Truemors
Photos: courtesy of Harold E. Carey Jr.
Over the past several years, one of the topics of concern for many tribal peoples in my area was a simple one. Their children could elect to learn German, French, or Spanish in school. In fact, some curricula, especially for the college-bound, demanded a language elective.
But, even though there were people who could teach the language, there was no option to learn your own tribe's language. This decision by New Mexico to adopt a Navajo-based book may lead to other efforts to include Native American languages and cultures.
Navajo wëlapènsit. Yun wëlakèxën. Ntalënixsi. (The Navajo have a good rich inheritance in their culture. This is a good road. I speak in Lenape. Note: "This is a good road" means this is a good way to go, a good decison, in one sense. But the exact phrase "good road" has greater implications within a traditional world.)
In the Navajo language, there's no one word that translates into "go" — it's more like a sentence.
"There are so many ways of 'going,'" said Evangeline Parsons Yazzie, a Navajo professor at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. "It states who is going, how many of us are going, where are we going. So the tense, the adverb, the subject, the number of people, all of that is tied up in one little tiny verb."
Those verbs are part of what makes the Navajo language one of the most difficult to learn, she said. Yazzie is hopeful a book she recently wrote will provide a user-friendly way for New Mexico students to learn not only the language but the culture of a tribe that long has tied the two elements.
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