RAFAEL escreveu:
We have been traveling in Australia for roughly two months now.
The first place we visited was Parkes in New South
Wales, then we went to Melbourne in Victoria, to Port Augusta and Adelaide in South Australia, and finally to Kununurra and Yuendumu in the Northern Territory. In these places, we met people that
worked respectively, on Wiradjuri, Woiwurrung, Barngala, Kaurna, Miriwoong and Warlpiri. These places
and languages are listed in the same order as our trips, that also being the order of vitality of the
languages: only the language mentioned last, Warlpiri, is still being spoken by children; the
language mentioned next-to-last Miriwoong, still has some elderly native speakers, and all the
other languages are being revived from written sources. The fact that the vitality of these
languages coincides with the order of our trips is not a coincidence, but is rather connected to the
fact we first travelled to urban places near Canberra and then to gradually more isolated and harder
to reach places.
As we reported in
previous blog posts, our encounters with mobs working on language revival
taught us just how hard it is.
Though it is undeniable that language revival efforts have an important effect on the
self-esteem of Aboriginal people and on school attendance, numeracy and
literacy rates among Aboriginal kids,
it is undeniable too that in none of the cases we learned of was an Aboriginal language revived
beyond the knowledge of fixed expressions and of isolated words. What our experience
emphasizes to us is just how important it is to support the transmission of Aboriginal languages
whose full speakers are still around.
In Kununurra we met a
mob working on boosting the transmission of an Aboriginal language, the Miriwoong language.
Among the Miriwoong people, only a handful of elders are full speakers of their language, a few middle-aged people are good passive speakers of it, and younger Miriwoong people have had little or no exposure to the language. To remedy the situation, the Mirima Language and Culture Centre is
working on two fronts. They have already been for some time running a program targeted at young
adults, which consists of organized sessions in which the Miriwoong elders
teach the language to the
younger adults. The Miriwoong language center recently started a program targeted at children,
consisting of lessons taught at childcare centers and kindergartens. It is too early to access how the
child-directed efforts are going to fare. As for the adult-directed efforts, they don't seem to have
resulted in the restoration of the use of the Miriwoong language in daily situations.
This experience showed
to us that even when full speakers are still around, restoring a language once direct transmission
has been broken is no easy business (though we can't disregard the non-linguistic positive
impact of restoration efforts on Aboriginal people).
My personal point of
view is that the focus should be dislocated from the restoration of languages and cultures to the
underlying, far more complex and long-standing problems the brutal British colonization brought
onto the native peoples of the Australian continent. Drug abuse, domestic violence and cultural
disintegration are but the symptoms of Aboriginal peoples' dispossession, hopelessness and lack of
control over their own lives.
In the Warlpiri
community of Yuendumu, we learned about some recent actions of the
integrationalist program of the Northern
Territory government on Warlpiri schools. After a few productive decades of autonomous development
of the Warlpiri school curriculum, with hundreds of books produced locally in Warlpiri language, the
NT government effectively imposed English as the school language. In the same vein, by enforcing
stricter requirements on teacher certification, the NT government managed to reduce the presence of
Warlpiri teachers in the school to only two. Take into consideration the fact that Yuendumu is the
largest Warlpiri community of Australia.
Of course the situation
is more complicated than anyone is able to grasp, and an interesting collection of points of
view on the demise of the education of Aboriginal children in their mother tongue can be found
[here](http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/content/2009/s2683288.htm).
My personal point of
view comes from the comparison of the situation of the Australian Indigenous peoples with that of the
Brazilian Indigenous peoples. In Brazil Indigenous peoples have the constitutional right to
self-determination, and even though that right is often illegally violated, it is notory that in
Australia the subjugation of the indigenous peoples is constitutional.
Symptomatic of the state
of subjugation of the Australian Aboriginal peoples is the fact that in Yuendumu the principal
of the local school is not a Warlpiri person. Nor are Warlpiri the people in leading positions at
PAW, the modern incarnation of Warlpiri media. This state of affairs must be contrasted to that of
Indigenous schools and media associations in Brazil, where teachers, principals and media
makers are Indigenous.
In the last stop of our
trip, in Alice Springs, we learned about innovative uses of new digital media for the conservation and
documentation of Aboriginal languages in the "Getting in Touch"
workshop.
Foto do acervo da AIATSIS, exposta na inauguração da Conferência Internacional 50 anos da AIATSIS, em Canberra
Foto do acervo da AIATSIS exposta. A legenda diz: The men prominent in Wave Hill strike for equal conditions and pay for Aboriginal workers, 1960.
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