Passage II

A Siletz Speaker

[1]

“Ghaa-yalh,” Bud Lane says to his young granddaughter. [A] He’s using a phrase from the language of his ancestors, words so old that they were spoken thousands of years before Europeans arrived in North America. (16) His goal is to teach her Coastal Athabaskan, a nearly extinct language spoken fluently by only a few members of the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians, given that it is the language of their ancestors.

[2]

Alfred (Bud) Lane III didn’t grow up along the coast of Oregon, which is where the Siletz Reservation is located. He was born in 1957 in Guam, where his father was stationed in the military. As a young adult, Lane moved to the land of his ancestors to learn everything he could about Siletz culture. The Confederated Tribes of the Grande Ronde created Oregon’s first language-immersion program to successfully teach the tribes’ preschoolers to speak their native language, Chinuk Wawa. (19) He learned fragments of the Coastal Athabaskan language, as in small pieces of the language, but he longed to converse in it.[B]

[3]

Lane convinced Nellie Orton, a tribal elder who knew the language well but never spoke it in public, to be his teacher. (22) He produced language CDs and created an online Coastal Athabaskan “talking dictionary,” of words that had previously existed only in the few speakers’ heads. [C]

[4]

In 2003, the tribal council asked Lane whether he were to have started language classes in the community. Still, he soon resigned from his job at the local paper mill and began teaching at the Siletz Valley Charter School. [D] With financial help from a grant awarded to the tribe in 2008, with these funds Lane organized a small staff to develop a formal language curriculum, including instructional materials accessible not only to schoolchildren but to all tribal members.

[5]

For Lane, a unique knowledge is embedded in the traditions of his forebears, including medical knowledge. Language, he believes, is the life force of a culture, a source of stories, poetry, history, and art. ‘‘Language maintains our view ofyuhl—the world,” he says.