This created a “lost generation” that disrupted the flow of the tribe’s culture and language.Ĭomanche is a complex, relatively recent offshoot of the Shoshoni language that came about as the tribe splintered and moved south from their homelands in the Great Basin region of the United States, Williams said. Also, generations of Comanche children were sent to boarding schools where they were reprogrammed, often violently, to assimilate to white culture. Instead, they received allotments that interspersed Anglos and other non-Indians within what had been Indian Country. He attributed the language’s demise to the fact that Comanche, Kiowa and Apache tribes lost their reservations in the Oklahoma Indian Territory at the turn of the 20th century. Part of my task is to create a digital archive of what we know of Comanche, the other is to use technology and devise a way to teach college students the language.” “Of the 13,000 people on the tribe’s enrollment, we had, at last estimate, 20 to 25 speakers. “The Comanche language is nearly dead,” Williams said. The project is funded through a $215,000 competitive grant awarded to Comanche Nation College from the Administration for Native Americans, a branch of the U.S. He will work with tribe members and researchers at Comanche Nation College in Lawton, Okla., to record what’s left of the language and create a method for teaching it to students at the college. Jeff Williams, chairman of the Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work, will serve as an external evaluator for Numu Tekwapu, a project to document and revitalize the Comanche language. Newswise - This fall, a Texas Tech University professor of anthropology will begin the difficult task of collecting the remnants of the near-extinct Comanche language, then creating a way it can be taught in a university setting.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |