American Indian Culture and Research Journal

When the Europeans began to come to stay in North America in the seventeenth century, they found a completely new horizon, not only in flora and fauna, climate and geography, but also in the people they encountered. Differences between Europeans and North Americans in physique, dress, customs, manners , and economy all stood out with great clarity. With similar clarity, the differences in language stood out. The languages the Europeans encountered were unlike any they had encountered before, not only in sound and structure but also in the social settings in which they were found. In Europe there were but few languages, which were spoken by large numbers of people-hundreds of thousands, if not millions, in some cases, such as English and French; in North America, there were dozens of languages, spoken by very small speech communities in the hundreds of thousands. In Mexico and Peru, where the Aztec and Inca empires flourished, the language structure was imperial, with subject peoples continuing to speak their own languages even though many learned that of the rulers of the empire. Furthermore, the European languages, as welI as the languages Europeans had encountered in the Middle East and in Asia, were written languages, with grammatical and literary traditions. The languages of North America were neither written nor did they have such traditions. They presented an uncharted sea of variation and diversity. So the newness and unexpectedness of the languages and those who spoke them had their impact on the Europeans. Faced with these new languages, along with the new cultures and customs, the Europeans set about to record and describe the new linguistic horizon as best they could. The recording and description of languages, which here will be our major concern, was admittedly a secondary linguistic task for the Europeans. Their first concern was to learn the languages they had come in contact with; the second was to write down what they had learned. This recording they did as best they could within the intellectual framework that was available to them and in the absence of native literary or grammatical traditions to use as a guide-much early description of North American languages sounds like a description of Latin or Greek, or even Hebrew- and with a great variety of success and failure. But record they did, and the result was a fairly large body of writings of various sorts- dictionaries, word lists, phrase books, translations (mostly of the holy scriptures), grammatical disquisitions, and the like. The pattern of European response to North American languages can be organized in terms of a cycle that seems to repeat itself throughout the history of this response. The sequence includes, first, the response of explorers and travelers; second, that of missionaries; third, that of scholars. From the earliest times of Europeans in North America this triad of explorer, missionary, and scholar has reacted and interacted with the languages encountered, and the result of this interaction is a large, sophisticated body of data and techniques that has contributed greatly to the development of linguistics, and to the preservation, analysis, and even the spread of the languages concerned.

The world today is full of new ideas to bring about change in our society. The field of education is no exception, as educators, too, have jumped on the bandwagon of change. For the educational practitioner, though, it may be extremely frustrating to try to determine which innovations are of value. This frustration is especially keen for educators who work with American Indian children. Of the hundreds of new ideas available, few have been evaluated at all, and even fewer have been evaluated and used with Native Americans. An extremely important part of communicating educational innovations to any group is that the educator is able to sift and decide which innovations are appropriate for his use and for the use of the children for which he has responsibility. There is a great value in diffusion theory, which we in education can use to help us introduce new knowledge more quickly into the classroom. In the past, many innovations took at least thirty years to become adopted in the majority of the classrooms. Even adoption of the new-mathematics program took six to eight years in the majority of classrooms across the nation. Most of the early diffusion theory came from people in agriculture and the extension service working to persuade farmers to adopt new practices. Recently, writers in education have looked at the special problems of education in our public schools in relation to the theoretical framework for developing a communications system of delivering information to the schools. If we are to move education ahead for Native Americans at a much faster rate than in the past, it is extremely important that the people responsible for the education of Indian children see that the gap between the development of new knowledge and its use is narrowed. Moreover, they should demand that only those ideas that have been properly tested and developed for Native Americans be used with these children. Research has shown that in education, as well as in agriculture and other fields, different levels of adopters of innovations exist. Most authors generally recognize the first level of adopters as the innovators themselves. Next come the early adopters, many of whom are leaders in education at the local level, people who would rather see new techniques tested and tried before put to use than to jump on every bandwagon. The next level is the early majority, followed by the lake adopters and laggards. The latter two groups frequently let very successful practices pass by before they are willing to accept them. Diffusion research has pointed out the important role of the linker in the diffusion of an innovation. In the regular educational structure these people may be found in state departments of education, regional service centers (in states that have regional service centers), some county offices of education (in states where such offices have been developed to serve this purpose). In many cases, central office personnel act as linkers. Universities could also act as linkers, although they do not often see themselves in this role. In Native American education, many other linkers are utilized. The BIA serves as a vital link between the knowledge developers and users. Tribal education officers are an extremely important linker where they exist. Many state departments of education have directors of Indian education whose primary responsibility is to see that adequate programs are developed for Indian children within that state. Each of these people links the developer to the educational practitioner, to ensure that worthwhile innovations are put to use in educating the Indian child.

Although some uncertainty exists regarding the exact date, it is generally believed that Quanah Parker was born in 1845 near Cedar Lake on the southwest edge of the Staked Plains of Texas. Quanah's father was Peta Nocona, a chief of the Nocone band of Comanche warriors. His mother was Cynthia Ann Parker, a white woman taken captive by Comanche raiders in 1836 at the age of nine. During his younger years, Quanah attained prominence as a cunning and resourceful war chief. It was during the period 1875-1911, however, that his reputation as a speaker of great influence and considerable eloquence was established.

In 1846, General Stephen Watts Kearny and about three hundred dragoon, of his "Army of the West" rode into Santa Fe to lay claim to New Mexico on behalf of the United States, a claim legalized two years later, in 1848, by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Along with it went most of what is now the southwestern United States, enlarged to its present boundaries through the ratification in 1854 of the Gadsden Purchase.

American Indians have played a part in motion pictures from the time the flickering light came out of the inventor's workshop in the last decade of the nineteenth century up to the present day. It is not likely that Indians will be abandoned as a source material in the future. To understand what "part" Indians played it is necessary to have some knowledge of the way in which the motion picture industry developed. The flickering light in the darkened room moved from the experimental stage to its present state of proficiency under a variety of names: Moving Pictures, The Picture Show, Silents, Talkies, Movies, and now, more esoterically (elevated to the rarified atmosphere of an art form), Film-or, even more elitist, Cinema. But what had begun in the clinical air of the laboratory soon took to the streets and the carnival midway, where it gained instant popularity. The response of the early audience can only be called primitive. The first reaction was characterized by open-eyed wonder, awe, fascination, and delight. The enchanted eye of the masses was not confused by any critical faculties of evaluation, selectivity, or judgment of the content of the Magic Lantern offerings. Not then. A minority view of the new device among literate people- intellectuals and academicians- was one of disdain and disregard. Whereas such enlightened viewers might have recognized the significance of this new form of mass communication and made use of it for serious purposes, they showed no such perceptivity. Instead they remained aloof from one of the most effective means of communication ever developed by a technological society, secure in their conviction that those dimly lighted, jerky images would remain a sideshow attraction.