The importance of language

Our Mother Tongues | Crow

"The language is not just words... it's a culture, a tradition, a unification of community, a whole history, and it creates what a community is- it's all embodied in the language; language is central to it. So it's really the revival of a culture and a way of life... it's a central component." -Noam Chomsky, MIT linguist, on the revival of the Wampanoag language (They believe the last native speaker lived over a century ago; now, after a burst of revival effort, a young girl is raised as the first native speaker in seven generations. A language brought back to life. Amazing.)

"What we would like to do, I heard in many ceremonies amongst our people, is to take this way of life into the future, into good times, into celebrations where we can be speaking the stories of our people, speaking in terms of our cultural practices, like clan practices... the stories that define who we are... to the point of where we empower ourselves and liberate ourselves with our identity and maintain this true civilization of who we are as Apsáalooke." -Dr. Lanny Real Bird, Apsáalooke (Crow), professor at Little Big Horn College

http://ourmothertongues.org/