 seminar, thanks for coming along. And this seminar is by Dr John Wynne here, who I'll introduce in a moment. I'd like to start by saying that language documentation, which is an area near to several of our hearts here at least, that for language documentation, its goals for language endangering can't be addressed by drawing on linguistics or formal linguistics alone. Rather, it has benefited from understandings and interactions with other allied areas like applied linguistics, socio-linguistics, sign linguistics, but not only that, but also from the knowledge and techniques of other disciplines such as anthropology, ethnography, history, biology, media studies, and the performing and the creative arts. So it's in that context that I've got great pleasure in introducing John Wynne, who I've known, or some of us have known, since about 2005, and I also have the honour of collaborating on a couple of his projects. Now as for John, he's a sound artist. He has a PhD from Goldsmiths College. He's currently a reader in sound arts at the University of the Arts here in London. He's a core member of the creative research in the sound arts practice group. He has, if you look at his web pages, you'll see that he's won many awards and prizes for his exhibitions and his work. His work's often based on significant research and field work, and his outputs have been shown in museums, galleries, public spaces, radio, a range from massive installations to flying radios. He's been interviewed internationally in the USA, in Canada, Thailand, many places here in the UK, and several places in Europe. His long-term research projects have involved working with people, including lung transplant patients here in the UK, and some endangered languages communities in Canada and Africa. To give you a flavour of his work, these are some of the titles of his exhibitions. Two hundred and thirty unwanted speakers in walnut rain vinyl vignette particle board construction, interactive plastic carrier bags, installation for three hundred speakers, piano and vacuum cleaner, transplants, hearing loss, which was an autobiographical piece relating to John's own father, hearing voices, which is a well-travelled exhibition that was, I think, first or, no, not first, but maybe second run... Third shown here at the Brunei Gallery, with which the Endangered Languages Project had a lot of interaction. We actually run a parallel exhibition that worked on John's side featured koi and sand languages from Namibia and Botswana. And most recently, an exhibit called Anzpaya, which is an audio-photographic and linguistic documentation of speakers of the Endangered Language, Kit Sanimath, who lived in a small reserve in northern British Columbia in Canada. That was a project that John undertook together with a visual artist and linguist. So I'm sure we'll hear about, quite literally, some of these projects in John's presentation. Can I hand over to you, John? Thank you, David. Just realized I hadn't plugged my laptop in. I don't want to lose power in the middle. In 1963, I was sent to a residential school in Edmonton, and what they fed us mostly there was spam. And one day, there was a riot at the residential school. I was outside on the ice rink, and I heard some commotion. And some of the older boys had broken into the pantry where they kept the spam, and they threw boxes and boxes and boxes of spam out onto the driveway. And the police were called, and they were driving over these cans of spam. Later, the Department of Indian Affairs was called, and the food did improve a little after that, and that was at Indian Residential School. I wanted to start that way to kind of, as a way of kind of highlighting the inadequacy of translation, in a sense, and also to kind of, in a way, putting myself through the... I was translating the words of one of the project participants, Gary, here. And I was trying to sort of put myself through the process of remembering oral history through, I mean, my knowledge of Getzanima, which he was speaking, and I will play a bit later of him actually speaking it, is very limited. When I first recorded Gary, Gary Williams, with the linguist Tyler Peterson, who David mentioned earlier, he was, when he spoke in Getzanima, he went through a long story, and pretty much the only words I understood at that point were spam and riot, which of course kind of got me interested. And as soon as he stopped, I said, what was that about? A spam riot? And then he told the story in English, which was generally what we asked people to do. Sometimes they spoke in English first, and the translation, so to speak, was in their other language. In most cases, however, like with Gary, the story was first in Getzanima, and then in English. Oh, this is gone. Okay. So it's interesting actually just a Facebook friend of mine the other day, a native woman in Canada posted something which I hadn't realized about residential schools. I don't know. I assume most people probably, perhaps everyone knows what a residential school is. Anyone who doesn't really know what it is? Well, residential schools in Canada, and I assume they existed in Australia as well, were schools that native kids were forced to go to, usually, quite often anyway, hundreds of miles from where their community was. And in the case of the Getzan, they grew up in a community sort of at the confluence of a couple of rivers, and salmon is a huge part of the culture and the diet and the year round, the various ways they prepare it and preserve it. And these kids are sent away to residential school hundreds of miles away and fed spam, which, for those of you in younger generations who might not have heard the original use of the word spam, is canned corned beef. Oh, there's beef in it, isn't it? Well, but processed meat, I thought it was beef. Maybe in Canada it was beef, maybe it was other things elsewhere. Anyway, so the Gary's story was about this spam riot. And I thought it was interesting that of all the stories that he presumably could have told about his time in residential school, that was the one that he chose to talk about. And one of the things that's interesting to me is the humor that is kind of mixed in with tragedy, with a lot of situations like residential schools. There are still things happening with residential schools in Canada. There was recently, and it's still going on, a kind of reconciliation process where survivors of residential schools are kind of bringing out stories. And there are still investigations going on as well. And recently the government has been forced to reveal, this is going back to where I started, was that my friend Angela posted something about an electric chair in one of the residential schools, which I hadn't heard about before, but it's only recently, it came out some time ago, I think, but the government has been suppressing it, and it's sort of just come out that they have to release some of this information about it. And, yeah, apparently there are, this is one particular school in Ontario, a Catholic school at Fort Albany, and apparently there was an electroshock chair used for punishment in the school's basement, apparently until the school was closed in 1973. And another thing I was kind of looking into for this talk was something a little closer to where we are now, the Welsh Knot, which presumably also some, perhaps many of you know about. It's a block of wood that children in Wales were forced to wear if they were heard speaking Welsh in the English schools. And a child who was heard speaking Welsh was forced to wear a block like this around their neck, and if they heard another child speaking it, they got to pass it to that child, and at the end of the day or the week, whatever the system was, that child would then be punished, usually caning or something like that. And it apparently has been claimed that this happened as recently as the 1940s in Wales. And in sort of looking at, looking that up last night, I came across an interesting image of a performance artist in Wales. This is Paul Davies, and his, sorry, I'm just getting my text the right size to read here. Paul Davies' performance holding above his head a railway sleeper with WN for Welsh Knot written on it at the National of Stedford in 1977. His protest in 77 was directed at the Welsh Arts Council, who'd organized a, quote, international performance art event at the Stedford, including Joseph Boyce and many other names, but excluding Welsh artists. So this is a photograph of his protest performance at that event, which I hadn't seen before. So I thought before getting to the endangered languages part of my work, I'd go through a few things that kind of led me up to my interest in endangered languages. And this is one of my very early pieces. This is a sound only piece, but this is, I did have a photograph of this guy named James Komodokimani, and he's a member of the Kikuyu community who was living in the outskirts of Nairobi when I met him. And when I was introduced to him, I recorded a kind of brief speech he made, which was half a part in Kiswahili, part in English, and part in Kikuyu. And he was kind of welcoming me to Kenya and saying, I want you to give greetings to people on your side. And so I kind of made this piece as a way of passing on those greetings and thanking him for his hospitality. Now I was quite interested in him as kind of phatic statements, because you didn't really have to understand the words so much to understand what he was, that it was an act of greeting. And for me they symbolized the relationship between visitor and visited, and we're already thus somewhat halfway between language and pure sound. So I kind of made a kind of abstract, well not abstract, but I took it further in the, took his utterances further in the direction of abstract sound while maintaining some of the rhythmic features of his voice. So this is a piece from 1996, a part of that piece. Huh So, after that piece, while I was in Kenya on that first trip trip. I was also introduced to this man, Ingosi Moshi, and he's a master musician from the north of Nairobi. And he said, oh, you must come and visit me upcountry. And so I, when I came back to London, I started planning a trip to go and record him and make a piece of work about it. But this time it started out, kind of, my initial idea was to make a kind of sonic portrait of him as I'd done with James. But this time I got very interested in the sounds of the environment where he lived as well, which was near a sort of dwindling pocket of rainforest, a rainforest that once stretched all the way across Africa and now it's just in small pockets. So I was also interested, also wanted to kind of acknowledge the sort of subjectivity of the piece and the effect of my own kind of memory and my experience on it. So I was using both his voice, his instrument, and recordings I made around the area with him. I'll just play you some short clips from this piece upcountry. And from another section of it. I said, woman, woman, and worker. That was very, very, last song which I heard when I was very, very small person and the people were doing, and reading somewhere and they just singing about some different name of people who, who was their performance, their song, avoid me. And just finally a bit from the end section of that piece. So in the end section there you're hearing a combination of unmanipulated sound and his voice manipulated and his shiriri, the one string fiddle that he plays. One of the things that kind of struck me in retrospect about that piece was about the, was kind of feeling slightly uncomfortable about the manipulation of his voice in a way. So when I came to the hearing voices project, which was based on click languages in the Kalahari, I still wanted to kind of explore some of the boundaries between documentary and abstraction as I was doing in that piece. But it took me a long time to kind of think about ways of both working with the voice and working with the environmental sounds. And I made a couple of pieces from the materials that I gathered in Botswana. One was a radio piece and the other was an installation. And I think one of the things that I did think was effective about that up country was a way of kind of getting people to listen to kind of the grain of someone's voice in a sense and the kind of information that carries. And also getting people to sort of hear the environment slightly differently and doing that by kind of becoming abstract and kind of musical with the materials, but then kind of returning to a more kind of documentary style. So I explored that a bit further in the radio piece for hearing voices. So let me just play some bits from that. There's a long slow introduction. This is a half hour piece that was commissioned by BBC Radio 3. And there's a very long slow introduction, but in the interest of time I'm going to kind of edit that down and just play you the last 30 seconds or so of the long introductory sound and then into the body of the piece and I'll sort of pick and choose bits through there. We noticed as we go around studying and documenting languages is it all sorts of amazing and unusual characteristics of human language turn up. So one of the perhaps striking examples of this is amongst the Khoisan languages and some of the Bantu languages that are in contact with them in Southern Africa that they have an amazing range of click sounds that are used in the languages to express meaning. The women and children like to go and collect wild berries and edible and succulent fruits when they're easy to match what they're available. They often go out for the whole day. In the wildness the small children sometimes get thirsty and the group must go back home to get water for them. The men go farther to hand so they go where they know there's water and they drink from those water points. The women don't go as far together but where they go there is no water. The Khoan language is spoken in Bhutan. There are some very few speakers of Khoan in Namibia and in South Africa. It's got five fundamental tricks. Which is the dental, the interdental thing and then the alveodental thing. And you've got the palatine and the lateral. It's not written. The most difficult has a click inventory talking about the fundamental clicks and their influences that is their accompaniment with that number over 120. I personally feel inferior to somebody who can produce 80 different clicks. Yet it is a lot which is that once I've beyond the next generation. So that's the first, well from the start of the piece and part of my reasoning with handling the manipulation of languages was to manipulate the academics for the most part speaking English as well as the Khoisan speakers. So at the beginning there with Jose Itzi's voice what I did was I separated the click consonants and the vowels and stretched out the vowels so that when she used a vowel I would then stretch that out to about a thousand times its natural length kind of create this chorus of vowels. And there a kind of inventory of clicks in a way that were edited out from her speech. And when I came to the installation I kind of distilled my techniques a bit. When I hear this piece now for me it I have reservations about it about the way that I manipulated the language and I'm not sure I would do it again but I still think there are some interesting things about it. But you'll hear in the work that I did with the Khoisanamuk that I didn't manipulate the voices. I stuck to manipulating the environmental sounds which has a very different effect. So Jose Itzi was working with Andy there. The language she speaks this is a quote from, oh I forgot to get his name on there. This is I think Peter Ladafogun who's talking about even the name of this language is particularly difficult for speakers of European languages to pronounce. So this is one of the I think five koi and sound languages that I recorded together with Andy. Jose Itzi is the only one that we recorded not sort of in the Kalahari. She was working living in Gabaron at the time and this was at the University of Botswana before we went up country and recorded. Her language is one of the most phonetically varied of the Khoisan languages and there are currently I think something like 5,000 speakers. I'd have to check that this might be an old figure I've got. And they're mainly in Botswana and there are 48 distinct click variations and some 83 different ways of starting a word with a click. And the phonetic complexity of this language is apparently approaching something like a maximum for human linguistic behavior. So it's quite unusual for someone as young as Jose Itzi to be a fully competent speaker. Most of the people that we worked with both in Botswana and in Canada were middle aged or older. And several of the people that we worked with on both projects have died since we did the recordings. But Andy was working with Jose Itzi to develop an orthography of her language. So the car sounds in that piece I used because the trans-Kalahari highway which kind of took us up country fairly newly improved highway through Botswana became a kind of theme sound wise for me in the piece. Kind of a representation of the incursion of technology and also the effect of technology on languages and cultures by bringing in people from outside but also of taking away young people from communities. Often before they develop a kind of fully competent use of their local language they often go away as Jose Itzi did but luckily taking her language with her to the bigger cities. So we also made some recordings at the side of the Kalahari, Trans-Kalahari highway. And this was a squatter camp. These people had been, a lot of the Khoisan have been evicted from their traditional lands in the Kalahari game reserve and places where they found diamonds. And they often live in squatter camps like this where they follow the work or in this case they had found a school for their children so they had to stay there. I think I'm going to skip that actually. So one of the things that was often a challenge in recording in the field is because making high quality recordings is very important to me and it's been sort of the basis of both the collaborations I've done with Andy Chaban in Botswana and with Tyler Peterson in Canada is my role with them is to provide as high quality recordings as I can provide. And sometimes as in the case of this squatter camp beside the highway it's not always easy to get high quality recordings. So in fact in this instance we recorded inside the car. So I forgot to arrange those slides properly but that's me setting up the microphone inside the car which worked out fine. We didn't get the wind noise and I was using a sort of what's normally used in kind of studio situation large diaphragm microphone. So in certain circumstances I try and control the acoustic environment as much as possible so when we're recording in other places I would kind of try and use mattresses or blankets inside a room to try and improve the acoustics a little bit. When people are evicted from the game reserve and other sites they're often sometimes if they're lucky given a government house that might look something like this. This is Tama Sobe. It's not actually his house. It's a house owned by another or lived in by another one of our participants. I think I'll play a little bit of one of the participants of the project named Roy Susana who is one of the founding members of the first people of the Kalahari and we were lucky that he just happened to pass through and be staying in the same missionary place as we were. So let me play a bit of his. He says he's Roy Susana. He speaks Kalahari. He stands for the rights of the first people of the Kalahari. Lately these people were removed from the central Kalahari game reserve and put into settlement and in this settlement they have undergone oppression deprivation and their culture is lost and they are told that there is development but the development really is not for them. The development is for other people and these people are the ones who really oppress them and therefore other people they remain without their land they remain without their language and their culture. In the Tuana culture they are taken as second great citizens they are not like all the people know of God Taikwa rights rise to their language. In schools there's no school that teaches their language and therefore he feels really that this is very inhuman this is very degrading and therefore there is no future if nothing is done to correct this kind of thing. People are trying to connect. The fact that coison people are thought to be among the original human beings and they have been the original human beings with the type of grief that they have people have tried to connect that with language that I think is still speculative. There's still a lot to be done to bring them back to life. That I think is still speculative. There's still a lot to be done to really find out the connection between cliques, beginning of speech and the fact that the coison people are being thought to be among the original human beings on earth. Simply is not the case that there is any language anywhere in the world that is primitive. All languages are rich and detailed and complicated. They have thousands of words. They have grammatical systems that enable their speakers to express any idea they want to express. A language may have only a small number of speakers but that doesn't mean there's a small language. Basically it's kind of almost an act of faith for all languages to say that you can say anything in any language. If you haven't got a way of saying it now you can make one out of it. You can borrow words so that there is no such thing as a language which is deficient on the whole in the ways of saying things. So that was actually recorded in this room. Peter Ladafogged when he gave a talk. One of the things that I tried to do in that piece which I often get frustrated when I'm listening to a documentary or watching one on television when you hear someone speaking a language that you don't very often hear and it's an amazing language and then they very quickly turn it down and have someone giving a voiceover. So I tried to as much as possible within the confines of the half hour that I had try and let people hear the actual voices and have the translation after. There were a couple of places where it just became impossible for me to have the time to do that because I also wanted to make the piece quite slowly paced so that you could hear some detail in environmental sounds as well so that clanging sound you heard there was a water one of those metal water pumps with a small windmill at the top. The way that... I'll talk a little bit about the installation now by the time I did the installation which was after the radio piece I had kind of rejected some of the methods I was using in the radio piece and decided to make the installation using only voice sounds but actually someone commented about the installation that it had a sense of the desert to it but what I did with the installation was just to use the elongated vowels and the click consonants but rather than putting the click consonants in a kind of strict time grid the way I did in the radio piece I left them in their sort of temporal locations so that this kind of syncopated rhythm of clicks that went around the room was the actual rhythms of the speech and then the voices themselves would come up occasionally through that and what I did with people's images because I was interested in kind of questioning or problematizing the ethnographic gaze as well and to kind of acknowledge the mediation of technology involved in this installation and of all kind of documentation of languages in a sense the photographs were by the same woman who took the photographs for me for the Gitsen project, Denise O'Rissio and we discussed during the field work what she was going to photograph how she was going to photograph it and she did various things and then I decided on these pictures with the equipment between the camera and the subject and also I decided to print them very sort of faded like this so this is what the installation looked like here at SOAS there's an interesting comment actually I often find people's comments in visitors books as interesting as what critics say but actually Stefan is also a kind of cultural critic but he said it felt to him like languages slowing down almost coming to a standstill and talked about the space kind of resonating which was quite rewarding for me because that's exactly what I wanted to happen and people were spending a lot of time in the installation which is another thing that I want to happen the real voices of the participants do emerge from the sound but in order to hear them all you'd have to spend in this piece I can't remember exactly what it was probably 30 or 40 minutes in the space to hear it all and some people were spending all that time which was quite good so it was kind of a piece that's again meant to explore the boundaries between speech and sound and so it showed before it came here it showed in the National Art Gallery of Namibia and those are shots of it there each time I show pieces like this I usually adapt them depending on the sort of architectural configuration of the space I'm given so in Namibia it looked like that in Botswana where it showed first Botswana National Museum it looked like this it was a kind of octagonal room I guess one thing I forgot to mention is that the images are actually speakers so the sound of each person's voice is coming from the speaker that has their image on it and so it's a kind of quite immersive piece you're sort of surrounded by sounds but you can also as you see someone in the Namibia installation there people kind of go up to each one and can hear each voice clearly and again I try and avoid people all the various subjects speaking all at once I mean there's a lot of sound art out there that involves a kind of jumble of voices and I wasn't really interested in that I wanted people to be able to hear what people were saying and so in this piece and in the Gitsan work later on I provided full kind of translation panel so that you could understand what each person was saying in this piece they weren't speaking English they were only speaking in their languages but as well as kind of creating this space to encourage people to slow down think about the issues of language endangerment and kind of creating a kind of contemplative space for that I also was aware that we'd collected a lot of materials and I wanted to make quite a distilled installation in a sense so I started to wonder what I could do with all these materials that would be kind of useful both as information for visitors to the exhibition and also kind of almost form a kind of catalogue for me and also potentially an archive source for people like the Working Group for Indigenous Minorities in Southern Africa to use for their kind of work to raise awareness of issues so I got involved with Peter and David here and we worked on along with Rob Monroe who was here at the time who's now in San Francisco developed this at the time it was a CD-ROM we've recently sort of redesigned it a little bit updated some things, tidied some things and we're releasing it as an app now with the language documentation description volume 12 that's the image there is Nicodemus Barkard who was our primary translator on the Botswana project an amazing character who spoke all of the Koisan languages that we were working with and they're for the most part mutually unintelligible but he spoke all of them as well as English, German Setswana, Afrikaans and that's him kind of looking at the disc in Botswana when he came down for the opening but unfortunately when he came down to the capital of Botswana, Gabaron, for the opening the opening was delayed because the National Museum there obviously is a government run institution and when they found out that Roy Sassana was one of my participants they said oh hang on a minute the permanent secretary has to approve this the disc and it was only the disc that they were worried about and they sort of asked me if I would go ahead with the show without the disc and I said no so the result of that was that the opening was delayed while the permanent secretary looked at the disc I'm sure when he saw the disc he would have seen that Roy was just saying what he was going around the world saying he was involved I'm not sure if it was at that time or shortly after he was working with Survival International taking the Botswana government to the high court there to challenge the legality of the forced evictions from the Central Calhari Game Reserve a fight which they eventually won so anyway eventually the opening went ahead at the museum and this disc which I had always intended to be a kind of kiosk alongside the installation was allowed to go ahead so I'll just briefly show a little bit of the app as we now have to call it so this has not all of the material I recorded but most of it an introductory essay by David Toup who writes on sound and sound art it's got some information about the languages themselves some information about where Botswana is and where we recorded it shows the roughly the sort of distribution of each of the languages there's Roy Susana and you can jump to him as a speaker or you can go to the the speaker speaker's page here and see the various people that we worked with so Jose is there Nicodemus Roy we've already heard so Nicodemus himself he was quite direct about the problems of alcohol both for himself personally and for the community there are Nicodemus there are there are there are there are there are there are there are there are there are there are also some choir songs that I recorded and most of the material on the disc didn't feature in my installation so there's a narrow language choir which is so there's your Dutch hymns that were translated into narrow and performed there so I'll leave that there in the interest of time and because I haven't got to the Gitsan material yet so the Ansplayak project I when I started the work in Botswana I didn't really know anything about the politics or the history of the Khoisan languages in Southern Africa and I was only vaguely aware of the notion of language endangerment but having done that project and learned a great deal about language endangerment a lot of my PhD thesis was about those sort of issues I wanted to do a project in Canada which is where I grew up I wasn't born there but I wanted to kind of myself both further about language endangerment but also about issues facing the indigenous communities in Canada and through my connections here at SOAS I got in touch with various linguists over there and decided both through the path that I found and through preference really to work with the language called Gitsanamakh there are about 400 competent speakers of Gitsanamakh at the moment of course depending on who you ask one of the features of Gitsanamakh that intrigued me once I started hearing it was the presence of voiceless fricatives and the W at the end of Anspayak is one which interestingly enough it could hardly be more opposite the kind of clicks that I've been dealing with in Botswana the Gitsanamakh is spoken in an area near around the Kisbyaks reserve where we did the work in British Columbia on the west side of Canada and as with the other project I was there partly to kind of provide materials for Tyler who you see behind the camera there and I was both Tyler and Andy in Botswana had been as well as their kind of narrower linguistic focus Tyler's interest is in modality and apparently there's very interesting ways that Gitsanamakh deals with modality they were also interested in the wider context and also just getting people to say what they wanted to say and kind of the more sociolinguistic side of things which is what I was interested in so again that's an example of us just Holly just wanted us to record something of her for her own purposes she was trying to get some work in the tourist industry so we kind of did that for her even though it wasn't part of what either of us was likely to use for our own specific purposes so just this is an example of how the kind of data or metadata I suppose is called that Tyler is producing from the materials that we recorded very detailed translations and I'll play you let's see a little bit of I think I'll skip that that's no I will play it so and let's see this is so this the Ansbayak piece is only an installation I haven't done a radio piece from the material yet I'm still hoping to do something with it and here so anything I'm playing from this installation is kind of a reduction from the it's actually a 12 channel immersive installation mixed down here into just two channels interest here is about only a little about some other very little of that range here in the village because a decent move down to the village here about over a hundred years ago over a hundred years ago and that is about the extent of our own life but the election is different I heard my great-grandmother speak it it's a real classic we talk about Shakespeare present English that's how it was really deep with expression not to hear it I want to use it all down I have no problem speaking English I don't stutter, sputter around or not be trying to speak it but I'm not a rather used model when we get together guys like us we don't speak English my brother and sister my brother and Roy here but the next generation is entirely different students that start speaking this part each English that's speaking they do understand to know how to why we call it Samalia okay well I seem to have done spectacularly badly with timing today because I've got a lot of other things I wanted to talk about and say I'll just go through some of this very quickly the installation looked like this it was another one with flat speaker panels that's what it looked like at the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver where it showed for nearly a year and then it showed again at the end of last year at their satellite gallery in downtown Vancouver it also showed in San Francisco it was part of the American Anthropology annual conference where it showed in an interesting context in a gallery at the back of a bookshop I thought that so when you faced one direction you saw the bookshop behind I thought it worked particularly well with that image I did want to play a little bit of Gary speaking that 1963 and I thought it was a little bit of a big deal I thought it was a big deal I was thinking it was a big deal I was thinking it was a big deal I was thinking it was a big deal Well, I will span the party with that, which is some riot, so I don't know if you are a riot leader. So I just wanted to get a bit of that in at least, and of course one of the things that I forgot to mention about the residential schools, which maybe all or most of you know, is that they were like the Welsh punished for using their own language as well. So, yeah, that's probably a good place to leave it if we're going to have any time for questions. Okay, let's thank John for the talk, replaying several of his items of his work. There's a few minutes left for questions as well. We will have drinks, as is the normal fashion with the Institute, so if you want to actually grab John and ask or challenge him, he'll be there. Any questions for now? I thought it was interesting. What lingua stuff can do when we try to go out and make recordings? You were talking about doing good quality work. We actually want to throw away all that environmental stuff and try and not have the chickens and the noises in the background. We're really interested in the fine linguistic side of it, but in fact you were actually adding the environment to what you were doing. Should we be paying so much attention to trying to keep out all the experiments that you think? Well, whenever I record voice, I always try and do that as well, probably because I'm a control freak. Then I've got control over the environmental sounds and how I use them in relation to the voice. The sound of the frozen river running behind Bob's voice there wasn't happening when I recorded him, it was added after. To try and get a good recording for the linguist that I'm working with with environmental noise is probably not a good idea, I think. No, I don't think it's the wrong approach. From the beginning, from my early work, from that piece from the mid-90s with James Kamala Kimani, I'm quite interested in very close miced voice and as I mentioned, the grain of the voice. I've done a project with heart and lung transplant patients and what I found with those very close recordings is you hear the illness in the body, so people with lung problems or if it's a heart problem that you can hear the weakness in their physical being through those recordings that you wouldn't get if I was standing here with a microphone. It's an obtrusive way that I record, so that's why those photographs with the microphones in front of them, that's what people have to put up with when I record them. Part of the reason I'm interested in using still photography with recordings is that I find that people will relax more if it's just a microphone. They can quite quickly forget a microphone. People tend not to forget a video camera in their face, so Tyler did want to record video in a lot of cases, but I was quite happy that he would just set it up on the side and let it run because what we were both primarily interested in was getting the recordings as good as possible. I have a question in the absence of any others. You talked a bit about in your personal journey how you got uncomfortable with manipulating the sounds of the kohisan speakers and had a bit of a reaction to that later, which I think we saw. I think that would resonate for some of us, I think, who have recorded and worked with languages and say we're very happy to use recordings in language documentation, whatever that is, but perhaps also uncomfortable about commercialization, manipulation, non-authentic reproductions or presentations of them. You must be closer to a debate about that than we are. I wonder if you can tell us more. I think partly with me it's a kind of, I suppose it's a matter of respect in a sense or responsibility. In fact, in the kihisan work I did manipulate the voice in one instance, but for me it was a really interesting case where the woman had, we were finished with what Tyler wanted to record and she said, well, I could sing a song for you. She sang her own translation of an old country song. She translated it into kihisanama. For me, and she also introduced it, because I wasn't really interested in, if you want to record some of the songs that are traditional to the community, you have to get very careful permissions. In some ways as an outsider in my particular situation, I didn't want to go down that road. I could have probably pursued that and got permission for certain songs and things. We did get permission to record the words of one funeral song, but when she introduced this song saying, oh, it doesn't belong to anybody, which I found out isn't strictly true. She'd taken this country song, she translated it into kihisanama, she sings it quite regularly at ceremonies and things apparently. I felt somehow that that gave me a license to play with it a little bit. I don't want my work to be too dry and I want a playful element. There's a point which I didn't get a chance to play where there's a lot of laughter going on, which there was in a lot of our working situations. Those sides of the context of field work are something that I like to bring into it as well, whether it's environmental sounds or the more social context of it. That's a long answer to it. This is maybe rather case specific, but I was just curious about the comment that you made about some of the age of speakers when they're fully competent. I was wondering what you meant about that. I should have put that in quotation marks. I suppose it's a term that I've picked up from linguists. What is the definition of competence? Is that still a word that gets used by linguists? It's political. Right. What I meant by it was just a fully developed use of the language. I defer to the linguistic debate on whether that's an appropriate word or not to use, but it's the case that we really had a hard time finding any young speakers in and around Kisby ox. We found one 18-year-old who'd apparently grown up with his grandmother and spoke it very well. We got in touch with him. We were never able to kind of get together. He was leaving for university at the time or something. Well, yeah, most... The situation with Gasanamuk, anyway, is that it's skipped a couple of generations so that the older people are speaking it. It's now taught in schools, but for the most part the children who are learning it in schools are not speaking it at home because their parents don't speak it. There are certain families like the Weget family. Oh, this is the Weget's house here. They've really kept up the tradition of the language, but I don't think the youngest... Well, it's possible that the youngest ones are starting to learn it. The teenagers in this family weren't speaking, but some of the very young ones were being taught it at home by Clara's daughter. This is her daughter, Fern, who sings the song that I was just mentioning. From what I understand is that speaking it at home is more important, or at least as important, as learning it in school. So if they're learning a few words in school and then going home and speaking English again, it's not going to stick. We didn't have any shortage of people wanting to work with us. In fact, Bob, the guy whose voice you heard talking about the old form of the language that was like the equivalent of Shakespeare, I met his sister. We went to Bingo one night on the reserve, and I got talking to his sister who was working there, and she said, oh, what are you doing here? And I told her what we were doing, and she said, oh, you have to record my brother, Bob. He's my encyclopedia. So she actually came to us and invited us over and wanted us to record, and she also is a speaker, and she has become really important to Tyler's work in the community. The language that I worked with had been working there before he grew up in the area. He has a history of working on that language, and he's continuing to work now on it, and Louise has become really important for his work, and she spoke at a symposium that we organized in Vancouver at the end of last year. There were some negative responses, not many, though. In fact, Clara's husband, he didn't want to participate, even though he would have been a really valuable participant. I think it was, well, the reason that he said was that he didn't want it to be exploited commercially or somehow he had some notion that we could make huge amounts of money out of it, I think, or at least that was the reason that he gave. There was one negative reaction, actually, at bingo that night when one woman was talking to me and she said, oh, you know, and it was kind of a response, I think, that you get from a lot of Indigenous communities that feel like they're just being studied all the time, and why is money going into studying us when we don't have proper dentists here? And that was her kind of argument. But for the most part, people saw it as a chance to... I mean, they understand, the people who do speak it understand that it's disappearing and that it's important to them, and having someone from the outside come and show interest in it is a positive thing, for the most part. And I think you're always sort of at the mercy of the history of other people who have come and studied, and luckily within this community, the linguists who've been there over the years have a good reputation. And as I said, Tyler's been working with people there before, so, you know, if someone comes in and does exploit the materials that they gather, it kind of ruins everything for the people coming after them in some cases. There was a case in British Columbia of a linguist who was working with the community and getting stories, and basically there was a dispute going on with the railroad company who wanted to drive a wider track through their territory or something, and so they had to... The native communities in British Columbia are quite unique in North America in that they never signed treaties, so they never actually gave their land away the way many groups did. So there's land disputes still going on in that part of the world. And apparently part of their proof of ownership of land or historical ownership of land is if they have place names in certain areas. And this linguist had been working with the community and he kind of... I gather probably for money, started working for the railroad company in helping them kind of prove where there wasn't ownership of the land. And there was another case of somebody giving away some kind of commercially important information about fishing grounds and stuff, and then a certain area got commercially exploited and was then ruined. So things like that have happened in some communities, but thankfully not with Gitsan. Well again, I think there are a lot of people there who really appreciate that. I know the working group for Indigenous minorities was interested in the work that a bunch of them came to the showing in Namibia. I mean I think the fact that people show interest from outside in languages can help because part of the problem with languages dying out is that people don't see a value to them and they just think that, well if I learn Setswana or English and go to the city I'm going to be much better off, but it's not a choice. Learning more languages is going to help you, not him to you. So I think that people showing interest from outside is often seen by some as a positive thing. I mean I have kind of some political reservations about using religion as a way of helping with languages, but there's no denying that the missionaries, like Hessel and Kobe Visser, where we stayed in the Kalahari, they're doing amazing work with the narrow language. I mean part of that work is Bible translation, but they've done a lot of, they've also been involved in dictionary, writing dictionaries and developing their orthography of the language. Unfortunately we've run out of time, so if you want to continue conversations with John about yourself or about any of these topics in 15 minutes or so, as per usual some of these will gather at the Institute of Education Bar, I think that way. So in the meantime, let's thank John for his stimulating talk.