The saga of the Menominee student punished for speaking her Native language continues and has even gained the attention of mainstream national media. Fox News published an AP story that the Catholic Diocese of Green Bay, which oversees the Sacred Heart School where the incident occurred, had issued an apology. There's an article about the apology in the diocese' official newspaper, The Compass.
The teacher apparently also issued an apology, though even NBC Sports picked up on the shallow nature of what it called a "half-baked non-apology". Basically, the teacher side-stepped the apology and instead seemed to blame the student. A nice summary of the non-apology issue can be found in Friday's edition of Indian Country Today.
One of the many issues buried within this story is the ongoing tension between immigrant and Native languages. Remember, Julie Gurta, the teacher at Sacred Heart said: "How would you like it if I spoke Polish and you didn't understand?" Gurta is apparently of Polish descent, with Polish as either her first language or heritage language (it's not clear from the news stories), and in her reaction to the student she seems to equate immigrant and Native languages. But the histories of immigrant and Native languages are actually quite different.
Native languages were generally suppressed by force, part of an officially endorsed campaign to eradicate Native language and culture. In Alaska this was embodied in the English-only policies of Sheldon Jackson and the Indian Ed schools. Immigrant languages, on the other hand, are often suppressed by choice in an effort to assimilate. The consequences, of course, are gravely different. In suppressing the use of Polish Mrs. Gurta has had no affect overall on the Polish language. There remain 40 million Polish speakers back in Poland. In suppressing the use of Menominee Mrs. Gurta contributes to a long-established policy of extermination: there are today something like 100 speakers of Menominee remaining. There is no homeland across the water with millions of speakers. Rather, the homeland of the Menominee is right there in Wisconsin where Mrs. Gurta is teaching.
Imagine for a moment that this Menominee student were to travel to Mrs. Gurta's homeland in Poland, hear Polish being spoken, and then get upset and demand: "How would you like it if I spoke Menominee and you didn't understand?" Crazy? But that is essentially what Gurta is doing. She teaches in the homeland of the Menominee but then gets upset that someone would dare to utter the Native language of the area.
Attempting to equate the Native language situation with that of immigrant languages only serves to further marginalize Native languages. Gurta expresses the very American idea that speaking another language is not important, not something to be done publicly or to be proud of. And while there are plenty of problems with that point of view, at least when applied to immigrant languages it doesn't serve to suppress the language entirely. In most cases immigrant languages continue to flourish in their homeland. The essential difference with Native languages is that they are already in their homelands. For Menominee to flourish requires students like 12-year-old Miranda Washinawatok to be brave enough to say a few words. She can't rely on speakers in some foreign land carrying on the language. The future of Menominee and other Native language lies in kids like Washinawatok who are willing to take pride in their language, in spite of the cruel barriers thrown up by the Mrs. Gurtas of the world.
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