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"I dont have any place to go and talk Indian," was a comment made by an elderly Speaker of Loyal Shawnee (Sawanwa) in White Oak, Oklahoma.
The chiefofthe Loyal Shawnee Tribe reports there are 8,000 tribalmembers and yet only a handful of eiders still remember the language. The chief initiated an informal language program, which meets weekly and attempts to record the linguistic knowledge ofthose eiders and to create an environment in which the language of interaction is Shawnee. The story is very similarfor the Euchee Tribe of l,500people just south ofTulsa, Oklahoma.
A young lawyer found there were only 10 to 12 fluent Speakers left in his Community. Startled with the finding, he began to organize a language class. This article is an account of what mostly elderly Speakers of Oklahoma Native American languages feel about their languages, what they want to do with the language situations in their communities, and what Community members and education/linguistic specialists have done to revitalize these languages. Special attention is given to issues andproblems of designing programs for language revitalization.
