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Language Restoration Before Funding: Or, What to Do Before the Grants Come Through J OCELYN C. AHLERS California State University, San Marcos When members of Tribes whose languages of heritage are endangered first find themselves able to turn their attention to issues of language documentation and revitalization, the examples of successful efforts which are most frequently cited are typically well—known cases such as Hawaiian and Maori (not to mention Hebrew). While these are all excellent examples of language revival in practice, they share one feature in common that can be rather intimidating for Tribes beginning the road to revitalization: large amounts of organized funding. Immer- sion schools of any kind can require a great deal of money to get up and running. This includes funding to train teachers, to develop curricula, to pay for space for teaching; the list goes on. It would be unfortunate for any person interested in working on the revitalization of his or her language of heritage to feel unable to begin such work until a large grant has been acquired, or to assume that an im- mersion school must be the first goal. The purpose of this paper is to suggest that it is possible to strike while the iron is hot, to begin to achieve meaningful and important steps in the revitalization process before any funds have been found to support large—scale efforts. In order to show this, I report on the steps achieved by the Elem Pomo Language Group in the first three years of revitalization efforts, which were completed largely without any large—scale funding. Each of the actions taken by the Language Group during these three years comprises a step which was necessary for the process of language revitalization to continue, but was also small enough, and in this case done in such a way, that large amounts of funding were not necessary. In this way, we ensured that we would be ready to take advantage of funding opportunities as they arose. It is useful to begin with a brief description of the status of Elem Pomo. Elem (Southeastern Pomo) is a Pomoan language spoken near Clear Lake, California, in Lake County, on the Elem Pomo Indian Colony. As late as the 1970s, as many as one—third of Tribal members still had some knowledge of their language (McLen— don 1975), although it was rarely used in conversation. The Tribe gained federal recognition in the 1970s, and now has somewhat fewer than 200 enrolled mem- bers. Elem underwent a process that could be referred to as “gradual death” (Campbell and Muntzel 1989), with at least two stages of bilingualism, first with 48
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