Arts, Entertainment & Culture: People

Diné linguist named 'outstanding woman'

By Cindy Yurth
Tséyi' Bureau

CHINLE, April 7, 2011

It isn't the career she chose, it sort of chose her. And yet, it became such a consuming passion she never had time for marriage and children.

On May 6, New Mexico Gov. Susanna Martinez will honor Irene Silentman for her contributions to that career, along with 74 other "Outstanding New Mexico Women."

Silentman is understandably excited about the honor, but more excited because her career as a linguist dedicated to preserving the Navajo language is finally being recognized as an important asset in a state where BIA boarding schools once banned students from speaking Navajo and the state's 15 other indigenous languages.

"I've been forwarding the press release to everyone I know," Silentman said from a windy bluff near Two Grey Hills - the nearest place to her home in Newcomb, N.M., where she can get cell phone reception (not to mention water).

That's not because she wants people to know she's being honored - if she were attracted to the limelight, Silentman laughs, she wouldn't be in the "kind of dry" field of linguistics. She doesn't even know what to wear to the governor's reception.

Rather, the award is just another way to get the word out about language preservation, which is what most of the ironically named Silentman's 63 years on the planet have been about.

Silentman was born in Newcomb, into Hooghan Lání (Many Hogans Clan) for Tl'ááshchí'í (Red Bottom Clan). Her parents, James and the late Nettie J. Silentman, were traditional people who only knew "survival" English but nonetheless encouraged their daughter to get a "white man's" education.

She originally set out to be a teacher, but her life changed in 1971 when, as a junior at the University of New Mexico, she was asked by Prof. Bernard Spolsky to help conduct a reading study of 4- to 6-year-old Navajo children living on the reservation.

"At that time, there were only a handful of us Indians at UNM," Silentman explained. "He needed someone who could speak Navajo, so he recruited me and another person."

Silentman and her partner interviewed 4,000 Diné children and discovered 95 percent spoke primarily Navajo, and only 5 percent were proficient in both Navajo and English.

So at that time, language preservation was not a problem. The problem was getting Navajo children proficient enough in English that they could understand their teachers.

Spolsky, a progressive type, decreed that as many of the education faculty as possible should learn Navajo. Once again, Silentman and the other Navajo students were called upon.

In exchange for teaching their professors Diné bizaad, Spolsky taught them the universal phonetic alphabet that is used for unwritten languages like Navajo.

Writing Navajo

With that knowledge, Silentman and the other Diné education students developed a series of illustrated primers in Navajo to help children learn to read their first language - Navajo - and then their second language, English. (You'll still find the primers floating around some school districts, and Silentman recently encountered a copy in an Albuquerque used book store with a $25 price tag.)

Now Silentman was in even higher demand. She was among only a handful of Navajos who could read and write their language, and she was a published textbook author. She hadn't yet given up on her education career, though.

By the time she graduated with an education degree, schools all over the reservation wanted her. She chose the progressive new Rough Rock Demonstration School, but she never made it into the classroom.  She was already overqualified.

"They put me right into administration," she said.

There was a strong drive to recruit more Native teachers at the time, so she helped with a new UNM program that offered education classes right on the Rough Rock campus.

It was the mid-70s, and the backlash to traditional BIA boarding-school education had begun. Rather than ban Native languages, schools like Rough Rock were making sure their students learned theirs.

"Bilingual education was the new buzzword," Silentman recalled, "and the federal government was funding it."

Meanwhile, Silentman kept in touch with Spolsky, who was impressed with his young protegee's rapid progress. He got her temporary gigs with language preservation programs in Micronesia, Mexico City and Alaska. She was the first Native American to attend the Cultural Learning Institute in Hawaii.

She eventually landed at New Mexico's Public Education Department, where she helped with the new Bilingual Teacher Training Unit. After about 10 years, it dawned on Silentman she was never going to be a classroom teacher. She might as well get a degree in linguistics and get qualified for what she was already doing.

She obtained her master's in linguistics at the University of Arizona, and was immediately snatched up by Northern Arizona University for its new Navajo Language Program.

She was invited to present a paper in Poland, which evolved into a lecture tour that took her to Germany, Austria, France, Belgium and the Baltic states. European linguists were fascinated by the exotic Native American woman and the impossibly intricate Navajo verb system.

"Basically," Silentman said, "My language took me all over the world."

Losing ground

Meanwhile, back home, Diné bizaad was rapidly losing ground among the people. The 95 percent fluency rate Silentman had logged in the early 1970s was on a sharp downward trend.

Some of her former Rough Rock colleagues had worked with visiting linguistic professors from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on ways to teach the language, and these folks formed the Navajo Language Society to work on ways to teach the language more effectively.

One problem was that the verb-based language was being taught the same way English and other European languages are taught: learning the names of colors, numbers, animals, etc., first and then progressing to verbs. New methods, unique to Navajo, were proposed.

But the society fizzled out in the 1980s, and to the dismay of Silentman and others, most Navajo language teachers continue to use the noun-based method today.

By the late 1990s, the loss of fluent Navajo speakers had passed the tipping point. The vast majority of Diné children was speaking English and knew very little, if any, Navajo.

Lovers of the language, both Navajo and non-Native, realized something had to be done lest the beautiful, descriptive tongue be lost altogether and with it the stories, concepts and values that don't translate into English.

The Navajo Language Academy was formed, and once again Silentman was recruited.

The academy offers semi-annual workshops for teachers and a summer seminar, and its most recent triumph was helping to develop the new Rosetta Stone computer-based learning system.

But Silentman fears for the lovely language that took her all over the world, and that she still speaks daily with her 92-year-old father.

"I can say, yes, we have lost our language," she said. "Our children are not acquiring it as their first language any more.

"Navajo people will disagree and say, 'No, we haven't lost our language because we're still speaking it.' But who are these people who are speaking it, using it?" Silentman said. "It's those of us who are Baby Boomers ages 40s and on, all in our old age. We're going to be dying off and once that happens, who will carry on the language?"

Silentman said she's heard from a surprising number of non-Navajos who have been using the Rosetta Stone program and seem to be more interested in the language than Navajos.

"There's this black guy from Ohio, you can see him on YouTube," she said. "He speaks Navajo with a perfect accent, hitting all the glottalized consonants and the long vowels and the descending vowels. He says, 'Diné bizaad shil ayooooo nizhóní ("I find the Navajo language very, very beautiful")!

"Maybe," mused Silentman, "we'll end up relearning our language from these guys who are learning it from the Rosetta Stone."

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