$50K award to keep Hupa language alive
HSU assistant professor works to keep language alive with immersion classes
Humboldt State University assistant professor Dr. Sara ChaseMerrick was awarded a $50,000 grant earlier this month to help support her Hupa Language Immersion Summer School. The Dreamstarter Gold grant from Running Strong for American Indian Youth, a nonprofit that offers immediate services and financial support to tribes nationally, will help Chase-Merrick transform her week-long Hupa Language Immersion course into a fourweek summer program.
“This has been a collaborative effort with the Hoopa Tribal Education Association, with language teachers and speakers, as well as family. This is not just a me thing,” laughed Chase-Merrick in a phone interview with the Times-Standard.
Chase-Merrick is a Hoopa Valley Tribal member and grew up on the Hoopa reservation. After graduating from high school, she studied indigenous studies and linguistics at Columbia University in New York and later received her Ph.D. in education with a designated emphasis on indigenous language revitalization from UC Berkeley. Along with her work as an assistant professor in child development at HSU, Chase-Merrick has developed a Hupa Language Immersion program to revitalize the endangered language.
“I applied for and received the education Dreamstarter grant for $10,000 in 2017,” said Chase-Merrick. “That was for one of the first Hupa language immersion camps that we’ve had in the community in about 20 years. I’ve been working closely with my aunt, Verdena Parker, who is really vital to this project … and is one of the last fluent speakers who have spoken the Hupa language from birth.”
Chase-Merrick said she didn’t want to simply translate a basic kindergarten curriculum into Hupa, instead, she chose to approach teaching and learning from a Hupa perspective.
“Stories was really central to that. Each camp is centered around a traditional story,” Chase-Merrick explained. “There’s a collective piece, the relationships between the students as well as us, the teachers who are not fluent speakers but learning along with them and reconnecting those generations.”
Parker was in school during the transition from boarding to public schools but was still punished for speaking the Hupa language in class, Chase-Merrick said.
“So, reconnecting that generation to now, that tie between generations and language that colonialism has tried to sever is being reconnected through these children listening to stories and learning the language and to not be punished for it,” she said.
“I think the intergenerational model is an important piece that also highlights the importance of teaching indigenous children their language and speaking the language on multiple levels,” Chase-Merrick explained. “You can think about what is the importance of this for the individual child, their self- esteem and identity concept which is really amazing in itself.”
This year, Running Strong for American Indian Youth announced the $ 50,000 Dreamstarter Gold grant which would go to five Dreamstarter winners from previous years.
“We really wanted to further our investment of those five grant winners she was one of them,” said Hanna Hayden, spokesperson for Running Strong for American Indian Youth. “(Dr. ChaseMerrick) is just so brilliant and dedicated to defending the dying Hupa language.”
Running Strong provides immediate survival needs to native communities all over the world. In addition to direct services, Hayden said Running Strong
wants to invest in the success of tribal communities by providing financial and logistical support to organizations already doing the work.
“We are a native-led organization. I think what sets us apart from some other organizations is we’re here for the long run, we go where communities tell us,” Hayden explained. “We don’t show up and say ‘ this is what we’re going to do for you’ we start off with ‘ how can we best be serving you?’ One of the components to a community’s well-being is not only the immediate physical needs but the cultural need as well, such as language revitalization.”
With the $ 50,000 Dreamstarter Gold grant, Chase- Merrick hopes to extend the Hupa Language Immersion course into a four-week program. She said the COVID-19 pandemic complicated in-person learning, but it also enabled her team to get creative.
“This time has actually allowed us to expand into another area that we’ve been talking about like making videos, books and posters, hands- on things that we can put in homes.
That’s a major piece of what the grant has and will continue to allow us to do,” Chase-Merrick said.
The grant will also help Chase-Merrick to pay her team for their work.
“The other important thing is to place that value and importance on language expertise and knowledge. So, to be able to pay my aunt for lending us her knowledge and expertise and to pay others to develop curriculum and teach,” she explained. “I would say ideally everyone in our community would want to learn the language, but they’re working jobs and have kids and all these other things to do. So, creating opportunities where they can prioritize the language in a way that doesn’t take away from their family and their well-being is something the grant will help us to do.”