Making their language sing Kym Gouchie gets grandmother's help to save an endangered tongue through song CATHRYN ATKINSON
Special to The Globe and Mail October 14, 2008 http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20081014.BCLANGUAGE14/TPStory/TPNational/BritishColumbia/ A native singer-songwriter hopes a grant from the Canada Council will help three generations of her family make beautiful music together, and at the same time save their critically endangered indigenous language. Kym Gouchie received $8,000 from the council to write and record songs in the Lheidli dialect, a branch of the Carrier language group of northern British Columbia. Only three elders of the Lheidli T'enneh people still speak the language fluently, including Ms. Gouchie's 87-year-old grandmother, Mary Gouchie. Kym Gouchie, 43, who is also of Cree and Shushwap ancestry, became reacquainted with her Carrier heritage a decade ago, years after marrying away from her Prince George-based community. "I want my own granddaughter to learn the language. It's about immersion. ... This project is bringing me home," said Ms. Gouchie, who now lives in Penticton. "I wanted to document and gather information about my Lheidli lineage through my grandmother, who is my only living grandmother, and it all fell into place." She said her grandmother and 67-year-old aunt, Jeannette Kozak, would provide what she didn't have in terms of linguistic accuracy, as well as regional stories and traditions that could be translated into song. She called them her co-lyricists. A performer with the drumming and a cappella group Iskwew, Ms. Gouchie already sings and writes in Cree and other native languages. The songs that come from the year-long project will eventually appear on a Lheidli-only album. "Lheidli is very phonetic. There are glottal [stops] that emphasize letters in a word, and you can pretty much read it the way it is written if you've mastered that alphabet, whereas Cree is much harder to read," she said. Ms. Gouchie said she hopes her aunt and grandmother will help her "create songs as true to Lheidli as possible." "I come from a long line of musicians. My late father is a musician and I think his passing encouraged me to dig deeper into our roots and that took me to his mother. He's no longer here to tell me the stories, and had lost much of what he knew about the language when he was put in a residential school," she said. "I've had to do my own detective work for this project and I like to think of myself as a cycle breaker, to change things in my lifetime." Mary Gouchie, now a great-great-grandmother, said she is "so proud" of her granddaughter's initiative and has been helping her with the intricacies of Lheidli. "It is so important to me that our language is carried down to future generations. I've heard some of Kym's songs in our dialect and I'm so pleased she is catching on so well," her grandmother said. Ms. Kozak said the now-discredited residential-school system, which discouraged native children from speaking their languages for many decades, is to blame for the possible loss of Lheidli. "I spoke only Lheidli until I was six years old and then I was sent away. I was one of the unfortunate people who had to go to residential school, and we lost it all through that. We couldn't speak it there." In recent years, Ms. Kozak studied Lheidli and now teaches it to school-age children on a part-time basis. She said she felt the language would adapt well to modern usage if she had a greater chance to teach it, and lamented that funding was sporadic. "If they would only give me a chance to go in there and teach more, I really want that, but every time the money runs out our class stops," she said. She is very excited to be a part of the project and hopes to be able to sing when the songs are recorded. "We'll write as many as we can. I feel now that maybe it will be appreciated," she said. "I don't want the language to be lost." In October, 2007, the National Geographic Society named B.C. a world hot spot in terms of the risk of language extinction, with many aboriginal dialects classed as endangered or moribund, meaning that most fluent speakers were over 60. Tracey Herbert, executive director of the First Peoples' Heritage, Language and Culture Council, said 40 languages and more than 70 dialects were once indigenous to British Columbia. Eight are now extinct, and all of the remaining 32 are in trouble, she said. The high number of languages came from B.C.'s geography, Ms. Herbert added, with dialects evolving in remote communities. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------------------ Native News North List info{all lists}: http://nativenewsonline.org/natnews.htm Yahoo! 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