Story originally printed in the La Crosse Tribune or online at www.lacrossetribune.com
Published - Tuesday, September 23, 2008
State DPI chief seeks public funds to pay for Indian language teachers
MADISON — When teachers of the state’s native languages want a children’s book, some of them end up pasting a translation over the words of a book in English.
Now Wisconsin’s top schools official wants to give them help developing materials and even hiring staff by reviving a long-standing but now ended state program for American Indian languages.
The proposal by state schools Superintendent Libby Burmaster comes at a critical time. Native languages have come to the edge of extinction here, but a handful of tribal pioneers are also having their first success in teaching the languages to children in more than a generation. Speaking after her annual State of Education address last week, Burmaster said the initiative also could help boost the lagging academic achievement of tribal students by strengthening their connection to their schools.
“Every child really wants to know where they came from and what’s the history of their parents and their grandparents and their community, and so I think it does contribute to the growth of the child and that will foster their ability to achieve,” Burmaster said of tribal language programs.
In June, the Wisconsin State Journal reported that only about one-half of 1 percent of state tribal members are native speakers of the state’s Indian languages — a finding that Burmaster’s Department of Public Instruction cited in the proposal. The agency’s budget request was made to Gov. Jim Doyle last week and still needs to be approved by both Doyle and the Legislature.
Burmaster’s proposal would set aside $260,000 a year to help tribes and the state work with public schools or universities to develop language teaching materials or hire teachers. The money, which would be given in grants ranging from $10,000 to $50,000, would come from tribal gambling revenues paid to the state, including money to be paid to the state under the terms of a compact with the Ho-Chunk Nation announced last week.
The agency found that, of the state’s 426 school districts, only 10 offer classes in a tribal language, and only one truly immerses Indian students in their traditional language.
Keller Paap is a first- and second-grade teacher at “Waadookodaading,” the Hayward charter school that teaches preschool and elementary students every subject except English in the Ojibwe, or Chippewa, language. Paap’s school, funded by private and federal grants and tribal money, has to create often hard-to-find Ojibwe teaching materials on a small budget and has translated English children’s books to make do.
This year the school added a fourth grade — a state grant might help the school reach its next goal of expanding to include the fifth grade, Paap said.
“Boy, there’s a lot we could do with that,” Paap said of the grants. “We’ve got a long way to go.“
Both Doyle, a Democrat, and retiring Rep. Terry Musser, R-Black River Falls, the Legislature’s point man on tribal affairs, have said they support some kind of state help to preserve native languages because they’re part of the state’s shared history and culture.
But Mike Mikalsen, an aide to Rep. Steve Nass, R-Whitewater, said the money paid by the tribes to the state should go to general-interest state programs, not tribal-specific ones.
“If it’s a priority for the 11 tribes of this state, Rep. Nass believes they should step forward and finance that with their own money,” Mikalsen said of the language programs. “The gaming compact moneys are meant to be spent on the citizens of Wisconsin.“
Most of the tribal language programs are paid for by the tribes or private grants, along with some federal money. But the State Journal found that wealthy tribes with successful casinos could afford as many as 30 or more language workers, while poorer tribes couldn’t always afford even a single language worker.
Reviving the state language program has wide support among state tribes, including the Menominee, whose chairwoman Lisa Waukau wrote to Doyle in June in support of reviving a state native languages program.
Richard Mann, who oversees the Ho-Chunk tribe’s language program, gave a sad reminder Friday of why support for language programs matters — the death last week of an elderly native speaker of Ho-Chunk. The tribe has the largest such language program in the state and several times more native speakers — around 200 — than any tribe, but still only about 3 percent of Ho-Chunk members grew up speaking their language at home.
“Every time we lose a speaker, you know, it’s one person fewer. It’s an urgent thing that we do something while we can,” Mann said.
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