Educator PD: Stephanie Charging Eagle- Language Pt. 1 Gender & Lakota Thought

Gender and Lakota Thought - Stephanie Charging Eagle I have a bigger concern as far as, you know, at the present, you know, doing something now and that is the female and male genders, how language impacts that, how that impacts how we speak. And you know, in contemporary society, we now have the, you know, the cross gender, which also adds into the whole mix of things. But to put it simply, females and males have their roles in the society and the speech accompanying that. You knew a female by the way they spoke, by the word they spoke, the inflection in their voice, you know, their enunciation. And we're losing a lot of that because like anything else, when you have intertribal coming in, you have people picking up, you know, other dialects, other patterns of speech. But my concern is, our women, our Lakota women in their speech are talking using male terms. I don't see that happening so much with the male doing that with female terms. They might have an occasional male saying something, you know, inaccurately or inappropriately and that goes back to being taught by a grandmother or some female. But the female is really, the gender role is really important, significant to the Lakota society, to our children in their quest for cultural identity. Because we base everything on, as a Lakota person, where we come from, how we grew up. But following the protocol, the kinship rules, all of that is all enmeshed. You cannot separate one from the other. And that is my concern, is that women of our generation, whether it's lack of knowledge, just, you know, falling into the whole contemporary age of speaking, are saying words that typically are male. Like the word, how, you know, that is a male word. But I hear women saying that and I'm like, what? Or the word, hoka hei, that's, I mean, I always, this is how I determine a male and a female appropriate word, is, in my mind, I have to make connections. And I always make a connection for me to understand it better. In Lakota, it's like the word is, has the, the, the o, or the, it's a lower voiced enunciation, like the word hoka hei. Okay, now for females, that would be, it would not be very, I guess, very womanishly of her to say hoka hei, you know, because that's a male inflection of the voice. And the woman, the male would not say duwale. If you notice the difference in those two words, hoka hei and duwale, you can see that the hoka hei, you would think of the male right away, duwale means is more softer, you know. And so that's how I distinguish male and female. And I always wonder if our females even understand that, you know, or do they want to be, you know, have some of that generation, generational, you know, stuff. Come forward and become immersed in it. I don't think so, because some of the ones who speak these words inappropriately or inaccurately are fluent speakers themselves and I don't know if they think that's cool, put them on equal footing with the male, or what. But you know, I frequently hear that in the other words, for example, the word and Lakota thought philosophy is very significant. It is huge, because everything we say, we think first, and then we say: and so when we talk about Lakota language, we're talking about a very, ancient way of thinking, an ancient way of practicing life, spirituality, whatever. And so when you say, when people today say hihani wa shite, that is actually not Lakota thought, that is English thought being said in Lakota, because all we did was take, we took good morning and we said it in Lakota. But it's not the thought. And I remember growing up and people would, upon reading each other or seeing each other, they would say hihani lakhti. You know, oh, it's so early in the morning. You know, like: so what are you doing this morning, you know? Or they'd say some greeting like ah, niitai ahe or tooniki jahe, or you know. They say: you know it's inquiring about their well-being, you know, and they don't say good morning because we don't know if it's a good morning for that person. It may be for us, and those are words that we are becoming aware of losing. You know the thought behind language, and that's really it. That's significant, because, as we have Lakota language teachers who are going into the schools and teaching the language, and many of these teachers are young and they may not be fluent speakers or as first language learners, and so they don't have that Lakota thought and philosophy already. So they are taking English thought and turning it, translating it to Lakota. And a good example of how that happens and it's being used in the classroom is the Berenstain Bears. Now, that's an English story, English children's story, but it's been taken and translated to Lakota. So you have now a Lakota story with English thought. What really should be happening is we tell our stories, for example, the Iktomi story. Tell that in Lakota to our children so they understand why these stories are. What is the purpose of Berenstain Bears? You know, story to our children, to our way of life.