PRESERVING ILOKANO AND OTHER LANGUAGES, SOCIAL JUSTICE, AND CULTURAL DEMOCRACY
(Conclusion)
Aurelio S. Agcaoili, PhD
Nakem and its work could be understood as our own language of critique.
It is also our language of possibility.
Our work of Ilokano language and culture instruction at the University of Hawaii does the same thing.
The simple fact that Nakem Conferences came out of our desire to put in context the centennial celebration of the first 15 Ilokanos to work in the plantations of Hawaii already implicates the intrinsic connection between what we do at our university and at Nakem—and between what our Nakem partners in the Philippines, through the Nakem Conferences consortium and our Nakem Conferences International which is housed at our UH Ilokano Program.
This proves that there is this beautiful but delicate dance that we are doing in our respective organizations and academic institutions.
It is beautiful because we have come to a point where we can now speak who we are, not in the fullness of human speech yet because of constraints that are largely external and systematic.
These constraints are traceable to much ready are our educational bureaucracy such as the Department of Education, the Commission on Higher Education, and the TESDA in listening to what we have to say, things that have been kept deep in our hearts for so long a time because speech is not the best virtue of our educational system but acquiescence, silence, and acceptance without the benefit of critique and reason.
There is the delicate dance in our pursuit of the MLE goals, this we have to admit.
And the dance is delicate because we are walking on new ground even if we resist the old ground and insist on our freedom to walk on this new one.
Certainly, we are learning along the way, even as we try to respond to the challenges of the various MLE goals and its six areas of focused activity.
What we envision and what we want done at Nakem is the evolving of a new educational practice of “being more-so”, a practice that takes into fundamental account the language of the students and the language of teachers teaching these students.
We refuse here to look at language and its reality as something akin to a tool in learning, in education, and in understanding the world.
In our account of the new educational practice of being more-so, we look at language, like the hermeneutist Hans-George Gadamer, as that which mediates our understanding of the world, that which middles, that which is between us and the world.
Thus we can only come to an understanding of this world through language.
There is no other way.
The fact that this language must be always in the concrete, that it must be ours even if we accept that it is also beyond us, makes all the more relevant in understanding the place of MLE in our pursuit of education that emancipates, and that it emancipates because it grounds itself from the humanity of our students and our teachers, a humanity that is always life-long and thus demanding a life-long, continuing, ceaseless educational practice.
Now, we summon the poet Machado and we say: Indeed, there is no road.
But we make the road while walking. We have begun to walk hoping that the road appears.
FAO
Nov 2011
Showing posts with label preserving the ilokano language. Show all posts
Showing posts with label preserving the ilokano language. Show all posts
Preserving the Ilokano Language, Part IV
PRESERVING THE ILOKANO AND OTHER PHILIPPINE LANGUAGES, PART IV
Aurelio Solver Agcaoili, PhD
Kur-itan, now seen only in tattoos and other ‘exotic’ or nostalgic representations, kept a record of what we wanted remembered and expressed in a more lasting way. Except for some vague traces of that palimpsest based on the accounts of the frailes of what they intended to do in turning us all into rote memorizers of “Amami” (the Pater Noster) and “Abe Mariya” (the Ave Maria) and other formula prayers, we have really inaugurated the death of our being, the death of our being-more-so, so that what we have at this time is a bad prognosis: the commencement of our being-less-so. And we seem to enjoy this, masochistic people that we are.
Response to Erasures in the Diaspora
Let me provide the context of our struggle in Hawaii and connect this to the struggle that we have in the Philippines.
Each year, about 5000 people get into the state as immigrants. Ninety percent of these new immigrants come from the Ilocos and Ilokanized areas of Northern Philippines.
The number translates to 4500 Ilokanos in Hawaii each year. With three the average number of children per family, we have half of these coming in as children, easily translatable to more than 2000 Ilokanos. Now where do these children go? How do they get settled in the public schools?
Here comes the power of the state to turn these Ilokano children into Americans by having them get into the English as a Second Language or English with Limited Proficiency classes and there remind them that unless they shed off their skin as Ilokanos, like the snake shedding off its skin, they can never become Americans. So your guess is as good as mine: the trauma resulting from this is both personal and social, and the traumatized vows to become American as fast as he could.
First off the bat: Speak English.
Second, Speak English the way the locals do.
Third, Pick up the Pidgin to completely erase your Ilokanoness.
Do not claim that you were ever born in the Ilocos but say that you are local even if the Ilokano accent—the accent you are denying—sometimes comes back to haunt you.
But while this is true in Hawaii, it is true here in the Philippines as well. Those who have come to Metropolitan Manila, when they go back to the Ilocos, bring with them this dominant posturing. Back in their homes, they refuse to speak Ilokano, preferring to speak in the dominant language, as this, for the dominant group, is the mark of having arrived at the pedestal of a ‘cosmopolitan’ culture that is unlike theirs. We have comic stories about them, all intended to bring them down and make them realize that they have no business becoming reactionary and adopting the dominant group’s posture.
We have other tragic stories in Hawaii—and in our work with the federal government that involves other states in many ways.
Our Ilokano Language and Literature Program at the University of Hawaii is the only degree-granting program of its kind in the world, with a full program for a major in Ilokano, a minor, and a certificate.
There is not a single university in the Ilocos, in Cagayan Valley, and in the Cordilleras—all within the rubric of what is called Amianan—that offers any semblance of what we do at the UH.
Pretty soon, we are expanding the offering of Ilokano language and culture in another college within the UH System, the Maui College, side by side with an expansion of a pilot program, under a different grant, for Ilokano for high school students in two huge public high schools. We have started the Ilokano Plus Program, also at Maui College, and we hope to expand programs of this kind as soon as we have prepared our teachers.
Even as I say these things, we are aware that our initiatives in Hawaii, first formalized with the offering of the first-ever Ilokano class in 1972, are not of the same kind of an initiative that you need here in the Philippines particularly those institutions of basic and higher education in the three regions of Amianan, or Northern Philippine (Region I, Region II, and CAR).
The University of the Philippines at Diliman, for instance, is even better off in giving opportunities to students specializing in Philippine Studies to study a full year of Ilokano and some undergraduate and graduate courses in Ilokano literature. Some universities and colleges in the Ilocos do not seem to know what the Ilokano language and Ilokano literature are all about, because, as some teachers and instructors would say, Why do they still need to learn what they already know?
There is thus a whole scale working up of consciousness of self and community here—with so many of our people unable to use the lens provided by their language and culture and instead use, however handicapped they are, other lenses.
Why, indeed, do we have to insist on the need to educate our young in the language that they already know?
Why don’t we educate the Cagayanon in French and Italian and English so that they will be gainfully employed in France, Italy, and England?
If the Cagayanon only knows Bisaya, where would he go? We don’t even care to venture beyond whichever lens we fancy to wear to ask why the Americans or the English who are born with English as their language from their homes, in school and in their communities—why they still have to be taught English at various levels in school, why the Japanese or the Chinese or the Koreans all of whom learn to speak their own mother tongues at birth still have to study their own mother tongues in their schools.
Published in FAO, July 2011
Aurelio Solver Agcaoili, PhD
Kur-itan, now seen only in tattoos and other ‘exotic’ or nostalgic representations, kept a record of what we wanted remembered and expressed in a more lasting way. Except for some vague traces of that palimpsest based on the accounts of the frailes of what they intended to do in turning us all into rote memorizers of “Amami” (the Pater Noster) and “Abe Mariya” (the Ave Maria) and other formula prayers, we have really inaugurated the death of our being, the death of our being-more-so, so that what we have at this time is a bad prognosis: the commencement of our being-less-so. And we seem to enjoy this, masochistic people that we are.
Response to Erasures in the Diaspora
Let me provide the context of our struggle in Hawaii and connect this to the struggle that we have in the Philippines.
Each year, about 5000 people get into the state as immigrants. Ninety percent of these new immigrants come from the Ilocos and Ilokanized areas of Northern Philippines.
The number translates to 4500 Ilokanos in Hawaii each year. With three the average number of children per family, we have half of these coming in as children, easily translatable to more than 2000 Ilokanos. Now where do these children go? How do they get settled in the public schools?
Here comes the power of the state to turn these Ilokano children into Americans by having them get into the English as a Second Language or English with Limited Proficiency classes and there remind them that unless they shed off their skin as Ilokanos, like the snake shedding off its skin, they can never become Americans. So your guess is as good as mine: the trauma resulting from this is both personal and social, and the traumatized vows to become American as fast as he could.
First off the bat: Speak English.
Second, Speak English the way the locals do.
Third, Pick up the Pidgin to completely erase your Ilokanoness.
Do not claim that you were ever born in the Ilocos but say that you are local even if the Ilokano accent—the accent you are denying—sometimes comes back to haunt you.
But while this is true in Hawaii, it is true here in the Philippines as well. Those who have come to Metropolitan Manila, when they go back to the Ilocos, bring with them this dominant posturing. Back in their homes, they refuse to speak Ilokano, preferring to speak in the dominant language, as this, for the dominant group, is the mark of having arrived at the pedestal of a ‘cosmopolitan’ culture that is unlike theirs. We have comic stories about them, all intended to bring them down and make them realize that they have no business becoming reactionary and adopting the dominant group’s posture.
We have other tragic stories in Hawaii—and in our work with the federal government that involves other states in many ways.
Our Ilokano Language and Literature Program at the University of Hawaii is the only degree-granting program of its kind in the world, with a full program for a major in Ilokano, a minor, and a certificate.
There is not a single university in the Ilocos, in Cagayan Valley, and in the Cordilleras—all within the rubric of what is called Amianan—that offers any semblance of what we do at the UH.
Pretty soon, we are expanding the offering of Ilokano language and culture in another college within the UH System, the Maui College, side by side with an expansion of a pilot program, under a different grant, for Ilokano for high school students in two huge public high schools. We have started the Ilokano Plus Program, also at Maui College, and we hope to expand programs of this kind as soon as we have prepared our teachers.
Even as I say these things, we are aware that our initiatives in Hawaii, first formalized with the offering of the first-ever Ilokano class in 1972, are not of the same kind of an initiative that you need here in the Philippines particularly those institutions of basic and higher education in the three regions of Amianan, or Northern Philippine (Region I, Region II, and CAR).
The University of the Philippines at Diliman, for instance, is even better off in giving opportunities to students specializing in Philippine Studies to study a full year of Ilokano and some undergraduate and graduate courses in Ilokano literature. Some universities and colleges in the Ilocos do not seem to know what the Ilokano language and Ilokano literature are all about, because, as some teachers and instructors would say, Why do they still need to learn what they already know?
There is thus a whole scale working up of consciousness of self and community here—with so many of our people unable to use the lens provided by their language and culture and instead use, however handicapped they are, other lenses.
Why, indeed, do we have to insist on the need to educate our young in the language that they already know?
Why don’t we educate the Cagayanon in French and Italian and English so that they will be gainfully employed in France, Italy, and England?
If the Cagayanon only knows Bisaya, where would he go? We don’t even care to venture beyond whichever lens we fancy to wear to ask why the Americans or the English who are born with English as their language from their homes, in school and in their communities—why they still have to be taught English at various levels in school, why the Japanese or the Chinese or the Koreans all of whom learn to speak their own mother tongues at birth still have to study their own mother tongues in their schools.
Published in FAO, July 2011
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