Oakland: Treasure Language Storytelling
On Sunday 13 December 2015, approximately 65 people representing the Tigrigna, Iu Mien, and Chochenyo languages, plus members of the wider community, gathered at the New Parkway Theater in Oakland for an evening of “treasure language storytelling”. This page contains videos from our evening together. (NB we no longer use this interleaved translation format because it breaks up the flow of the story.)
In addition to the stories, this event included a welcome in the local Chochenyo language, an explanation of the format, and an interview with storytellers.
The show included the following elements:
Welcome on behalf of the original residents of this place
The goals of the evening – connecting us and celebrating our languages
The four agreements concerning the gathering
Language game – think of a treasured word in any language; how would you communicate it without using spoken language?
Stories in the original languages, with paragraph-by-paragraph translation into English
Proverbs in treasure languages – allowing us to hear from other languages represented in the room; plus individual words shared by children, with prizes
A word about the Aikuma Project
The language champion panel – hearing from people who have worked hard to maintain their language and pass it on
Suggestions for things to do next
Language Champion Panel
Nadia: how did you go about learning your treasure language, and what were the obstacles that you were facing?
Lai: The conversations I was having with my parents were just scraping the surface… I felt compelled a couple of years ago to have longer conversations with them. It takes passion. If you have a treasure language and you want to learn it, find an instructor, study an hour a day for a couple of weeks, a couple of months… it’ll really grow on you. I’ve been able to have those long, deep conversations, not only with my parents but in churches, or in the Mien community, I can move in rooms of hundreds of people. And because they don’t speak a whole lot of English, I feel like it’s my job to speak the treasure language, to communicate with them. Fortunately, I’ve been able to do that.
Vince: For 70 years, we didn’t have speakers. That is connected to the colonialism, racism, that happened in the Bay Area. Three waves of invasions. By the 1930’s, we had two speakers that remained in our community. They were determined to make sure that our language survived, that it persisted. They sat down with a linguist and recorded as much as they could remember. Songs, stories, as much as they could remember, so that future Ohlone people like myself, could pick up that wealth of documentation and be able to speak it again. To learn it, I had to very thoroughly and extensively go through the archives and make it into a modern language so it could be spoken again. There weren’t words for coffee shops, or refrigerators, or the Internet, so we have to fill those gaps.
The purpose is to have a living language that connects us to our home and connects us to our ancestors and connects us to our family and connects us to our land. When we speak the language I genuinely feel that we connect to all of those people before us, and it raises our self-esteem, and boosts our connection to our land, and fosters our community with each other, because we’re able to speak something which is unique to us. And so it’s a process but listening to the old songs and going through the old documentation and understanding what’s true of our language helped me be able to reconnect and share it with my community.
Tigisti: For me, I had no choice. I was 12, and 12 is an awkward age to master a language and completely lose your accent, which I tried. I didn’t belong in the African-American community. I didn’t look like anyone else either! So the only people that I related to, that I belonged with, and that I fit in with were the Eritreans. At home my mother didn’t speak English and she made sure that we didn’t speak anything else but English. All through high school, it was the same way.
It wasn’t until after high school and when I went to college that I had this revived pride in my native language. Two things made that happen. The first was that my brother was 4 years younger and was sent from Seattle to come live with me in a small college town. I noticed that he was losing the language. Just 4 years earlier, it was fine. It was almost like he was ashamed of the language. Something clicked: this is not good. Just seeing my brother ashamed of the language, it kinda woke me up, like ‘hey, I have to be this for him’. Another thing that happened, my freshman year of college I went back to Seattle for Christmas break and reconnected with some old friends. A couple of them literally arrived on the same flight to the US from Sudan. They did not speak Tigrinya. They were the same age, the came on the same flight, and they weren’t pretending that they didn’t speak Tigrinya. They really didn’t. That was another wake-up thing where I thought, ‘that could be me.’ Then I went completely the other way. I started teaching Tigrinya in the church, I would drive back to Seattle every weekend, started teaching the little kids. All of the sudden I had this desire and need to hold onto this language like it was disappearing tomorrow. That’s my experience, and I’ve been on that journey ever since.
Nadia: Do you have any insight as to what is possible as we come together across these differences?
Lai: Building relationships and connecting with people, I’ve been able to hook up with many high-quality people. Many doors are opening, I’m doing things and going places that I’ve never been before. It applies in business, in all areas of life. The one thing I don’t reveal to most people is that I used to be a stammerer, so I noticed the importance of learning language. I knew that I had to harness that power. I was battling anxiety for many years, and for the most part, it’s behind me. I’m very glad to be sitting here with you.
Vince: I think that overlapping feelings involved with a program like tonight, with languages that might be threatened, or in some cases suppressed. It shows that when we nourish and foster our languages, when we foster our languages to be things that are important, to be things that connect us to our family and and connect us to our communities connect us to our ancestors, we realize that each time we speak our languages, we realize that they are important and they are beautiful, that they contain worldviews about how our communities see the world around us. We can’t let our languages perish because each time a language stops being spoken, a worldview goes away, or goes to sleep. When that happens over and over, there are dents and bullets into the human imagination. What makes us special throughout humanity..how boring would it be if we just spoke 2-3 languages, how boring would it be if we let the worldview and philosophies embedded in our languages just go away. That would take away everything that makes humanity special. We have to foster — especially the languages that might be the most threatened — if any of these languages go away, it affects all of us just because of this collective human capacity to care for each other.
Tigisti: What I would add is that I think, in a place like this, whether you speak a native language or not, it makes you feel less alone, because those of us who are really fighting to hold onto their language — it’s a lonely place. I know a lot of people who speak and are older, they’ve always spoken the language, and there are those who don’t speak the language at all. And then there is me, who is kind of in between worlds, who speaks English which is a lot easier to go to English a lot of times, but who has to make that effort to make sure my daughter speaks the language — which she does by the way — and who has to force my husband to make sure my daughter is spoken to in Tigrinya, so it’s a daily effort, it feels like a fight sometimes. You don’t always have people telling you, you’re doing a great job. You don’t know how it’s going to pan out later. You’re just in the grind every day. I’m gonna do all I can and then just see what happens.
And then you come here and there are literally people trying to revive a language, and there are those of us who have people who speak the language all over the place but we don’t see them on a day-to-day basis. Just to know that there are people who care, who are trying, who are making a difference — it kinda makes you feel like, ok, I’m on the right path, I’m doing something right and it’s going to have its benefit down the line. And for me, it certainly has. I have a lot of pride that I can translate for the elderly, that I can do my videos for Tigrinya speakers. For my daughter, I’m going to make sure that she speaks it and that she has the support of like-minded people who are going to cheer her on down the line. It really is very special to be here.
The Details
Where: New Parkway Theater, Oakland, California
When: 13 December, 2015
Format: Freestanding event
Storytellers: Vince Medina (Chochenyo), Leiz Yauz-Cing and Lai Saephan (Iu Mien), Teklemariam Tekeste Kahsu, Memhr Le’ake Ocbai, Tigisti Weldeab, and Ephrem Naizghi (Tigrigna).
Production: Nadia Chaney, Steven Bird, Robyn Perry
Sponsorship: Kumu, UC Berkeley Linguistics Department, The Language Conservancy
Photography: Hannah Sande, Andrew Cheng, Steven Bird
Program: pdf