The Akha Journal

can still be done about that. I would say even whenthere are no more speakers of child-bearing age,when there are no more fluent speakers, somethingcan still be done, but I doubt whether a full-pagead in The New York Times is exactly what to do atany particular time. Let us turn our attention to different kinds ofthings that could be tried. Some of the things thatcould be tried, some of the things that should beavoided. For example, do not start too high. That isThe New York Times start. Do not start there. Donot start too far away, if you are interested in themother tongue being self-sustaining. Do not starttoo far away from things that have to do with home,family, and community on an inter-generationalbasis. That is where a mother tongue or vernacularis handed on. Particularly do not start too far awayif you are weak and your language is about tocrumble because it might crumble in another gen-eration while you were paying attention to full pageads in The New York Times. When Hebrew was being revived — a very un-likely success story — it had not been spoken intwo thousand years, and those who knew the lan-guage best were opposed to its vernacular use. Itwas revived through terminologies, first by work-ing out terminologies for carpentry and for kinder-garten. Very close to what you need to have forevery day, what adults needed every day and whatteachers needed every day with those new childrenwho were going to be the first children to be giventhe language very early, but not by their parentsbecause their parents did not speak it. Rather bythe few teachers who had learned to speak it. Theywere the ones to whom the children were entrusted.Children did not live with their parents. They livedin the children’s home in a kibbutz withthose teachers, the few teachers who had forcedthemselves to learn how to speak it, not naturallybut fluently. They needed a vocabulary for kinder-garten, and the parents needed a vocabulary forcarpentry. So, start low. Start exactly where themother tongue starts and try to aim at that. Eventhe school can help you aim at that. Another bit ofadvice is, do not concentrate along institutionallines. Most languages are not institutional, but in-formal and spontaneous. That is where languagelives. Children live; they play; they laugh; they fall;they argue; they jump; they want; they scream. When the illegal Basque schools were workingunder the Franco regime, they became undergroundschools. It was prohibited to speak Basque in pub-

lic because the Basques had resisted Franco, theFascist dictator, and had resisted him bitterly untilthe end. Franco got even with them. They were ar-rested; they were punished; they were killed; theywere shot; and their language was outlawed andwas laughed off the stage as vulgar, barbarous, bar-baric, uncouth, and animalistic. So they had to runprimary schools and pre-schools centered aroundresistance. They provided nursery and child carewhen you started school, and they provided healthcare for people who were afraid to visit the doctor.Because of their Basque nationalist association,doctors were afraid to treat them. They did not institutionalizing Basque on a nar-row basis. Quite the contrary, the school was a ha-ven in the society, an underground parallel society.The schools were creating their own cultural space.Creating cultural space is very important for a lan-guage if it is to become competitive within its ownculture. I remember when the psychologist JohnMacNamara told a story about having studied Irishall his childhood in school. He was scolded oneday by the lady who ran a candy store. He had justbought the candy from her and began talking En-glish to his sister. “You have learned Irish all yourlife. How come you’re speaking English? Youshould be talking Irish to your little sister.” Later,out on the street, the sister asked him, “Is Irish re-ally for talking?” That really did happen. It had notoccurred to them that Irish was for talking. It was aschool subject like geography and arithmetic. Howmany people go down the street talking geographyor arithmetic? So a real — not institutional — so-cial space has to be created for the language. Andin the revivalist movement that Irish went through,they tried to create that space. A young adult com-munity, a sports community, a language commu-nity for young people. All-Irish, mainly Irish, andpartly Irish schools were recognized by the gov-ernment, but not really very sympathetically rec-ognized. It was a kind of tokenism. The school has to gobeyond the tokenism. We must know enough tobeware of tokenism. The Romansh and Friulianshave an exchange program between their respec-tive districts, all over those little valleys where theymay live just a couple of miles apart but will neversee each other. They send tapes to each other, sothey are communicating. They send games to eachother and not only that, they send games and tapesand videos home from school as family home work.

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Something for the family to do together, and thewhole family listens to the tapes. They stay in touchthat way with folks that they are not going to see asflesh and blood, talking to them and playing withthem. Creating community is the hardest part of stabi-lizing a language. Lack of full success is accept-able, and full successes are rare. Now that Hebrewis so well-established and vernacularized, the min-ister of education of Israel recently tried to opensome English schools. He was attacked and rakedover the coals for his efforts because some advo-cates of Hebrew still feel insecure. So the sensethat the Hebrew language is safe has still not ar-rived in Israel, even though objectively it is safe.Emotional safety comes a lot later. The Franco-Canadians in Quebec are also not sure they are suc-cessful yet. They think they are suffering. TheCatalans are not sure they are successful. A culturehas been traumatized a long time, but it came back.So even in your lack of full success, dedicated lan-guage workers, whether they be Maoris, Bretons,or whatever, become committed to each other andtherefore they are members of the community ofbelief. In conclusion I want to tell you something aboutmy grandchildren. My wife engages in laptop pub-lishing. She publishes in the Yiddish language forour grandchildren. But let me tell you, the true laptop here is my lap and her lap and the laps of thechildren’s mother and father. That is a bond withthe language that will stay with them after we arelong gone. That is the lap top of language. And ifyou want that language revived, you have to useyour lap also with your children or your grandchil-dren or somebody else’s children or grandchildren.Adopt a grandchild. Adopt the grandparents. It isyour lap that is part of the link to sanctity, the linkto kinship, and the link to purpose. Now, in ouraffluent American society it turns out that one ofmy grandchildren already has an e-mail account.He writes messages to me to give to one of his cous-ins on the other coast. I go from coast to coastthroughout the year because I have grandchildrenon each coast. I have got to be sure that they sit onmy lap during the year. So he writes to his cousinon the other coast on e-mail. He has to transliteratethe Yiddish language into Roman characters be-cause e-mail only works in Roman characters, andhe makes a lot of mistakes in that. But it is recog-nizable. He is only seven, and the last e-mail I re-ceived was a little note saying, “I have got a little

mechanical bird. It speaks Yiddish. Ha, ha. That’sa joke.” So there are family building, there are culturebuilding, and there are intimacy building prerequi-sites for language fostering, things that you haveto do because no school is going to do them. How-ever, the school can put that on the agenda of whathas to be done. The school has intellectuals in it.The school has a building, a budget, a time, and aplace. Now it has to put the life of the language,not just the literacy of the language, not just thegrammar of the language, not just the lexicon ofthe language, but the life of the language in thehome and the community on its agenda if the lan-guage is going to be passed along. Reversing language shift is a research field, it isan applied field, it is a cultural values field, it hasnew horizons, there are new things to do, thingsthat are, if you like, differently focused than theordinary school has been. And reversing languageshift asks, “What happens with the mother tonguebefore school, in school, out of school, and afterschool?” so that it can be passed on from one gen-eration to another. I started with a good questionand I am ending with a good question and that isthe question. “What are you going to do with themother tongue before school, in school, out ofschool, and after school?” Because that determines its fate, whether it isgoing to become self-renewing. That is my ques-tion for you, no joke!

Crickets: The Akha collect these crickets and sellthem to the low lands two crickets for one baht.

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Doi Chang Coffee Festival Doi Chang Akha village has taken careto planting its coffee for several years, anAkha led effort and it has finally paid off.Coffee projects for the hill tribe generallywithered on the vine after foreign fundingto the Thai government stopped. This year coffee at Doi Chang paid offbig with many families benefitting fromtheir crops. So much was the jubilation that the head-man Ah Jah put together Doi Chang’s firstCoffee Festival. An all “Traditional Akha for Akha”event, no one made insults and no one toldthe “cute little token Akha girls” it was theirturn to dance. Rather the Akha womendanced all night long to a huge crowd ofAkha from scores of villages who came toattend the party. No missionaries showed up either, won-dering why they hadn’t succeeded in de-stroying all of traditional Akha culture. Villages wanting to start coffee planta-tions only need visit Doi Chang Akha!

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The Akha Nature Conservancy The Akha have seldom been consulted about the carefor the forest they live in or who would have access to it. While forest and lands were destroyed, the forestry de-partment came in with the idea that pine tree farming forprofit would work, that nature is really no more than apark or farm where you plant trees in rows, yes, this willwork for an eco system. And plant pine trees they have. Their swath of deathcan be seen where ever they were planted. The large treesfrom the original forest were logged off by the Thai log-ging companies more than twenty years ago. Yet it iscommon to blame the hilltribe for all of this. For these reasons the Akha see it in their self interest tohead up their own nature conservation projects. Coffee has become an integral part of this effort, alongwith varieties of tea.

Dance it up!Ah Burh of Cheh Pah Kah puts on a show for the DoiChang crowd. The women below do a cross dance between bamboopoles on a wooden deck, beating out a cadence into thechill mountain air.

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Akha Coffee Akha coffee is best if planted from importedseeds. Otherwise the coffee can be gathered fromestablished coffee farms when the beans sproutunder the plants or by pulling up small plants. ManyAkha have had to start their coffee plantations inthis fashion. Plants or seeds can be placed in soilbags. Potting soil should contain topsoil, charredrice husk and raw rice husk to improve and keep

the soil soft. Bags without rice chaff will compactduring the dry season and prevent almost all rootgrowth, stunting the plants. Planted in rice chaffsoil, the larger plants are big enough after the firstyear to plant out in the fields. Fields should becompletely turned over by hand, small trees pro-tected, the field should NOT be burned. Coffeeplants should be planted no closer than a meter anda half.

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Coffee plants for villagers makes a difference. Sparse funds can go a long way in an Akha village to keepfamilies together. 500 plants, enough for a small family starter plantation only costs 1000 baht.

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A store house and restroom go in at the coffee plantation. Below the women of Doi Chang head off fora day of picking coffee berries.

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Ah Shurh, an Akha woman in DoiChang village picks ripe red coffee berriesto take back to the village. After arrivingback to the village berries are run througha dehusker that takes the meat off the cof-fee beans and then they are rinsed in a wa-ter vat to remove all the last flesh. After this cleaning the coffee beans stillin their parchment layer, are laid out in thesun in any flat space that can be found anddried over a number of days. When the drying process is done thebeans are stored until they are scheduled togo to the dehusker in the village. When thedehusking is done, the beans are sorted, allthe small and un uniform beans being re-moved, leaving only uniform full coffeebeans which are then either sent to DoiChaang Coffee Company for roasting or aresold to Bangkok Brokers. This year wasan especially good year for Doi Chang forwhich reason they had good cause to throwa Akha party, full with dancing.

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Coffee beans are cleaned, dried and dehusked. After that sorting is done by hand to leave only the bestbeans for selling or roasting. Many Akha villages are now planting coffee after seeing the success here.

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SportsBah Mah Hahn Football forthe local villages was a bigevent lasting two days.Interupted slightly by rain,the Pah Nmm teams success-fully stomped the visitingLahu and Lisu teams, leavingthe Akha on top one moretime. Girls and boys events.

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Ah Burh Chauh A popular girls game is played on an inclinewhere girls toss a large black bean gathered fromlong pods in the tree tops. The bean is sent roll-ing down the hill with the intent of knocking overother beans that are carefully set up by the wait-ing girl below. Each girl gets two throws in aturn if the first one doesn’t go all the way. Thegame is noisy and wild, up to ten girls playing atime, cheering and jeering while their friend’sbean flies out of bounds or overshoots the target.Coming within close range the girls manipulatetheir last toss to knock down up to four of thebeans in front of them. This is also one of thegames of the year end festival called Gah TauhPah. For collection the large beans can readily befound in Chiangmai for sale.The large beans pol-ish beautifully in the hand, reminding one of flatchestnuts.

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Tops and Projectiles Gah Tauh Pah is the year end festival,usually held late December. Heavywooden tops are carved and vigorouslyplayed against each other.

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Akha Music Scene

Doi Chang Akha Starting to work on their own band, the boys fromDoi Chang found something to do with their extracoffee money. The group puts together a catchyAkha folk sound and hopefully we’ll get to hearthem at the next Coffee Festival.

The Singing Man Ah Baw Gurh of Huuh Yoh Akha is a well knownAkha singer. He knows many a traditional Akhaballad or can just make up a tune and the poetry togo with it as he goes along. A tiny man, he is morethan glad to sing for an hour if you give him thechance, out in the field or sitting along side the firein the hut at night, nothing but the glow of the flamesand the twinkle in his eye. The plaintive songs ofthe Akha can be heard across the fields as they work,singing of lost love or poverty, the words aren’thard to figure out.

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Akha Art Ah Baw Pooh draws on scraps ofpaper, favors birds. A truck driverfrom Pah Nmm Akha village inAmpur Mae Faluang, his art workis visible in numerous huts to whichhe visits.

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