Miss-Delectable
New Member
- Joined
- Apr 18, 2004
- Messages
- 17,164
- Reaction score
- 5
First Indian sign language conference in 80 years will be held in August | Indian Country Today | National & World News
Representatives from seven tribes will convene on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation Aug. 12 – 15 for the first hand talkers’ conference held since 1930.
The conference is an important part of a National Science Foundation funded project led by Dr. Jeffrey Davis of the University of Tennessee, Dr. Melanie McKay-Cody (Chickamauga Cherokee/Choctaw) of William Woods University and James Woodenlegs (Northern Cheyenne) to document hand talkers from Northern Cheyenne, Assiniboine, Sioux, Crow, and several other tribes.
The mission is to preserve Indian Sign Language through the cooperation of sign language linguists with deaf and hearing members of the North American Indian signing communities through research, video recording and a dictionary.
The conference is more than a research vehicle. The videotapes will be gifted to the communities, according to McKay-Cody, who attended the Oklahoma School for the Deaf and the University of Arizona. Tribal representatives will discuss their respective communities’ plans for their signing languages.
“We hope to find as many sign talkers as possible for this conference,” McKay-Cody said.
McKay-Cody is hoping to find more women hand talkers, as well as those who have developed personal signs for use at home or in the community. The Keresan Pueblo sign language is one example of this.
“Elders are dying and the next generation is not using the language,” McKay-Cody said. “In my study of linguistics and Indian culture I feel an obligation to preserve this language.”
In fieldwork last summer McKay-Cody and team found 25 signers at the Crow and Northern Cheyenne reservations, some as easily as by visiting the grocery store.
In 1880, Smithsonian ethnographer Garrick Mallery called American Indian Sign Language “the mother utterance of nature.” In 1930, General Hugh Scott’s preservation efforts of Plains Indian Sign Language, using much of his own money, led to the Indian Sign Language Grand Council, the largest meeting of elders and chiefs ever filmed, at the Blackfeet reservation at the present site of the Museum of the Plains Indian.
Scott died in 1934 and the films were lost in the dust of the Great Depression and the unconcern of anthropology’s mainstream until Davis, an interpreter, teacher and researcher in the field of sign language/deaf studies, was stranded overnight in the Archives during a snowstorm in the early 1990s. Members of a Ken Burns documentary crew, also stuck overnight, had noticed the films and told Davis about them.
Davis has restored these films and posted them online – Hand Talk: American Indian Sign Language – with funding from his university, the Smithsonian and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Whether officially or unofficially considered endangered, for more than 200 years, North American Indian sign language was and is still an integral part of storytelling, ceremony and history and is still used as a practicality in many communities all over Turtle Island in some form by people who cannot hear.
Indian Sign Language provides a broader cultural connection within American Indian communities, among communities and between Native and non-Native communities than what is afforded by American Sign Language.
“It permits everyone to find in nature an image to express his thoughts on the most needful matters intelligently to any other person,” wrote Mallery in his 1880 Study of Sign Language.
“Even if you are not understanding the language, sometimes you can tell it’s this beautiful voice, it’s this beautiful, beautiful signing,” stated Davis for Science Nation Magazine.
Conference details can be found at www.pislresearch.com or contact Ed Grinsell at (406) 592-3756.
Representatives from seven tribes will convene on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation Aug. 12 – 15 for the first hand talkers’ conference held since 1930.
The conference is an important part of a National Science Foundation funded project led by Dr. Jeffrey Davis of the University of Tennessee, Dr. Melanie McKay-Cody (Chickamauga Cherokee/Choctaw) of William Woods University and James Woodenlegs (Northern Cheyenne) to document hand talkers from Northern Cheyenne, Assiniboine, Sioux, Crow, and several other tribes.
The mission is to preserve Indian Sign Language through the cooperation of sign language linguists with deaf and hearing members of the North American Indian signing communities through research, video recording and a dictionary.
The conference is more than a research vehicle. The videotapes will be gifted to the communities, according to McKay-Cody, who attended the Oklahoma School for the Deaf and the University of Arizona. Tribal representatives will discuss their respective communities’ plans for their signing languages.
“We hope to find as many sign talkers as possible for this conference,” McKay-Cody said.
McKay-Cody is hoping to find more women hand talkers, as well as those who have developed personal signs for use at home or in the community. The Keresan Pueblo sign language is one example of this.
“Elders are dying and the next generation is not using the language,” McKay-Cody said. “In my study of linguistics and Indian culture I feel an obligation to preserve this language.”
In fieldwork last summer McKay-Cody and team found 25 signers at the Crow and Northern Cheyenne reservations, some as easily as by visiting the grocery store.
In 1880, Smithsonian ethnographer Garrick Mallery called American Indian Sign Language “the mother utterance of nature.” In 1930, General Hugh Scott’s preservation efforts of Plains Indian Sign Language, using much of his own money, led to the Indian Sign Language Grand Council, the largest meeting of elders and chiefs ever filmed, at the Blackfeet reservation at the present site of the Museum of the Plains Indian.
Scott died in 1934 and the films were lost in the dust of the Great Depression and the unconcern of anthropology’s mainstream until Davis, an interpreter, teacher and researcher in the field of sign language/deaf studies, was stranded overnight in the Archives during a snowstorm in the early 1990s. Members of a Ken Burns documentary crew, also stuck overnight, had noticed the films and told Davis about them.
Davis has restored these films and posted them online – Hand Talk: American Indian Sign Language – with funding from his university, the Smithsonian and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Whether officially or unofficially considered endangered, for more than 200 years, North American Indian sign language was and is still an integral part of storytelling, ceremony and history and is still used as a practicality in many communities all over Turtle Island in some form by people who cannot hear.
Indian Sign Language provides a broader cultural connection within American Indian communities, among communities and between Native and non-Native communities than what is afforded by American Sign Language.
“It permits everyone to find in nature an image to express his thoughts on the most needful matters intelligently to any other person,” wrote Mallery in his 1880 Study of Sign Language.
“Even if you are not understanding the language, sometimes you can tell it’s this beautiful voice, it’s this beautiful, beautiful signing,” stated Davis for Science Nation Magazine.
Conference details can be found at www.pislresearch.com or contact Ed Grinsell at (406) 592-3756.
Bebonang I'm sorry with you that you can't go. That has happened to me before with things and I was disappointed...I would have like to know your experience from this conference but maybe they'll have it again and you could know earlier so you could plan. I'm happy that many First Nations people want to learn and preserve the sign language. I went to the link in Indian Country Today paper and to the Hand Talk site and was really intrigued.