The Teacher
At 29, Stacey Oberly is teaching a language that's been spoken in Colorado for centuries. Whether Ute can survive the next century is in doubt.

The future of the Ute language rests with people like Stacey Oberly, who teaches it to children at the tribe's Montessori school in Ignacio. Two hundred years ago, Ute was Colorado's predominant language.

The future of Colorado's only indigenous language sits before Stacey Oberly, filling the room with words on the verge of extinction in a chorus of little voices.

Pien. Muan. Kaguchin. Togochin. Namichin. Chekachin. Nu.

Mother. Father. Grandmother. Grandfather. Younger sister. Younger brother. Me.

"Let's see if any of these will trick you today," Oberly says to her 14 students, kindergartners and first-graders at the Blue Sky Montessori School on the Southern Ute Reservation in southwest Colorado.

She holds up flashcards with numbers, then colors, then animals. The children shout back the Ute word for each, and for the moment it seems as if this ancient tongue is alive and relevant.

But it is not.

Two hundred years ago, the predominant language of Colorado was not Spanish or English, but Ute.

Today, Ute is a language struggling to be heard. Only a handful of people speak it fluently, a few dozen by some estimates, the majority over 50 years old. Oberly's class is unique; the local elementary school recently dropped a class in Ute and the high school hasn't offered it in years.

"It's like that for Indian people all over the country. We're fighting to retain some of our language, our religion, our culture," says Alden Naranjo, a tribal historian. "Sometimes, our own kids aren't interested in learning. I guess that's what they call progress."

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In the centuries before European settlement, before they were forced onto reservations, Utes roamed Colorado virtually alone. Their words are scattered across the state's map -- Saguache and Uncompahgre, Weminuche and Tabeguache.

As recently as the 1930s, writers who visited the Southern Ute Reservation near Ignacio reported that although traditional arts and foods were dying out, the Ute language was not.

"Although many old Ute customs are fast disappearing, their language has persisted with little apparent change," they wrote in the WPA Guide to Colorado, a Depression-era government project. "All younger Indians speak both Ute and English and most can speak Mexican-Spanish."

Um aa' nuu apag'ad? Do you speak Ute? The answer today around Ignacio is most likely kuch -- no.

Naranjo, who's 58, learned Ute the traditional way: at home. "It was my first language." It was the early 1940s, but by then Ute was under siege, the victim of decades of federal boarding-school teachers who discouraged children from speaking the language in class. When discouragement didn't work, mouths were washed out with soap.

"They were supposed to learn the American way of life," Naranjo says.

The repression had a lasting effect. Oberly, for instance, never heard Ute at her house as a child, even though her mother is fluent.

"My mom, she didn't teach me by choice. She wanted me to be successful and not go through the stuff she did," Oberly says. "She didn't understand the total ramifications of her choice."

The 1950s were a turning point, Naranjo says. Elders who knew the language were dying. Meanwhile, their grandchildren and great-grandchildren weren't being taught.

"They didn't forget their culture," Naranjo says of postwar parents. "They were just too busy, too busy making a living. I'd say they put it aside."

Naranjo, who worked as a police officer for 30 years, didn't find time to teach his four kids. Now semi-retired, he's teaching his five grandchildren.

Learning Ute takes time. It's an oral tradition, not a written one. A Ute dictionary didn't exist until a college professor compiled one in 1979. Full of esoteric notations conveying unique sounds, the dictionary is as difficult to grasp as the language's many spiritual and cultural nuances.

Explaining the spring Bear Dance, for instance, in a language other than Ute is like attending a Catholic Mass that's not in Latin. Something is both gained and lost in the translation.

"Our culture, our traditions, go hand in hand with our language," Naranjo says. "It's hard to explain in English, but it's all intertwined."

Naranjo fears that even if the Ute language survives, it will do so in a truncated form, becoming a collection of words with their deeper meanings planed away.

"In time, all that will be retained is the definitions of words. But you won't be able to use them in their intended context," he says. "You'll be able to say, 'See Spot run.' But who is Spot? What is the essence of that word? What does it mean? That is what will be lost.

"It's scary. We're down to a few people who know the language, the traditional ways. When they're gone, where do we go then? Who will we be then? "We're going through a cultural genocide."

Oberly remembers when she realized what was at stake. She was driving home from New Mexico with her mother. The night was clear, the light of the heavens rained down on the high desert, and Mary Inez Cloud explained that the stars are alive.

"That concept is so big," Oberly says. "In Ute, the stars are our ancestors and they're all alive up there and they're looking down on us and taking care of us. In my English world, they're just burning masses of gas."

In college, where she majored in Spanish, Oberly had a cultural awakening -- an awakening that led to hours of tape-recorded conversations in Ute with her mother.

"A lot of people have put the responsibility of saving the language on the tribal government," Oberly says. "But it's up to each of us as individuals."

At 29, Oberly isn't fluent in Ute. Yet she knows enough -- and her skill is rare enough -- that she's able to plant the seed of tradition with Autumn and Ricky, Christian and Jessica, Orion and Spring Wind.

"Maybe they'll remember a few words and take some pride in their culture," she says. "Maybe they'll take it home with them and teach their parents."

Colorado Millennium 2000 is a yearlong project by the Denver Rocky Mountain News, NEWS4 and the Colorado Historical Society
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