound respect for the natural world were gradually eroded. This was because an oral culture was considered less than one possessing the written word. But fortunately especially in the absence of written documentation, remembering, telling and sharing have always played a significant part in Khasi social life. Kynmaw is the Khasi word for remember and as Nigel Jenkins points out in his book Gwalia in Khasia, the word is ‘megalithic’ because it suggests to make or ‘mark with a stone’ (1995: 5), immediately recalling the monoliths raised to commemorate past lives. Kynmaw is also a chilling warning – ‘remember’, or else’ – and that is what this article sets out to do: to rekindle the old reverences for a language teaching us a way to be to halt the dangers of an ongoing cultural forgetting.
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Cree language use in contemporary children’s literature
Authors: Julia Schillo and Mark TurinAn increasing number of children’s books are being written, illustrated and published in Indigenous languages, responding to the urgent need for children to be exposed to their ancestral languages to further the goals of language revitalization across all ages and restore intergenerational language transmission. Such publications range in style from instructional language-learning books that feature a picture alongside associated text – helping children to learn words in a manner similar to using flashcards – to fully developed storybooks written entirely in an Indigenous language or in a bilingual format, with an Indigenous language and an official, national or colonial language sharing the same page. This article focuses on three recent books that have adopted the final approach outlined above – using English as the primary medium with Cree woven into the text throughout the book: Nimoshom and His Bus (Thomas 2017); Stolen Words (Florence 2017); and Awâsis and the World-Famous Bannock (Hunt 2019).
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Book Reviews
Authors: Tom Ue and Vayu NaiduA Bond Undone: Legends of the Condor Heroes II, Jin Yong (trans. Gigi Chang) (2019) London: MacLehose Press-Quercus Publishing Ltd, 528 pp., ISBN 978-0-85705-461-6, p/bk, £14.99
Chinatown Days, Rita Chowdhury (2018) New Delhi: Pan Macmillan Publishing India, 396 pp., ISBN 978-9-38621-523-9, h/bk, INR:599
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