![]() “A lot of Comanche families use this technique to try to teach their kids the language-when you have a meal, you have to ask what you want in Comanche,” he says. ![]() Tahquechi, the student who first heard the language from his grandmother, says the learning that takes place there feels natural. On Thursday evenings, students and others interested in the language gather there to practice speaking. The lab is set up like an apartment, where students converse while setting a table or relaxing in a living room. Lopez, president of Comanche Nation College, says she looks forward to the day when Comanche is spoken as freely in the halls of her college as it is in the language lab. The number of speakers shrank further when, at the turn of the 20th century, the Comanche, Apache, and Kiowa tribes lost their reservations in Oklahoma and were interspersed with non-Indians.Ĭonsuelo G. ![]() My parents didn’t want me learning the language, because they wanted me to be successful in the white man’s world.” “My father was whipped for speaking the language, but he did it secretly and was a fluent speaker. ![]() Juanita Pahdopony, dean of academic affairs at Comanche Nation, says her parents were products of the boarding schools, which existed through the 1970s. Starting in the late 19th century, they were sent to boarding schools, where they were taught to assimilate into white culture and punished for speaking Comanche. Generations of Comanche children were deprived of the chance to learn their language. Williams, interim dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Texas Tech.īut he hopes the language exposure will enhance their sense of identity and make them want to pass the language on to their children. “Pragmatically speaking, a lot of them are saying, ‘Knowing Comanche isn’t going to help me get a job,’” adds Mr. Williams, a professor of anthropology at Texas Tech who worked on the language project with its director, Todd McDaniels, an assistant professor of linguistics at Comanche Nation. “Part of the battle is getting young people to say, it’s worth my time to study Comanche,” says Jeffrey P. Recruiting students is an even bigger challenge. The language is mostly oral, so there are few textbooks or written materials to draw upon. Typically only a few advance enough to take a fourth semester. It expects to enroll about a dozen students in introductory Comanche in the fall. The college has a collaborative transfer agreement with nearby Cameron University, a four-year institution. It offers associate degrees in majors like American Indian studies, linguistics, math, and English, along with work-force certificates in fields like medical coding and billing. The curriculum covers tribal history, tradition, language, and culture. A sentence might describe a boy ducking under a fence and running across the prairie to find his older brother fishing and tell him his mother said that supper was ready.Ĭomanche Nation College, which was established in 2002 in Lawton, the capital of the Comanche Nation, has 164 students, 116 of whom are American Indian. The resulting 42 modules require students to match the audio of a sentence spoken in Comanche with a corresponding picture or photograph.įor more advanced students, the sentences became more elaborate. Department of Health and Human Services.Įach of three Comanche speakers-all women in their 60s and 70s-was handed a script in English, which she translated into spoken Comanche as the project director recorded her. The recording project was supported by $198,000 in grants from the Administration for Native Americans, a branch of the U.S. “I wanted to do something in my lifetime to keep the language alive,” he says. Tahquechi, who learned a smattering of words from his Comanche grandmother, says he loved hearing the language spoken at powwows and at church. ![]() “Every time an elder dies, one more of our speakers is gone,” says Gordon Tahquechi, a 23-year-old Comanche who took two semesters of the language at Comanche Nation, using materials gathered by the researchers. In the Ivies, Most Leaders Are Still Whiteįorum: The Campus Climate for Gay Faculty ![]()
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