Day: September 26, 2016

(This post originally appeared in the online anthropology magazine SAPIENS. Follow @SAPIENS_org on Twitter to discover more of their work.) 

Joshua Hinson’s first biological son was born in 2000. His son’s birth marked the start of the sixth generation that would grow up speaking English instead of Chickasaw, which was the primary language his ancestors had spoken for hundreds of years. Hinson was born in Memphis, Tennessee, and grew up in Texas. Other than a small handful of words, he knew almost nothing about his ancestral language—formally known as Chikashshanompa’. Hinson had a few pangs of sadness over the years about what was lost, but it didn’t really affect him—until his son was born.

As he counted the 10 tiny fingers and 10 tiny toes of his firstborn child, Hinson realized he had nothing to teach his son about his Native American roots. The only thing he had to pass on was his tribal citizenship card. Hinson wanted to bequeath more than just a piece of paper; he wanted his son to be a part of Chickasaw culture. He recognized that the most direct way to understand his culture was to speak the language. But to make that happen, Hinson had to start with himself.

“I had family stories, but not the lived experience of being an Indian,” says Hinson. “I wanted to become a better Indian, and what better way than learning the language.”

A

s Hinson began to learn the Chickasaw language, he found that native speakers were in perilously short supply. In December 2013, the last person on the planet who spoke only Chickasaw, Emily Johnson Dickerson, died at the age of 93 in her home in central Oklahoma. Less than 100 tribal members remained fluent in Chickasaw, although they could also speak English. All of these individuals were over the age of 60, and no one under 35 could speak conversational Chickasaw. None of the rest of the tribe’s 62,000 members knew more than a few words of Chickasaw. After months of searching, Hinson apprenticed himself to a fluent speaker of Chickasaw, ultimately leaving Texas to move back to the center of tribal life in Oklahoma in 2004. By 2007, tribal leaders had appointed him to direct a project to revitalize the Chickasaw language.

“My goal was to get more people proficient in Chickasaw as quickly as possible,” Hinson says.

Hinson wasn’t just fighting to preserve a fading language, he was also racing against time. To keep Chickasaw alive, Hinson not only had to teach children how to speak the language—he also had to convince them that it was worth speaking.

“Once parents stop teaching the language to their children, it becomes an extracurricular activity, particularly for youth,” Hinson says. “Language is up against softball and basketball and football.”

Languages also have to compete with technology. Digital media is becoming an integral part of Chickasaw life, just as it is in nearly every corner of the globe. But rather than pointing to technology as contributing to language loss, as some linguists have done for decades, Hinson decided to embrace technology as an opportunity. As someone who relies on the internet, he saw it as a potential route to success, not a barrier.

With the tribe’s backing, he began to build an online presence for his tribe—all in Chickasaw. Hinson’s efforts to revitalize the Chickasaw language are also reflected in a larger movement wherein speakers of endangered Indigenous languages are turning to digital technology to preserve their past and adapt to an ever-changing world. The latest technology may just provide a way to help save some of the world’s most threatened languages.

Languages have always cycled through their own stages of birth, change, and disappearance. As cultures move and evolve, interacting with the world around them, so do their languages. That languages shift and dominate other tongues isn’t necessarily a bad thing, explains Bernard Perley, a linguist at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. What worries linguists and anthropologists isn’t simply that Indigenous languages are fading to silence but that so many are doing so at such a rapid rate. UNESCO, the U.N. division that works to protect the world’s culture and heritage, now estimates that half of the world’s 6,000 or more languages will no longer be spoken by 2100 if action isn’t taken to reverse this trend.

A language provides more than a way to communicate—it offers a unique worldview. It’s almost impossible to fully appreciate a group of people without understanding their language. When a language falls silent, both wisdom and basic information are often lost, such as knowledge about healing plants and natural disaster risks. (For example, even today, Navajo healers hunt among the towering buttes and rust-colored arroyos of the desert Southwest for a pop of bright purple from the tsédédééh, a flower used to treat mouth sores.) Language loss can also lead to the disappearance of more abstract concepts like Ilooibaa-áyya’shahminattook, the lyrical Chickasaw word meaning, “We used to gather together regularly, a long time ago.” Such losses cut a culture from its roots, setting its people adrift in a strange world.

Beginning in the late 1700s, policies enacted by the U.S. government attempted to do just that by actively seeking to eradicate the languages and cultures of Native Americans, who were deemed to be little more than “savages.” But even in the face of annihilation, as the Chickasaw Nation saw their numbers plummet due to disease and then were force-marched from their homeland in the Southeast to Oklahoma on the Trail of Tears, their language remained strong. It wasn’t until Native children were forced into boarding schools and forbidden to use their ancestral language that Chickasaw began to decline in earnest. This severing happened to Hinson’s great-grandparents in the 1920s.

“This had a terrible effect on Native American languages,” says Pamela Munro, an expert in Indigenous languages of the Americas at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Some parents became reluctant to pass on their language to their children.”

It is this history that has led to the dire circumstances many Indigenous languages in the U.S. face. Researchers are aware that speakers of Indigenous languages are dying out much more quickly than new speakers are being born, creating one of the classic scenarios of an endangered language. The professional call to arms occurred in 1992 when a series of papers published by the Linguistic Society of America brought international attention to the extent of worldwide language loss. As a result, professional linguists joined a global movement that used traditional ways of preserving languages while simultaneously searching for new methods. From a scholarly standpoint, the tactic made sense, but this approach wasn’t always what speakers themselves wanted or needed.

“Linguists are trained to write academic papers that tend to be quite technical and often don’t have applied uses,” says Lenore Grenoble, a linguist at the University of Chicago. “Even if you write a grammar of a language, it’s often too technical for speakers to use.”

Several Indigenous communities have cultivated linguists from their own groups and have begun to claim more power and authority over preserving their own languages. As a result, the larger global movement to save Indigenous languages has increasingly relied on community-based efforts. Hinson wasn’t a professional linguist, but he had a strong vision for how he wanted to rebuild a community of Chickasaw speakers. After nearly a decade of work, he knew enough Chickasaw to hold conversations as well as to read and write. He had made so much progress that he began working on a new, full-time project to help save his tribe’s language.

The Chickasaw Language Revitalization Program, founded in 2007, took a two-pronged approach, pairing novice speakers with older speakers who were fluent in the Chickasaw language, and using technology to reach a wider audience. Language learners were paired with expert speakers in a master/apprentice program for immersive lessons that lasted several hours a day, five days a week. Hinson credits his ability to learn so much of the language in just a few years to this type of approach and to his own dogged determination. Under Hinson’s direction, the tribe also built an online television network with six different channels that include language lessons, cultural events, and oral histories. The movement rapidly gathered a strong social media following on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Television and social media worked wonders for sparking interest in learning Chickasaw, but they didn’t always help with the day-in, day-out needs of students like Hinson who were trying to incorporate the language into their daily lives. In most cases, this is where the master/apprentice course would take over. However, given the small number of fluent Chickasaw speakers, many of whom were aging, Hinson knew that over time the master/apprentice program alone wouldn’t be enough to reach a sufficient proportion of the Chickasaw Nation’s members to help the language endure.

In contrast to some stereotypes non-Natives hold about tribal peoples, tribes have modernized—mobile phones and the internet are just as popular on reservations as they are in the rest of American culture. A substantial proportion of the Chickasaw own smartphones and have internet access at home, and these numbers are even higher among young people, just as elsewhere in the world.

To Hinson, this technological access offered promise for reaching the people who were most likely to keep the language going. Inspired by the success of the Chickasaw TV and social media efforts, Hinson decided to build a smartphone app to help reach even more people.

Working with third-party developers, Hinson created an app for iOS and a website for Android phones and other computers to give new speakers a foundation in Chickasaw. Besides teaching the alphabet, essential words and phrases, and methods for constructing a sentence, the app also contains recordings of native speakers to model pronunciation and cadence. Tribal leaders supported the app, which was launched in 2009, but Hinson had no idea if it would translate into more people learning the language.

The app was an instant hit. As young people began showing more interest in learning to speak Chickasaw, they sparked their parents’ interest too. Hinson’s eldest biological son, now 16, as well as his younger children have all benefited from the app and from having a father who is a proficient Chickasaw speaker. Hinson observed that some families began labeling household items with their Chickasaw names to encourage everyone to use their heritage language, even if just in passing.

“People have to find the language useful. Language is a tool, and you can put it aside and forget how to use it,” says Salikoko S. Mufwene, a linguist at the University of Chicago. Mufwene grew up in the Democratic Republic of Congo speaking Kiyansi, a Bantu language, until he left home for college.

“Even though Kiyansi is one of the first languages I spoke, I’m now least fluent in my own mother tongue,” says Mufwene, because he currently uses the language so infrequently. By contrast, new Chickasaw language users have more opportunity to practice the language, and the smartphone app is helping to transform Chickasaw into something new and useful. To University of British Columbia anthropologist Mark Turin, giving an endangered language a new sense of purpose is perhaps the most important aspect of digital efforts to preserve and teach endangered languages.

“These things help leverage and engage people,” Turin says. “They provide new domains of use and help to bring people together around a common language, even those who don’t live together.”

Other Indigenous tribes are also using digital technologies to save languages that are thousands of years old.

The Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages — a nonprofit that connects linguists with Indigenous language speakers and activists in order to save endangered languages—has created multimedia toolkits to allow people to use video, audio, and other technologies to preserve their language. Swarthmore College linguist K. David Harrison is working with tribes in Papua New Guinea to build talking dictionaries as part of an effort to teach these native languages to the next generation, and, with that, to preserve and pass on ancient knowledge about plants, animals, and the world.

The Miami tribe of Oklahoma, together with Miami University of Ohio, has launched a pioneering language-revitalization program. The Myaamiaki Project, founded in 2001 and now called the Myaamia Center, pairs research into the Miami tribe’s language and culture with practical, on-the-ground revitalization efforts. In Canada, Perley (the University of Wisconsin linguist), who is also a member of the Maliseet Nation from the Tobique First Nation of New Brunswick, has helped revitalize a variety of tribal languages through similar efforts and has observed other tribes taking comparable steps.

Specifically, Perley has worked with a variety of Native American tribes to help them develop lessons and other programming. Early on, one of the teachers he spoke with wasn’t sure his students would use Tuscarora, the Indigenous language of a Native American tribe along the East Coast of the U.S. and Canada, outside of the classroom. As soon as class was over, everyone seemed to switch back to speaking English. However, when the teacher listened more closely to a group of kids playing cards at a picnic table during recess, his perspective changed. The boys were playing a game that involved a lot of counting, but instead of using English for the numbers, they were counting in Tuscarora. All on their own, they had begun using their tribal language in their everyday lives.

“It’s this emergent vitality, these creative uses that make language more relevant,” Perley says.

And these successes build on themselves. The more languages are seen as useful and important, the more they are put into use, explains Grenoble, the University of Chicago linguist. “We don’t want these languages to be museum pieces, we want them to be a part of life.”

Anthropologists at the Living Tongues Institute are working with Indigenous communities around the world to put endangered languages back into regular usage. Besides simply documenting these languages, researchers and speakers are collaborating to create talking dictionaries and other technologies that help the languages thrive again.

“People around the world will be able to go online and hear someone speaking their language,” says Anna Luisa Daigneault, a development officer at the Living Tongues Institute.

Still, Mufwene cautions, technology alone won’t save a language. Many languages in Africa have continued to thrive despite ongoing colonialism, in part because opportunities to speak them remain. These languages are spoken on the job, within families, in primary schools, and in religious ceremonies. Teaching children to speak a language will only help if they are also provided with ample opportunities to use that language. In other words, some of the work of saving endangered languages has less to do with linguistics and more to do with economics.

“If you revitalize a language, you need policy and political structure to maintain it,” Mufwene notes.

Hinson agrees that the app and programs he and the Chickasaw tribe have created aren’t a cure-all. Instead, he sees them as a spark to help light the fire to maintain the traditional language. His vision doesn’t require that every single Chickasaw citizen become fluent in Chickasaw, but it does require that large numbers of them value the language and provide resources to maintain the apps and other technologies.

“An app won’t make you a proficient speaker, but it can help you learn the language,” Hinson says.

These high-tech solutions have also influenced the way many speakers view their own language. Before, some speakers of Indigenous languages perceived their mother tongue as a relic of a bygone era. The insertion of the language into new technologies and contexts, however, makes it seem shiny and new—like something relevant to the technological era. This will likely help today’s children pass the language on to their own children. A language’s transmission is key to keeping it alive, many linguists say.

For his part, Hinson continues to develop other language technologies for the Chickasaw to use. Recently, the tribe partnered with the popular language-learning software company Rosetta Stone to create a series of 80 Chickasaw lessons. Rosetta Stone has already created similar lessons for the Navajo and Mohawk communities.

“It’s a constant process of creating new speakers,” says Hinson. “When this generation has its own kids, then we’ll know if it’s working.” His children are soaking up their language and its surrounding culture. Hinson says it’s their intention to teach their own children Chickasaw someday.

“My dream is that as an old man, people will come up to me and say they’ve decided to teach their children Chickasaw.”

Millions of phony accounts. Fake bank card PIN numbers. Fictitious email accounts.

Wells Fargo admitted to firing 5,300 employees for engaging in these shocking tactics. The bank earlier this month paid $185 million in penalties and has since apologized.

Now CNNMoney is hearing from former Wells Fargo (WFC) workers around the country who tried to put a stop to these illegal tactics. Almost half a dozen workers who spoke with us say they paid dearly for trying to do the right thing: they were fired.

"They ruined my life," Bill Bado, a former Wells Fargo banker in Pennsylvania, told CNNMoney.

Bado not only refused orders to open phony bank and credit accounts. The New Jersey man called an ethics hotline and sent an email to human resources in September 2013, flagging unethical sales activities he was being instructed to do.

Eight days after that email, a copy of which CNNMoney obtained, Bado was terminated. The stated reason? Tardiness.

Related: Elizabeth Warren’s epic takedown of Wells Fargo CEO

HR official describes ‘retaliation’

Retaliating against whistleblowers is a major breach of trust. Ethics hotlines are exactly the kind of safeguards put in place to prevent illegal activity from taking place and provide refuge to employees from dangerous work environments.

Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf made precisely that point on Tuesday when he testified before angry Senators.

"Each team member, no matter where you are in the organization, is encouraged to raise their hands," Stumpf told lawmakers. He mentioned the anonymous ethics line, adding, "We want to hear from them."

But that’s not the experience of some former Wells Fargo workers.

One former Wells Fargo human resources official even said the bank had a method in place to retaliate against tipsters. He said that Wells Fargo would find ways to fire employees "in retaliation for shining light" on sales issues. It could be as simple as monitoring the employee to find a fault, like showing up a few minutes late on several occasions.

"If this person was supposed to be at the branch at 8:30 a.m. and they showed up at 8:32 a.m, they would fire them," the former human resources official told CNNMoney, on the condition he remain anonymous out of fear for his career.

CNNMoney spoke to a total of four ex-Wells Fargo workers, including Bado, who believe they were fired because they tipped off the bank about unethical sales practices.

Another six former Wells Fargo employees told CNNMoney they witnessed similar behavior at Wells Fargo — even though the company has a policy in place that is supposed to prevent retaliation against whistleblowers. CNNMoney has taken steps to confirm that the workers who spoke anonymously did work at Wells Fargo and in some cases interviewed colleagues who corroborated their reports.

It’s possible Wells Fargo could face legal consequences for any retaliation that occurred against employees who called the ethics line.

"It is clearly against the law for any company (or executives of such companies) to try to suppress whistleblowing," Harvey Pitt, former chairman of the SEC, told CNNMoney in an email.

A number of statutes — including Sarbanes-Oxley and Dodd-Frank — "make this unambiguously clear," Pitt said.

"I endured harsh bullying … defamation of character, and eventually being pinned for something I didn’t do," said Heather Brock, who was fired earlier this month as a senior business banker at a Wells Fargo branch in Round Rock, Texas.

Related: Workers tell Wells Fargo horror stories

‘That’s retaliation’

One such former employee was fired after flagging issues directly to Stumpf, according to Senator Bob Menendez.

At the Senate hearing, Menendez read the New Jersey woman’s 2011 email to Stumpf, where she described improper sales tactics she felt were "wrong."

"Did you read that email?" Menendez asked Stumpf.

"I don’t remember that one," Stumpf replied.

"Okay, well she was fired. … So much for the safe haven," Menendez said.

Several senators spoke about the plight of the mostly 5,300, low-level employees who were fired related to the scandal.

The firing certainly took a huge toll on Bado’s life. It put a permanent stain on his securities license, scaring off other prospective bank employers. Today, the New Jersey man’s house is on the verge of being foreclosed on and he’s working part-time, at Shop-Rite.

"You wonder where the justice is," Bado said.

Ken Springer, a former FBI agent who runs a firm that offers a whistleblower hotline service, was alarmed by the allegations made by former Wells Fargo employees.

"That’s retaliation. It’s a big problem — and a perfect example of what shouldn’t happen," Springer said. "It looks like there’s been a terrible breakdown of checks and balances at Wells Fargo."

In response to CNNMoney’s report, a Wells Fargo spokeswoman said: "We do not tolerate retaliation against team members who report their concerns in good faith." She emphasized that employees are encouraged to immediately report unethical behavior to their manager, HR representative or 24-hour ethics line.

Related: Wells Fargo CEO denies orchestrated fraud

‘Excessive tardiness’ eight days after HR email

Wells Fargo confirmed to CNNMoney that Bado had worked there. However, the bank declined to comment on why Bado left and and on the ethics complaint with corresponding report number he cited in emails. "Everything submitted to the EthicsLine is investigated," a Wells Fargo spokeswoman said.

While ethics complaints are supposed to be confidential, documents show that Bado did speak out before he was fired. On September 19, 2013, Bado wrote an email to a Wells Fargo HR rep and copied his regional manager, where he detailed improper sales tactics.

Documents show Bado was fired — for "excessive tardiness" — just eight days later.

"I have been asked on several occasions to do things that I know are not ethical and would be grounds for discharge," Bado said in the email to HR.

He said a branch manager on "many occasions" asked him to send out a debit card, "pin it," and enroll customers in online banking — "all without the customers (sic) request or knowledge." Those are precisely the same practices that regulators fined Wells Fargo for three years later and that senators grilled the bank over this week.

Lose, lose situation for Heather Brock

Brock, the business banker from Texas, told CNNMoney she experienced a similar situation. The 26-year-old single parent of two young boys was fired soon after she contacted the company’s ethics line about illegal sales practices she witnessed.

Wells Fargo also confirmed Brock used to work at the company but declined to comment further.

Brock was fired earlier this month, with Wells Fargo accusing her of falsifying documents — a charge Brock emphatically denies. Brock said the company bullied her into admitting she did something wrong.

A current Wells Fargo employee who works in Brock’s branch vouched for her version of events.

"That’s really scary when you’re with a big corporation like this and HR doesn’t have your back," said the current employee, who wished to remain anonymous so as not to get fired as well.

Brock is hoping her story forces meaningful change at Wells Fargo.

"You lose if you do complain and you lose if you don’t. What does a powerless employee do?" Brock said.

— To reach the author of this article email Matt.Egan@cnn.com

CNNMoney (New York) First published September 21, 2016: 8:40 AM ET

The head of the Commission on Presidential Debates has some advice for debate moderators this fall: leave the fact-checking to the candidates.

Janet Brown, executive director of the commission, told CNN’s Brian Stelter that moderators should let the candidates check one another on “accuracy and fairness.”

“I don’t think it’s a good idea to get the moderator into essentially serving as the Encyclopedia Britannica,” Brown said Sunday on “Reliable Sources.”

Related: Matt Lauer ups ante for debate moderators

While Brown said the commission depends on “independent, smart journalists” to make their own decisions about how to moderate, she said that historically, correcting the record has been left to the candidates.

Brown’s comments came a day ahead of this year’s first presidential debate, which will be moderated by NBC Nightly News host Lester Holt at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York.

The role Holt and other moderators should play on stage has been called into question in recent weeks.

Holt’s NBC colleague Matt Lauer was widely criticized earlier this month for his handling of a “Commander-in-Chief Forum” with Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Lauer did not correct Trump on the Republican nominee’s false claim that he had opposed the Iraq war.

Related: How Lester Holt is getting ready for Monday’s debate

But not everyone supports the idea of a moderator who fact-checks in real time from the stage.

Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace, who will moderate the final presidential debate next month, said he won’t fact-check because “it’s not my job to be a truth squad.”

By contrast, when she was serving as a moderator in 2012 former CNN anchor Candy Crowley fact-checked a statement by Republican nominee Mitt Romney about President Obama — a controversial moment that benefited the president.

CNN’s Dylan Byers contributed to this report.

CNNMoney (New York) First published September 25, 2016: 12:06 PM ET