Three Brazilians and the Australian language programs

We have been traveling in Australia for roughly two months now. The first place we visited was Parkes in New South Wales, then we went to Melbourne in Victoria, to Port Augusta and Adelaide in South Australia, and finally to Kununurra and Yuendumu in the Northern Territory. In these places, we met people that worked, respectively, on Wiradjuri, Woiwurrung, Barngala, Kaurna, Miriwoong and Warlpiri. These places and languages are listed in the same order as our trips, that also being the order of vitality of the languages: only the language mentioned last, Warlpiri, is still being spoken by children; the language mentioned next-to-last, Miriwoong, still has some elderly native speakers, and all the other languages are being revived from written sources. The fact that the vitality of these languages coincides with the order of our trips is not a coincidence, but is rather connected to the fact we first travelled to urban places near Canberra and then to gradually more isolated and harder to reach places.

As we reported elsewhere, our encounters with mobs working on language revival taught us just how hard it is. Though it is undeniable that language revival efforts have an important effect on the self-esteem of Aboriginal people and on school attendance, numeracy and literacy rates among Aboriginal kids, it is undeniable too that in none of the cases we learned of was an Aboriginal language revived beyond the knowledge of fixed expressions and of isolated words. Our experience left us thinking that it is really important to support the transmission of Aboriginal languages whose full speakers are still around.

In Kununurra we met precisely a mob working on boosting the transmission of an Aboriginal language, the Miriwoong language. Among the Miriwoong people, only a handful of elders are full speakers of their language, a few middle-aged people are good passive speakers of it, and younger Miriwoong people have had little or no exposure to the language. To remedy the situation, the Mirima Language and Culture Centre is working on two fronts. They have already been for some time running a program targeted at young adults, which consists of organized sessions in which the Miriwoong elders teach the language to the younger adults. The Miriwoong language center recently started a program targeted at children, consisting of lessons taught at childcare centers and kindergartens. It is too early to access how the child-directed efforts are going to fare. As for the adult-directed efforts, they don't seem to have resulted in the restoration of the use of the Miriwoong language in daily situations.

This experience showed to us that even when full speakers are still around, restoring a language once direct transmission has been broken is no easy business (though we can't disregard the non-linguistic positive impact of restoration efforts on Aboriginal people).

My personal point of view is that the focus should be dislocated from the restoration of languages and cultures to the underlying, far more complex and long-standing problems the brutal British colonization brought onto the native peoples of the Australian continent. Drug abuse, domestic violence and cultural disintegration are but the symptoms of Aboriginal peoples' dispossession, hopelessness and lack of control over their own lives.

That doesn't seem to be the prevalent view among those in power. In the Warlpiri community of Yuendumu, where the language is still being transmitted to the children, we learned about some recent actions of the integrationalist program of the Northern Territory government on Warlpiri schools. After a few productive decades of autonomous development of the Warlpiri school curriculum, with hundreds of books produced locally in Warlpiri language, the NT government imposed English as the school language. In the same vein, by enforcing stricter requirements on teacher certification, the NT government managed to reduce the presence of Warlpiri teachers in the school to only two (and take into consideration the fact that Yuendumu is the largest Warlpiri community of Australia).

Of course the situation is more complicated than anyone is able to grasp. Myself, two months ago I didn't know about any of those things, and I am maybe forming a rushed opinion. An interesting collection of points of view help by Australians on the demise of the education of Aboriginal children in their mother tongue can be found here.

On the other hand, my point of view, stated above, comes from the comparison of the situation of the Australian Indigenous peoples with that of the Brazilian Indigenous peoples. In Brazil Indigenous peoples have the constitutional right to self-determination, and even though that right is often illegally violated, it seems to me a bit scandalous that the Australian constitution sanctions the subjugation of Aboriginal peoples.

Symptomatic to me of the state of subjugation of the Australian Aboriginal peoples is the fact that, in Yuendumu, the principal of the local school is not a Warlpiri person. Nor are Warlpiri the people in leading positions at PAW, the modern incarnation of Warlpiri media, one the most important producers of media content in Aboriginal languages. This state of affairs must be contrasted to that of Indigenous schools and media associations in Brazil, where teachers, principals and media makers are Indigenous.

In the last stop of our trip, in Alice Sprigs, we learned about innovative uses of new digital media for the conservation and documentation of Aboriginal languages in the Getting in Touch Workshop.

Barefoot - Day 10

I've been thinking of trying to run barefoot.

Barefoot - Day 9

I've been forgetting to log my barefoot walks. I suppose it's because I've already become used to them. Yesterday I didn't wear shoes, and also on another day this week (which one I'm not sure). Today is the first time I leave my shoes at home for two consecutive days. That was something I was avoiding at first, out of fear of hurting myself, but now I think it's going to be fine. The reason is I'm combining doing consecutive days with doing less walking each day. I've recently joined the bike share program in my city, which kind of gives me a good balance between walking and biking (you have to walk from your point of origin to the nearest station from it, then from the nearest station from your destination to your destination). And last but not the least, yesterday was the first time I've randomly bumped into another person walking barefoot on the streets, which is kind of cool by itself.

Barefoot - Day 6

I've forgotten to log my last barefoot walk, which I think was two days ago. No discomfort anymore on my Achilles heels. My skin doesn't toughen as fast as I'd like it to, though. The middle front bump on the soles of my feet rub a lot against the asphalt and by the end of the two-way walk, the area feels a little sensitive.

Barefoot - Day 5

When will I be able to run on these bare soles? Maybe I should add some sand walking.

Barefoot - Day 4

One more day. barefoot. I had been avoiding walking without shoes because I was feeling some discomfort in my feet. I thought it was from walking on my bare soles, but then I noticed that even though I hadn't walked barefoot already for a while my feet were still kind of sore. Maybe it could be something else, and what I thought it was was this: At the same time that I started working on walking without shoes I also started trying to correct my walking gait. I tend to angle my feet outwards when I walk. I was trying to point them forwards. And of course after 30 years walking like a duck, forcing a "normal" gait is going to use all sort of muscles that had atrophied from "anormal" use. So what I did today was I tried to walk the way my feet wanted, and I think it might be working. I still want to correct my feet's angle, but I guess I should work on a thing at a time.

Barefoot - Day 3

One of the things I feel happens to a barefooter is you end up using your calves more. The internal part of my left Achilles's heel is a bit sore today. (The soles of my feet are all right, though.)

So, why did I think it would be a good idea to learn to walk on my naked feet? All of my life I've worn mostly minimalist footwear. Flip-flops and the like. Then I bought these fancy hiking boots for a trip to Peru and found out, once I was already there, that the boots hurt my knees. I was way too far from EMS to return the boots, so I ended up just doing all of those long hikes in Crocs. It was the rainy season, and sometimes I'd actually have to take the Crocs off if I didn't want to slip and fall in the wet slippery terrain.

After this trip I thought: to the hell with those shoes things. I already know I don't need no arch support from them (not any more than Crocs provide). It might not be too far-fetched to try and simply drop shoes altogether.

So that's basically it. I want to develop this super-power I thing is dormant in me.