Breathing New Life Into Language -- Puget Sound Tribes Try To Preserve Their Native Lushootseed Dialects

TULALIP RESERVATION - The words on the page are a combination of English letters and phonetic symbols.

The sounds from the mouth are sometimes soft, often hard - a struggle to pronounce.

Even when spoken correctly, the language is understood by only a handful of people in the world.

But two nights each week, a dozen or so students gather in a church on the Tulalip Reservation to turn the symbols, letters and sounds into comprehensible Lushootseed, the original language of Puget Sound's Native-American tribes.

Once, the subtle dialects of the Lushootseed language were spoken from Bellingham to Olympia. Today, tribal leaders estimate fewer than a dozen fluent speakers remain.

Now, there is an organized push among educators and tribal members to preserve the language - to create another generation of speakers before the last is gone.

The language - with its cadence, expressions and stories - holds the key to the cultural past of Puget Sound's native peoples, leaders say.

"The language has been sleeping for some time," says Vi Hilbert, a 77-year-old member of the Upper Skagit Tribe, who has spent decades studying, documenting and teaching the language. "But it is awakening."

The awakening extends beyond Lushootseed. On reservations across the state, schoolchildren are learning the words for animals and numbers in their local native language.

A state law passed in 1993 established course credit in public

high schools and colleges for Native-American-language classes statewide - a vehicle to restore Native languages from the Olympic Peninsula to east of the mountains.

"The climate is different," says Roberta Basch, president of the Washington State Indian Education Association. "There has never been so much support in the school systems to learn the language. The environment is right."

While advocates push to get languages into the schools, Grace Goedel teaches her adult class in a tidy room on the Tulalip Reservation west of Marysville.

Some students will receive college credit. But all are drawn to the class for its cultural value and the traditions it helps to preserve.

Goedel, 66, grew up listening to her grandmother speak the guttural language in their home near Marysville. Until she started studying English at a tribal boarding school when she was 6, Goedel had spoken only Lushootseed.

Two years ago, after years away from the reservation and the language, she decided it was time to offer a class to students who for too long had no way to learn the language.

"It was really going against my grain to hear things wrong," Goedel says.

The class started out small - mainly a few close family members. She began with a simple curriculum. Since then, she's expanded her teaching to include more written materials. Other students - some Native American, some not - have signed on.

The Northwest Indian College, a two-year program that also offers a Lushootseed grammar class on the reservation, began to give credit for the class last year.

Some of Goedel's drills are traditional: stories and songs passed down through generations. Others, incorporating the written version of the language developed in the late 1960s, apply the language to modern life.

There's a drill about paying phone, gas and car bills; the dialogue between a car salesman and a customer; the translation of Little Red Riding Hood; and the popular sniffling-sneezing-stuffy-head-so-you-can-rest-medicine commercial - in Lushootseed.

The idea is to make the language accessible and relevant.

While the written translation is difficult, students struggle most with the guttural tones and accents - pressing tongues into cheeks, speaking from the back of the throat, forcing raspy accents.

"We drink a lot of water," Goedel says.

Cherie Farris, Goedel's daughter, takes what she learns back to the third-graders she teaches at Tulalip Elementary.

Norma Joseph, who works as the health- and social-services director for the Sauk-Suiattle Tribal Council near Darrington, Snohomish County, makes the long drive twice a week in the hopes that she can one day share her knowledge with her tribe's people.

Veterinarian Doug Yearout, a white man who's been working on mastering the sounds and meanings of the language for nearly two years, views the class as a way to help restore something taken from the area's native peoples.

"Even though you're basically butchering it, there's the feeling that you can learn it," says Marcy Johnson, a student with Cherokee and Choctaw heritages. "It is a rich oral tradition, how they kept legends alive. It is the history of this area."

As tribes struggle to regain economic independence and increase Native-American identity for young people, they look to the past. Often, that past is buried in the words and expressions of the language.

The substance of the language, speakers say, reflects a sense of spirituality and involvement with nature.

"To try to find English words for the feelings in our language was a painful, painful process," Hilbert says. "This has so much feeling."

Knowledge of the language also helps tribes to uncover and document the past. The Tulalip Tribes, for example, use descriptions of fields and streams to understand how their ancestors used the land - where they hunted, fished and lived. And more people are learning to pronounce and write Native-American names.

For generations, the government discouraged use of the native language. Many young Native Americans were required to study English at boarding schools and were punished when they uttered the words they heard from family and friends.

By midcentury most had given up, and spoke only English.

"(The) government took it away; they wouldn't allow you to have it," recalls Stan Jones, chairman of the Tulalip Tribes, who years ago heard stories of his father being punished for speaking Lushootseed.

Until Hilbert joined then-doctoral student Thom Hess to create a written Lushootseed language in the late 1960s, the language was strictly oral, passed from one generation to the next by spoken word.

Later, the written language was recorded in a dictionary, based on a system of English letters and symbols - question marks without a dot below, a superscripted "w," and a backward, upside-down "e." Now, the dictionary serves as the foundation for classes like Goedel's that are attempting to make the intricate language intelligible to students who've never heard it.

Goedel, for example, uses work sheets and cartoons in Lushootseed for students to study at home.

Her efforts are one aspect of the language push on the Tulalip Reservation, where a three-member language department helps young children to learn words and stories, and consults with the tribe's cultural-preservation program.

The written tools are helping efforts on other reservations. The Puyallup and Muckleshoot tribes are teaching the basics of the language to adults and children, conducting research, and developing the Lushootseed curriculum.

The Wa He Lut Indian School near Olympia is teaching the basics to its students and working on a more advanced curriculum.

"The more they hear it, the more they use it," says Dr. William Stogsdill, superintendent of the school, which educates Native-American students from dozens of tribes.

The trend continues nationally. A federal act passed in 1992 encourages the preservation of the roughly 200 Native-American languages that still exist in some form.

For many, the act was a symbolic victory, a change for a government that had long discouraged or ignored Native-American languages.

But with limited funds, and the reality that English is the first language for most Native Americans, it remains to be seen how successful language-education classes can be in the long run.

"It's not easy to turn around language loss," says Leanne Hinton, a linguistics professor at the University of California at Berkeley, who has worked with several California tribes to revive nearly-extinct languages.

"The great experiment is the next step to see if language teaching can go out of the classroom and back into the home."

Students in Goedel's class say they are using common words with their children at home, hoping to instill an interest word by word.

As students sit in folding chairs, practicing pronunciation among themselves, Goedel listens carefully to each word, each sound. When a word doesn't sound right, she corrects them, repeating the word aloud herself.

"If I can teach a few people a few things, then maybe someday they can carry on the language."

---------------- LISTEN TO A TALE ---------------- To hear Grace Goedel tell a traditional tale in the Lushootseed language, call The Seattle Times InfoLine at 464-2000 from a Touch-Tone phone and then enter category TALK (8255). This is a free call within the local Seattle calling area.