Event Celebrates Threatened Languages

The ¡Glob­al­querque! pre­sen­ta­tion “Hand-to-Tongue: A Cel­e­bra­tion of Threat­ened Lan­guages” fea­tures four affil­i­ated with UNM – alumni Lisa Gill and Teresa Blankmeyer Burke, grad­u­ate stu­dent Tanaya Winder and dual enroll­ment stu­dent Reed Bobroff – at 1 p.m. on Sat­ur­day, Sept. 17, in the National His­panic Cul­tural Center’s Wells Fargo theater.

“Hand-to-Tongue” presents poetry and con­ver­sa­tion about native lan­guages lost, Navajo pre­served and the inti­macy and joy of Amer­i­can Sign Lan­guage. Practicum stu­dents in the UNM signed lan­guage inter­pret­ing pro­gram will inter­pret the event.

Lisa Gill

Gill, grad­u­ate of UNM’s Mas­ter of Fine Arts in cre­ative writ­ing and found­ing artis­tic direc­tor of the Local Poets Guild, hosts the event, spon­sored by the LPG. She described the ben­e­fits of lan­guage preser­va­tion as scal­ing from the level of the indi­vid­ual to the world.

“To cel­e­brate and pre­serve threat­ened lan­guages is to respect the planet and pro­tect the full vital­ity of cul­tures,” Gill said. “We need bounty to reap the full plea­sure of shar­ing the world with others.”

“There are even stud­ies which cor­re­late lin­guis­tic diver­sity with envi­ron­men­tal diver­sity. We may need lan­guages more than we can even com­pre­hend,” she said.

Tanaya Winder

Winder is a can­di­date for UNM’s M.F.A. in cre­ative writ­ing, Depart­ment of Eng­lish Lan­guage and Lit­er­a­ture. She comes from the Duck­wa­ter Shoshone and South­ern Ute nations.

“I don’t know my lan­guage, the his­tor­i­cal tongue of my peo­ple. In this way, I know silence, the loss of words,” Winder said. “My grand­mother speaks her indige­nous lan­guage, Duck­wa­ter Shoshone. She comes from a dif­fer­ent era and expe­ri­enced board­ing school includ­ing its pos­i­tives and neg­a­tives. She did not teach her chil­dren her native lan­guage, and there’s where it started dying. It is because of this loss that I under­stand the sacred­ness of words and is per­haps at the heart of why I became a poet.”

Teresa Burke. Photo by Rhea Kennedy

Burke, grad­u­ate of UNM’s Depart­ment of Phi­los­o­phy, is the first known sign­ing deaf woman to receive a doc­tor­ate in phi­los­o­phy. She is an assis­tant pro­fes­sor of phi­los­o­phy at Gal­laudet Uni­ver­sity, the world leader in lib­eral edu­ca­tion and career devel­op­ment for deaf and hard of hear­ing students.

“The diver­sity of lan­guages is not just about dif­fer­ent sounds and move­ments – in the case of signed lan­guages – but about dif­fer­ent ways of see­ing the world. Pre­serv­ing these lan­guages is a way of ensur­ing and encour­ag­ing diver­sity of thought and cul­tural knowl­edge,” Burke said.

Signed lan­guages are endan­gered because med­ical progress is reduc­ing the num­ber of peo­ple learn­ing them. “The intended goal of this tech­nol­ogy is not to elim­i­nate signed lan­guages, but to help peo­ple acquire access to sound, or – in the case of immu­niza­tions – sim­ply to avoid suf­fer­ing. The side effect of this pri­mary goal – philoso­phers often refer to this as a dou­ble effect… – is to dec­i­mate the num­ber of signed lan­guage users around the globe, since deaf chil­dren have his­tor­i­cally been the future users and care­tak­ers of the lan­guage,” she said. “Pro­fes­sor Sher­man Wilcox of the UNM lin­guis­tics depart­ment has worked on projects to doc­u­ment these signed lan­guages in Italy, Brazil and Saudi Arabia.”

Bobroff is a Dine writer and senior at the Native Amer­i­can Com­mu­nity Acad­emy. In 2010 his team took third place at the Brave New Voices Inter­na­tional Poetry Slam, broad­cast on HBO.

For infor­ma­tion about ¡Glob­al­querque!, visit globalquerque.com and also Local Poets Guild.