Losing language, losing a people

News item from Indian Country Media Network, "Alaska Native Language Loses Last Native Speaker." "The world and the Holikachuk Athabascan language suffered a great loss with the passing of Wilson "Tiny" Deacon on March 10, 2012. He was 86."

The loss of language coincides with the loss of the soul of a people, in my opinion. We are what we think and what we think is coded through our native (and sometimes acquired) languages. When the fluency of a language is lost, the language becomes a museum piece, a dusty exhibit visited only by equally dusty scholars but is, essentially, dead -- a shell of a way of life that can no longer be described. That loss is sad. Native people have long recognized the importance of native languages and have fought to retain their language as a mark of their identity. Here in Northeast Wisconsin, the Menominee and Oneida tribes work to carry on their language through the next seven generations, as they say, though that is hard to do in an overwhelming, encroaching white culture.

Julie Raymond-Yakoubian, of the University of Alaska-Fairbanks, described Mr. Deacon: "He strongly identified his life with the traditional, now-abandoned village of Holikachuk on the Innoko River in interior Alaska, where he was born. Tiny spent many years hunting and trapping in the forests of the Innoko River region and possessed an almost unimaginable wealth of traditional knowledge about the land the its inhabitants."

As a comparison of the importance of language, I think of the changes to the Catholic Church in the 1960s brought about not only by the Second Vatican Council, but also by the change from Latin to the vernacular at Sunday Mass. Once the mystery and music of the Latin prayer were replaced by the clanging sounds of English among other languages, the Church was bound to change, because the way we described and thought about the central weekly sacrament had changed. Change the language and you change the core of people. Lose the language, and the people and all they stand for fade away into history.

I mourn the loss of Wilson "Tiny" Deacon, but also of the Holikachuk way of life that has been lost.