Michelle Black was born in Kansas and attended the University of Kansas at Lawrence and Washburn University. She earned a degree in anthropology before entering Washburn Law School. She served on the Law Journal Board of Editors and graduated with honors. She practiced law in both the public and private sectors and held board positions on numerous community service organizations.

In 1993, she and her family moved to the mountains of Colorado and she began to focus on her fiction writing. Her short stories were twice honored by the National Writers Association and her novel-length fiction has been recognized by the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers.

Books by
Michelle Black


WINNER!
of the 2000 CIPA Book Award for Fiction
given by the Colorado Independent Publishers Association

Other books available online about Native American Languages

by Albert White Hat, et al

by John P. Williamson, Carolynn I. Schommer

bu Cody Iron Eyes, Iron Eyes Cody

by William Tomkins, A. J. Stover (Illustrator)

How many Americans have ever heard a truly American language spoken? The first languages on the North American continent did not originate in Europe. Over three hundred Native American languages were in use here before Columbus arrived, but today only about half survive. They are disappearing at a startling rate, leaving an aching and uniquely American cultural void in their wake.

Recently when the Northen Cheyenne tribe held a contest to determine the youngest speaker of their language on their reservation, the winner turned out to be 46 years old.

Though the federal government spends one million dollars per year per Florida panther to save the species from extinction under the Endangered Species Act, it spends only two million dollarsin total--to try and stem the loss of indigenous American languagesa demise the government itself created.

Federal policies during the first half of the 20th century are largely responsible for hastening the demise of native languages. Reservation children sent to government-run boarding schools were punished for speaking the languages of their tribe. One such child was a Cheyenne named Ted Risingsun. He was born on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in Montana, the great-grandson of the great Cheyenne leader Dull Knife.

The reservation is located just thirty miles from the spot where George Armstrong Custer met his demise at the hands of Sioux and Cheyenne warriors in 1876. One hundred years later, the Cheyennes began to fight to maintain their cultural heritage and to keep their language from slipping into obscurity. Ted Risingsun not only helped his people regain control of the reservation schools from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, but invited professional linguist Wayne Leman to come to Montana to create a written form of the Cheyenne language. Leman and his wife would come to spend the next twenty-five years doing just that.

Initial efforts to preserve Cheyenne met with resistance from Cheyennes themselves. An entire generation had grown up with the government mandate that all Indian people should speak English and that speaking a tribal language was worthless and unimportant in modern America.

Said Leman, "When we first came [to the reservation], many were skeptical and even suspicious of efforts to teach people to read and write the Cheyenne language. They had bought the lie promoted by past government policies and the pressures of the English-speaking dominant culture of the U.S. that for one to be a 'success' in life, he must speak only English. Now Cheyennes and many other Native American groups recognize that if they lose their language they will lose at the same time much of what it means to be a unique people with a valuable historical and cultural tradition."

Ted Risingsun would not be deterred and worked tirelessly to redeem his language in the eyes of his own people. He longed to hear Cheyenne children speak Cheyenne and understood the experience to be an essential part of understanding what it is to be "Cheyenne."

In 1990, he and Wayne Leman sat down and designed a language course that would introduce the Cheyenne language. Two sixty-minute audio cassettes and a booklet were developed and called, .

Though the government policies developed during the administration of Ulysses S. Grant were not officially repealed until 1990 when Congress passed the Native American Languages Act, momentum to maintain Indian languages has been noticeably building, according to Leman. "There is much work to be done to slow or perhaps reverse the loss of native languages. It requires that everyone in native communities participate, not just schools, but also parents, grandparents, peer groups, social clubs, churches, and other institutions."

"It would be nice," Leman continues, "if the majority culture would somehow affirm the value of these endangered languages, not simply with romantic lip service, but with sincere interest in the linguistic heritage of Native Americans."

Today the Cheyennes and many other tribes have active programs to preserve and teach their language. Many of the programs are available commercially and distributed through various companies specializing in either foreign language or Native American books and music.

Still, mainstream acceptance of native languages remains elusive. When one walks into a large bookstore like Barnes & Noble and peruses the enormous foreign language collection offered for sale, not one Indian language is represented. , though commercially published in 1999 by WinterSun Press (formerly Wolf Moon Press), is currently available from the giant bookselling chain only by special order and on their Internet site. As respect for native languages grows in America, perhaps that will change.

Ted Risingsun passed away in 1995, but his dream to hear Cheyenne children speak their native tongue as well as his resonant voice live on in the tape series.

For more information about the Cheyenne language, visit the following website http://www.mcn.net/~wleman/cheyenne.htm For more information about   $15.95, (ISBN 0-9658014-1-1) visit http://wintersunpress.com

Copyright © 2000 by Michelle Black. All rights reserved