Image provided by: The Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs; Warm Springs, OR
About Spilyay tymoo. (Warm Springs, Or.) 1976-current | View Entire Issue (Aug. 18, 2005)
SCO OrColi E 73 .S68 v. 20 no. 17 August 16, 005 Spi lya y P.O. Box 870 Warm Springs, OR 97761 Univeriity of Oregon Library Received oni 08-26-05 Spilyay tyioo. ECRWSS Postal Patron . U.S. Postage I PRSRTSTD Warm Springs, OR 97761 50 cents Coyote News, est 1976 August 18, 2005 Vol. 30, No. 17 ivnrjc Business on reservation is challenging By Brian Mortensen Spiyay Tjmoo Over the past 12 years, 98 mem bers of the Confederated Tribes have graduated from the Oregon Native American Business and Entrepreneur ial Network (ONABEN) Starting a Successful Business course. Some of them celebrated a class reunion recently. They shared their sto ries of the trials of starting a new busi ness, and they met economic develop ment researchers who are impressed with what has happened in the area of tribal business development The reunion was held Aug. 10 at the Warm Springs Small Business Center. Twelve graduates-attended the luncheon celebration, which coincided with a visit from ONABEN executive director Tom I lansen. Also on hard were Jonathan Taylor, a research fellow with the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development and researcher with the Native Nations Institute at the Univer sity of Arizona; and Joan Timeche, assistant director of the Native Nations Institute for Leadership, Management and Policy, also of the University of Arizona in Tucson. Each of the graduates at the lun cheon had the opportunity to speak. Among the graduates was class of 2004 graduate Beverly Arthur, who operates Arthur Landscaping with her husband . Pedro. Another graduate on hand was Billy Joe Berry Speakthunder, and his wife Wanda Berry, who plan on raising organic cattle on the reservation and creating a haven for people who are returning from drug and alcohol reha bilitation. 'The Warm Springs tribes have been one of the strongest leaders in small business development," said ONABEN's Tom Hampson. "You are fortunate to have the level of tribal support that you have here." He said Onaben has been nominated by the Harvard Project for Economic Development as one of the finalists for projects that contribute to tribal eco nomic development and governance. The nomination brought Taylor and Timeche to Warm Springs for the day. "The object of the awards program is to investigate where tribes have been innovative in creating programs that are sustainable, creative, transferable and effective in solving the problems of nation building in Indian country," Tay lor said. EBUSINESS on page 9 Project seeks (AP) - Every two weeks or so the last elderly man or woman with full command of a particular language dies. At that rate, as many as 2,500 native tongues will disappear forever by 21 00. David W Lightfoot is helping spear head a government initiative to pre serve some of these dying languages, believing each is a window into the human mind diat can benefit the world at large. "If we are going to lose half the world's languages, that endangers our capacity to understand the genetic ba sis of language," said Lightfoot, who heads the directorate of Social, Behav ioral and Economic Sciences at the National Science Foundation. The foundation recendy joined the National Endowment for the Humani ties in the effort to preserve languages. The project has awarded $4.4 mil Tribes move forward with casino plan The Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs arc beginning the evaluation of how a casino at Cas cade Ixcks would impact the envi ronment. The evaluation process will result in an environmental impact state ment, or EIS. The EIS process is a large, nec essary step toward bringing the 25 acrc development site into trust. Once the land is in trust, the federal government will consider the gam Youth gather 1,200 eels at falls By Dave McMechan Spilyay Tynoo I Iigh school students this sum mer gathered hundreds of eels at Willamette Falls, a traditional eeling place of the tribes. The eels were brought to the res ervation, prepared and then cooked and eaten as part of the Huckle berry Feast. The eeling trip was the most popu lar part of the Natural Resources Summer Youth Program, a new pro gram this year (see story Mow). Eeling at Willamette Falls is im- -portant to -the tribes, said Tribal Council Chairman Ron Suppah. Young people need to learn of the tribal members' off-reservation rights in order for these rights to remain strong in the future, Suppah said. Twelve young people of the tribes made the trip to Willamette Falls. See EELING on page 9 Variety of work at Natural By Ashley Aguilat Spilyay Tymoo There was a new option this sum mer for students wishing to pursue a career in natural resources. The program is called the Natural Re sources Integrated Education Pro gram, and it is funded by the tribal Natural Resources Branch. Students in the program also col laborate closely, almost on a daily basis, with the Education and Workforce Development Depart ment. This year the Natural Resources to preserve lion to 26 institutions and 1 3 individual scholars to investigate the status of 70 languages that are believed to be en dangered and to help preserve them. The project is now asking researchers to apply for additional grants, with the expectation that at least $2 million a year will be available. Some experts say there are up to 10,000 different languages left in the world; others put the estimate thou sands lower depending on how many are characterized as dialects of another language. Languages aren't just words, linguists say, but a people's way of looking at the world. Lightfoot gives the example of Guguyimadjir, spoken by people in the Australian state of Queensland. They have no uvrds for "left" or "right" but orient themselves and their world by ing compact between the tribes and the state of Oregon. The first public meeting toward de velopment of the EIS will be from 6 to 8:30 p.m., Thursday, Sept. 1 5 at the Cascade Ixicks Marine Park Pavilion. There will be another meeting at the same location from 9:30 a.m. until noon on Saturday, Sept. 17. The meetings arc an open-house type of event, where people can com ment and ask questions about the tribes' proposal, said Ed Manion, of it 'i' if r i wsr n 1 .. '."ffvv.'.i; . v i ' - r. A, 5 .. 111. h t'i (' youth crew was different from the crews Natural Resources has had in the past. Instead of focusing on one job or one line of work, the crew experi enced some aspect of each department in the branch. Natural Resources Branch Manager Bobby Brunoe wanted to design a pro gram that would create interest in natu ral resources, and careers in natural re sources, among high school students. Brunoe then asked Joseph Sheppherd, tribal archeologist, to head the new program. Sheppherd has ex perience in development of curricula. languages in the points of the compass unlike most of us, who see things in relation to ourselves rather than to the world as a whole. People in Brazil's Amazon rain for est who speak Piratapuyo say "The cake ate John" where English speakers would say "John ate the cake" in other words, they put the object of a verb first and the subject last. Such peculiarities feed research on how the human mind works, how it perceives relations in space, how chil dren learn complex languages so quickly and easily, Lightfoot said. These types of research will be aided by one method of saving languages: by recording their speech, analyzing their grammar, and preserving them digitally. Other researchers are interested in a broader range of knowledge that is more difficult to save. To do so requires the project development team. The meetings are recorded, and made part of the EIS record. Following the meetings at Cascade Ixcks, there is an I CIS scoping meeting in Portland on Sept. 19, and one in I lood River Sept. 21. The tribes have hired the architectural, engineering and consulting firm of 1 1DR to produce the EIS. The EIS will evaluate all environ mental impacts of the tribes' develop ment proposal. An example is the im V - Photo, courtesy of Natural KesourceaSummer Youth A member of the Natural Resources Summer Youth work crew, Simeon Kalama catches an eel at Willamette Falls. The eels were placed on ice and brought to the reservation in time for the Huckleberry Harvest. Resources 1 le began working on the project in December of last year and put the pieces together to set up the program within six months. The purpose of the program is to help develop well-prepared staff in natural resources to replace those who retire in the future. It is a long term process. The program was flexible, and fo cused on three main aspects of natu ral resources work: observation, hands on participation, and discus sion. See YOUTH on page 9 danger of disappearing encouraging younger people to learn their language from their elders, pre serving not only the words themselves but unwritten traditions, arts, religion and more. For example, plants used by tradi tional healers around the world have led to the discover)' of new medicines, including aspirin. Some small and de clining tribe in Africa or in Papua New Guinea a country where there are 820 languages among fewer than 5.5 million people, by one count may know something about a plant that could help treat cancer or Alzheimer's. For decades children in American Indian schools were discouraged from speaking tribal tongues and punished when they did. That policy has long been abandoned, but generations were lost to many languages. Anthony Woodbury, who heads the pact of creating the interchange to die casino site off Interstate 84. The EIS and its recommendations will be submitted to the BI A. The pro cess is expected to take about a year, said Manion. The casino has the support of the Port and City of Cascade Locks, I lood River County, and other nearby com munities. The casino development site is zoned for industrial use. Part of the development process will involve re zoning the land for commercial use. Language experts meet with teachers By Brian Mortensen Linguists from around the nation worked with tribal language teachers during a three-day seminar at Kah-Nce-Ta, Aug. 3-5. The goal was to work toward bring ing the traditional languages of the Confederated Tribes back into the class room at Madras High School, said Valerie Switzler, of the Warm Springs Culture and Heritage Department "We have a lot of hope in the new school administration," Switzler said. "We're working toward building a cur riculum for the high school." Robert Moore, a linguist from Chicago who specializes in Kiksht, spoke with Wasco language teachers. He empha sized that the language can be taught to older students. Hank Millstein, from the University of California at Berkeley, and Tim Thornes of the University of Oregon, also worked with language teachers. As part of the retreat, Ronica Comingore, a second-grade teacher at Warm Springs Elementary School, dem onstrated how teachers make assess ments of each student's progress ac cording to the lesson plans. Nola Queahpama of Warm Springs, and George Talman, language teacher at Madras High School, spoke on class room management The language teachers were given a lesson on how to use computers to edit video language lessons. Using Apple computers, a digitally shot video is imported onto the screen, and subtitles, using the traditional lan guages, can be superimposed onto the screen to describe the action. Sound, to teach pronunciation, is not yet avail able. See LANGUAGES on page 9 linguistic faculty of the University of Texas at Austin, suggests that if the motivation is strong enough, even a virtually dead language can be revived. He points to Hebrew, a language learned for centuries only in its ancient written form. A modern version is now a vital part of life in Israel. Another example: Irish has survived with politi cal support. At a conference sponsored by the two federal agencies, the NSF described how technology helps. Scholars used to embalm a little-known language in a single book, available in a few research libraries. Now data, including the actual sounds, will be widely and cheaply avail able on the Internet, standardized so it can be compared with data on other languages. t