CARLOS Tiger without Time

OHSWEKEN, Ontario (Reuters) – In a grey, shed-like building on the Six Nations of the Grand River reserve in southern Ontario, Esenogwas Jacobs is getting her kindergarten students ready to head home for the day.

“Gao dehswe,” Jacobs says, calling her students to the door.

“Gyahde:dih,” she adds, it’s time to go.

Her students answer with assertive “ehes.”

No one speaks a word of English.

“I just use Cayuga with them,” Jacobs said. “Mostly they can respond back in Cayuga, so it’s pretty cool.”

The eight children of this kindergarten class carry on their shoulders the hopes for preserving the language of the Cayugas, one of the six nations that make up the Iroquois Confederacy of southeastern Canada and the northeastern United States.

Since the 19th Century and until recently, Canada has pushed for the assimilation of its native population, sending aboriginal children to boarding schools where they were taught the language, culture and spirituality of Canadian society.

While the effort to assimilate aboriginal people into Canadian culture failed, the schools, the last of which closed in 1996, were effective at stunting aboriginal languages.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has promised to set up a commission to look into the schools, which could lead to a statement of apology similar to one issued by Australia to its aboriginal people this week.

Less than a quarter of aboriginal people in Canada use their ancestral tongue, the government says. The number of fluent Cayuga speakers has dropped from 376 in the 1970s to only 79 today.

“The number of speakers, they’re dying off all the time, like every year,” said Elva Jamieson, who learned the language as a child from her family, but wasn’t allowed to speak it at school. “It gets lonely when you don’t have someone to talk to.”

Jamieson is a teacher at the Gaweni:yo High School, part of the same Cayuga language immersion program that also includes Jacobs’ kindergarten class, as well as a parallel Mohawk language program.

“I think the language speaks to their spirit,” Jamieson said of the 35 pupils at the high school, located about 70 miles southwest of the Ontario capital Toronto. “They’re able to grasp it and go with it.”

While the linguistic knowledge of native speakers like Jamieson is irreplaceable, Gaweni:yo — which means “nice-sounding words” — is helping to slow the erosion of the Cayuga language, and young people are becoming a viable population of fluent speakers.

The most dedicated meet up regularly to chat in Cayuga and practice new words and some even use Cayuga as the primary language at home.

Jacobs, 24, herself a graduate of Gaweni:yo, tries to speak only Cayuga with her boyfriend, another graduate, and she spends evenings visiting with elders to learn new words.

The program has been running since 1986, but this is the first year that it has included a kindergarten class. Many of her young students are the children of fellow Gaweni:yo graduates and Jacobs encourages them to use Cayuga at home, too.

While the dominant language on the reserve is still English, Jacobs is happy with the progress. The language is going through a rebirth, she said. “It feels good knowing these kids are coming up.”

LANGUAGE LOST

Not far from Jacobs’ kindergarten, a group of adults are also studying Cayuga in a crowded community centre classroom. One of them is Oklahoman Sally White, a descendant of the Seneca-Cayuga – a tribe that separated from the Cayuga of Six Nations in the 18th century.

The Seneca-Cayuga spoke a similar dialect, but their language has now been declared extinct, which means a man from Six Nations must go to Oklahoma each year to perform their traditional ceremonies.

“Without him, I don’t think we would have (our ceremonies),” said White, who hopes to learn enough Cayuga to teach the basics to her husband and other members of their community. “It’s just about gone. We’re losing a lot.”

But saving dying languages costs money and for many Canadians the price of immersion programs such as the one at Six Nations may be too steep.

Canada’s Conservative government, elected two years ago, has cut a 10-year, C$173 million ($173 million) language revitalization program, leaving the immersion programs at Six Nations dangling by a thread. School officials do not know if there will be funding to continue past the current year.

The death of the language would be a tragedy, according to linguist Marianne Mithun, who spent 10 years studying the decline of the Cayuga language at Six Nations.

“The loss of language is a devastating loss of identity,” said Mithun, a University of California Santa Barbara linguist who specializes in aboriginal languages in North America. “It is the disappearance of their heritage, a blacking out of their intellectual and cultural history.”

While Cayuga still has enough mother-tongue speakers to document how the language should be spoken, a process that is taking place on Six Nations through video and audio archives, Mithun worries that once all the elders die, the living language will only be a pale shadow of what it once was.

“When you get to see a language like Cayuga, you just see other ways of looking at the world,” said Mithun, commenting on the language’s literal nature. “If we care about understanding the human mind, then we’re really missing the boat if we let these languages slip.”

* By Julie Gordon (15 Feb 2008)

RIBNOVO, Bulgaria (Reuters) – Fikrie Sabrieva, 17, will marry with her eyes closed and her face painted white, dotted with bright sequins. She lives ‘at the end of the world’, tending a hardy Muslim culture in largely Christian Bulgaria.

The remote village of Ribnovo, set on a snowy mountainside in southwest Bulgaria, has kept its traditional winter marriage ceremony alive despite decades of Communist persecution, followed by poverty that forced many men to seek work abroad.

“Other nearby villages tried the traditional marriage after the ban was lifted, but then the custom somehow died away — women wanted to be modern,” said Ali Mustafa Bushnak, 61, whose daughter came to watch Fikrie’s wedding.

“Maybe we are at the end of the world. Or people in Ribnovo are very religious and proud of their traditions.”

Some experts say clinging to the traditional wedding ceremony is Ribnovo’s answer to the persecutions of the past.

Bulgaria is the only European Union nation where Muslims’ share is as high as 12 percent. The communist regime, which did not tolerate any religious rituals, tried to forcibly integrate Muslims into Bulgaria’s largely Christian Orthodox population, pressing them to abandon wearing their traditional outfits and adopt Slavonic names.

The wedding ritual was resurrected with vigor among the Pomaks — Slavs who converted to Islam under Ottoman rule and now make up 2.5 percent of Bulgaria’s 7.8 million population — after communism collapsed in 1989.

But today it is still performed only in the closed society of Ribnovo and one other village in the Balkan country. Young men return from abroad to the crisp mountain snows, just for the winter weddings.

People in Ribnovo identify themselves more by their religion, as Muslims, than by their ethnicity or nationality, and the wedding ceremony is an expression of their piety. The village has 10 clerics and two mosques for 3,500 inhabitants.

DOWRY ON DISPLAY

Fikrie’s family have been laboriously piling up her dowry since she was born — mostly handmade knit-work, quilts, coverlets, sheets, aprons, socks, carpets and rugs.

On a sunny Saturday winter morning they hang the items on a wooden scaffolding, 50 meters long and three meters high, erected specially for the occasion on the steep, muddy road of scruffy two-story houses that leads to her home.

Nearly everyone in the village comes to inspect the offerings: Fikrie’s tiny homeyard has been turned into a showroom for the furniture and household appliances the bride has to provide for her new household.

The girl and her husband-to-be, Moussa, 20, then lead a traditional horo dance on the central square, joined by most of the village’s youth.

But the highlight of the ceremony, the painting of the bride’s face, comes at the end of the second day.

In a private rite open only to female in-laws, Fikrie’s face is covered in thick, chalky white paint and decorated with colorful sequins. A long red veil covers her hair, her head is framed with tinsel, her painted face veiled with and silvery filaments.

Clad in baggy pants and bodice shimmering in all the colors of the rainbow, the bride is presented by her future husband, her mother and her grandmother to the waiting crowd.

Fikrie is not permitted to open her eyes wide until a Muslim priest blesses the young couple. Alcohol is forbidden at the wedding receptions and sex before marriage is taboo.

BANNED RITUALS

Ethnographers say it is hard to date the bridal painting ritual, as the communist regime did not encourage studies into minority ethnic and religious groups.

“It is very likely that it is an invented tradition. It’s their way to express who they are,” said Margarita Karamihova, an associate professor at the Ethnography Institute of the Bulgarian Academy of Science.

Experts say Pomaks had identity problems and faced more challenges than the majority of Muslims in Bulgaria, who are ethnic Turks.

“In the 1960s they would ban Islamic music at weddings, then they would not allow traditional clothes, and in the 1980s, the whole traditional Pomak wedding was banned,” said municipality mayor, Ahmed Bashev, born in Ribnovo.

Ribnovo’s inhabitants used to make a living from tobacco and agriculture, but low incomes in the poorest EU country forced men to start seeking jobs in cities in Bulgaria or in western Europe — not least to raise money for a wedding.

Outside influences have been slow to reach Ribnovo and young people rarely marry an outsider. Another Fikrie, 19-year-old Fikrie Inuzova, suggested the women, for whom the acceptable bridal age is up to 22, are not in a rush to modernize.

“My brother wants to travel, see the world… It’s different for men. They can do whatever. I want to stay here and marry.”

* By Tsvetelia Ilieva

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – A California arbitrator ordered Health Net Inc to pay $9.4 million in damages and expenses for what he described as “reprehensible” conduct in canceling the policy of a cancer patient after she fell ill, according to documents made public on Friday.

The award to Patsy Bates, 51, included $8 million in punitive damages and raised concerns about the company’s practice of retroactively canceling policies of individuals who make large claims and paying bonuses to underwriters for meeting cancellation targets.

Health Net said in a statement that, while it does not agree with some of arbitration judge Sam Cianchetti’s conclusions, it will immediately adopt a review process for all policy cancellations.

The multimillion-dollar punitive damages award, the first in a so-called recision case, is sure to send a message to other large health insurers who face lawsuits over the practice, said Bates attorney William Shernoff.

“Let’s see if these other big health carriers will change their practices, then we will have done something,” Shernoff told Reuters. “Until this punitive damages award came down, nobody was doing anything.”

Shernoff has three proposed class actions over retroactive cancellations pending in California courts against Health Net, Blue Cross and Blue Shield, as well as a case involving a newborn boy whose Health Net coverage was canceled after he was born blind and with cerebral palsy.

The Bates case brought to light a bonus system in which Health Net set annual policy cancellation targets that it described in terms of numbers of canceled policies and millions of dollars in savings in medical expenses.

CHEMOTHERAPY CANCELED

Bates had health insurance with another company for several years before a Health Net broker solicited and enrolled her in an individual insurance policy in August of 2003.

Bates was diagnosed with breast cancer a month later, and began chemotherapy treatments but had just three of eight planned treatments when Health Net pulled the plug, contending she had lied about her weight and a heart problem on her application.

“Can you imagine having Stage 3 cancer and you think you have insurance and you are supposed to have eight sessions of chemo and you have three and they are stopped?” she told Reuters. “If you haven’t had to go through trauma that you may live and you may not, you may not understand.”

A cancer advocate enrolled Bates in a state-funded program to finish her chemotherapy treatments. Her cancer went into remission but she still has no health insurance and was left with about $130,000 in unpaid medical bills.

In an opinion issued on Thursday, the arbitrator found that Bates’ application had been improperly filled out by the Health Net broker, and inadequately reviewed by its underwriters.

“It is difficult to imagine a policy more reprehensible than tying bonuses to encourage the recision of health insurance that helps keep the public alive and well,” arbitrator Cianchetti wrote in his opinion.

In awarding the $8 million in punitive damages, Cianchetti observed “it is hard to imagine a situation more trying than the one Bates has had to endure.”

He also warned that Health Net ignored its own guidelines as well as “obvious errors,” including at least one error “amounting to criminal conduct.”

In response, Health Net said it would rescind no policies going forward without a binding external, third-party review process.

The company said it planned to clarify its application and underwriting processes to insure it received all necessary information before issuing policies.

Health Net also pledged to do a “comprehensive review” of its processes, including broker training and education.

“We take this very seriously and are committed to resolving these issues,” the company said in a statement.

* By Gina Keating (Feb 22, 2008/ Editing by Gary Hill)