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Watertown Public Opinion, Watertown, Oct. 27, 2015
Preserving native languages needs to be pursued
American victories in World War I and World War II were made possible in part by a handful of people who spoke languages most people never heard of let alone could speak or understand. Code talkers used Native American languages to deliver important military information. If the enemy intercepted the message, there was no way he would be able to understand it because he didn’t speak the language.
And that is just one of many reasons why it’s important to do all we can to preserve languages that are in danger of disappearing.
Illustrating that point is a documentary that chronicles efforts on reservations in North Dakota and South Dakota to save the language of the Lakota people. The program is set to premiere on public television stations nationwide in November.
The film “Rising Voices” highlights how classroom instruction and immersion preschools, dictionaries, voice recordings and animated cartoons are being used to preserve the Lakota language, which is estimated to be spoken by fewer than 6,000 people - less than 14 percent of the Lakota population in North Dakota and South Dakota - with an average age that will soon reach 70.
The film addresses what is now seen as a dark moment in federal education mandates: the assimilation policy that forced Native American children into boarding schools, where students were forced to speak English and were punished when they were caught speaking in their native tongues. The policy inherently limited or erased the Lakota fluency of some Native Americans who later were unable or refused to teach it to their children and the children of their children.
It’s hard to imagine that the U.S. government, or any government for that matter, could be so short-sighted as to not see the value of protecting and preserving the diversities of different cultures and languages. Think about what would have happened to American military efforts in both world wars if there had been no code talkers because their languages had been “assimilated” out of society. How many more American lives would have been lost without the benefit an unbreakable code? How would the absence of that code influenced the outcomes of both wars?
Languages are living links between the past and present and preserving them can open unexpected doors to reveal things we never thought possible.
For thousands of years people wondered about the strange picture drawings on ancient Egyptian temples and monuments. It was clear they were part of some written language, but over the centuries people had lost the ability to read them and understand their meaning.
In 1799, soldiers in Napoleon’s army discovered the Rosetta Stone while digging the foundations of an addition to a fort near the town of el-Rashid (Rosetta) in Egypt. A valuable key to the decipherment of hieroglyphs is the inscriptions on the Rosetta Stone. The stone contains a decree passed by a council of priests and is one of a series that affirm the royal cult of the 13-year-old Ptolemy V on the first anniversary of his coronation.
The decree is inscribed on the stone three times. Once in hieroglyphics (suitable for a priestly decree), once in demotic (the native script used for daily purposes), and once in Greek (the language of the administration). Translating the Greek helped lead to translating demotic which in turn led to translating hieroglyphics. Once that happened all the strange picture drawings on ancient Egyptian temples and monuments made sense and opened doors to the past that had been closed thousands of years ago.
The Lakota language, like other Native American languages, is part of the history and culture of this country and its people. Rather than discourage the use of those native tongues, we should encourage their preservation so the people who speak them can maintain and strengthen a historical link to their past and those who have gone before them. Besides, you never know when it might come in handy again, just like native languages did in both world wars.
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Aberdeen American News, Aberdeen, Oct. 28, 2015
Lessons can be learned from Central ’threat’
Thank heavens Aberdeen has never had to face a true threat to its school that hurts students, teachers and staff.
In this day and age - it can happen here, it does happen in places like this - it is never wrong to be prepared.
A scrawling on a girls’ bathroom wall at Central High School, which administration and police called a “vague threat,” at the least tested Aberdeen’s communication channels.
Did our community pass the test?
FAIL: In an effort to curb a weekend of rumors about a violent act that could take place at Central Tuesday or Wednesday this week, Principal Jason Uttermark addressed students Monday via the PA system.
In an effort to quash hallway gossip and fears, instead a new fuse was lit.
Students, by misunderstanding or in the storytelling, made the situation sound much more dire than it was. They told their parents, who were not pleased.
It is difficult to put ourselves in the hard-worn shoes of school administration. They are balancing education, safety and a ton of distractions. We imagine that, in an effort to downplay the rumors, it seemed just talking to kids would be enough.
But, clearly, the school needed to go right to the source.
PASS: At about 6:50 a.m. Tuesday, parents received a voice message from the SchoolMessenger notification service. In it, Uttermark described an “unsubstantiated threat” and described it as “very vague in nature.”
This was the right move to make before school started. Parents, some seemingly going mad overnight with rumors and speculation, needed to know that school administration and police were on top of the case. Hearing Uttermark’s voice was likely reassuring to some parents.
Hindsight being 20/20, this message should have been sent to parents on Monday afternoon, in place of the loudspeaker message to students.
It would have cut out the middlemen and middlewomen, gone straight to the parents and cut down on the Monday evening explosion on Facebook.
PASS: Aberdeen Police responded quickly to parental calls and concerns with a Facebook post Monday evening.
It was clear that the digital town square was populated by angry people, and police did not wait for regular business hours to lead.
FAIL: The rumors and, by extension, the worries, persisted all through Tuesday and even into Wednesday, with some students staying home from school.
There were reports of kids leaving early and of teachers locking classroom doors during school hours. These are unconfirmed stories, but they highlight the confusion and lack of message.
Clearly, community folks were not trusting of school and police reassurances.
In the event of a real emergency, that divide must be bridged.
INCOMPLETE: Wednesday, Aberdeen Police issued a $1,000 reward “to anyone providing information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person responsible for threats at Central High School.”
While some in our community saw this as a sign of failure in finding the mystery scribbler, it is too early to say what the end result will be.
To our thinking, a reward and desire for conviction in this case against a likely teenager who, 20 years ago, might have at worst been sent to detention, shows how little tolerance police have for any kind of threatening language.
If a student is identified, arrested, tried and convicted, will it really send a message to other kids not to make stupid threats? Only time will tell.
FINAL GRADE: Yet to be determined.
But we are thankful that this was only a practice test. There will certainly be some lessons learned by the end of this week.
It is our hope and prayer that those lessons will never need to be put into practice.
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The Capital Journal, Pierre, Oct. 27, 2015
History honor is well-deserved
If you were fortunate enough to be his student at South Dakota State University, and hundreds and hundreds of us were over the decades, then you knew how a good history professor could root you deeper in the place you thought you knew. He knew things about your hometown you didn’t know. He could tell you what your great-grandparents had quarreled about in any given election year. He had a slow way of talking that was mesmerizing to listen to because it worked like time travel.
So it’s fitting that the Midwestern History Association announced Tuesday that John E. Miller is the winner of its annual Frederick Jackson Turner Award for Lifetime Achievement in the field of Midwestern history. Miller is professor of history emeritus at SDSU in Brookings and is clearly one of the best historians in the state - not just currently, but for as long as we’ve been South Dakota.
He taught for 29 years at SDSU and still found time to write books on the side about things such as the history along U.S. Highway 14, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s continuing influence and, most recently, the important contributions that small-town boys from the Midwest had in shaping America.
As long as people continue to think about the Midwest, what it is and what it has contributed to the national character, scholars will continue to cite works by John E. Miller. And Tuesday’s honor? That’s worth a footnote in someone’s text someday, years and years from now.
A historian couldn’t ask for anything better.
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