Growing up within the Onondaga Nation spread across a glacier-riven valley 50 miles north of Ithaca, Kevin Connelly learned to speak English as his first language, just as the other children of that small community of about 1,600 people had done for several generations.
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| Kevin Connelly, an Iroquois linguist in the American Indian Program, uses photography, video and virtual reality software to capture a sense of natural world space so that it can be incorporated into second-language acquisition curricula. Nicola Kountoupes/University Photography |
Today, at age 48, after spending 10 years earning a doctorate in linguistics at Cornell -- an educational mission that began when he encountered a journal article about the Onondaga language -- Connelly is embarked on a quest to help keep the language of his people alive as a spoken language, not just as documented texts. To do that, he is conducting outreach at the Onondaga reservation to develop a curriculum to teach the language to children, and he is experimenting with virtual reality software to see whether the language can best be visualized -- and taught -- in cyberspace.
Linguists agree that languages are disappearing at an alarming rate all over the world. Before Columbus led the European invasion of North America, there were probably more than 250 languages spoken in what is now United States territory, according to an article in The Washington Post. That number is down to about 190, and at least three-quarters of them are in imminent danger of dying out.
Today there are only a handful of fluent speakers of Onondaga, whose people are one of the five original nations of the Ho-de-no-sau-nee, the People of the Longhouse, also known as the Iroquois. The Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida and Mohawk peoples populated what is now New York state and parts of Pennsylvania and Ohio. Their confederacy, the League of Peace, is the oldest and strongest alliance ever formed among native Americans.
Connelly, who was born into the Eel Clan, is passionate when he explains why it is important to keep the language alive.
"Languages are like an archive," he said. "All of its history is in there somewhere. One of the things that's archived in a language is a completely different way of being here, of thinking and of logic."
Comparing Onondaga to English, Connelly said, "I don't think you could find two languages farther apart."
Connelly explored that difference in his dissertation, "The Textual Function of Onondaga Aspect, Mood and Tense: A Journey into Onondaga Conceptual Space." He received his Ph.D. from Cornell in May 1999. This past semester, he taught a 400-level class in anthropological linguistics cross-listed between the American Indian Program and the Department of Anthropology. Using text versions of Onondaga oral narratives, the class explored how language, thought and reality interact with one another.
"English is a language of tense," Connelly explained. "You are obliged in English to pay attention to a timeline. In English, there's just one way of being a human being -- individualistic, self-centered, ego-based. Onondaga is a language of space, and how you are in that space, and is called an 'aspect' language. In Iroquois, you have a choice to be here as a communal human being or an individualistic one. You have the option in Iroquois languages to lose yourself, to get the sense that you're participating in something grand."
Class discussions sometimes became spirited, as some students reject the notion of the loss of individuality. But placing the narrator is a key element of Connelly's research, which looks beyond words and texts to the core values, and the sense of one's place in the world, that are reflected in language.
As an example, he pointed to a 150-word passage in Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay "Self Reliance," part of which reads: "These roses ... are what they are; they exist with God today. There is no time for them. There is simply the rose ..." In the Onondaga language, that perfect state of being is expressed in one monosyllabic suffix.
"Kevin's understanding of the Onondaga language is one of the most important and profound advances in Iroquoian studies that has been made," said Jane Mt. Pleasant, associate professor of crop and soil sciences and former director of the American Indian Program (AIP).
Connelly's work is "important and unique," Daniel Usner, current AIP director, agreed. "He's immersed in the culture and has linguistics training. In his course, he is sharing with Cornell students a crucial inquiry into language and knowledge. He hopes to develop a language curriculum for the school at Onondaga, which will help maintain a way of thinking."
Usner said Connelly's is the only Iroquoian course currently taught at Cornell.
Mt. Pleasant and Connelly, who also has a bachelor's degree in agronomy from Cornell, are seeking funding for a unique program that will merge agriculture and language as a way of keeping a culture alive. Mt. Pleasant is an expert on traditional Iroquois agricultural methods. The two want to develop an integrated language/gardening curriculum based on a method of teaching language in which students become immersed in the language during activities.
Connelly also is working with an undergraduate student in his class, Carmen Jones, to use virtual reality software to express Onondaga as a "visual grammar lesson." Onondaga is a "picture language," he explained, that has no written text. He described the narrator point of view as being somewhat like that of an astronaut in space -- out of time and immersed in a spatial reality. This visual language lesson will teach "not just a language but a way of thinking core to the Onondaga world view; the language itself is spatial."
At Onondaga, Connelly is interacting with the few fluent speakers who are still there to improve his fluency and knowledge.
"There's really hope in my mind now that members of that community can reconnect with their thinking that is still in place, that is completely Iroquoian," he said, "and hook up again with the language that is ideally suited to keep that kind of thinking alive, to keep up the link between thought and language, the language that was suited for the kind of thinking that is still there."
His studies of fluent speakers make him appreciate the beauty of the Onondaga language, which Connelly calls "a gem."
Cornell is in a strong position to assist in restoring Iroquois social, economic and cultural traditions, Mt. Pleasant said. As the state's land-grant institution, Cornell has faculty -- including Iroquois faculty -- staff and programmatic resources that could work in collaboration with Indian communities in New York. And courses like Connelly's that explain the culture and traditions of those communities are important as well, she said.
"The state of New York and the Iroquois nations will have to negotiate an increasingly complex relationship, as communities of Native Americans with nation status exist side by side with New York citizens," she said. "After enduring 200 years of colonization, rebuilding Iroquois nations must start with strengthening communities through the revitalization of cultural, social and economic traditions that have been the mainstay of Iroquois identity for more than 500 years."
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