Professor Jeffrey Davis has spent over twenty years of his life teaching and researching American Sign Language (ASL) and has now written a book called Hand Talk: American Indian Sign Language.

He spoke to students on Friday, Sept. 17 about the importance of preserving Native American heritage.

Davis has been developing his book for twenty years. He expanded on his post doctoral work after realizing that the language was in need of being researched and documented to prevent it from being forgotten.

Davis’ presentation began with an explanation of the use of sign language in many areas of life, not just the hearing impaired.

Aboriginal Australian women of the north central desert of Australia used the tradition of sign language for a year after the death of one of the men of their tribe.

Neapolitan Italians use sign language frequently when communicating with other people.

Martha’s Vineyard Sign Language was understood by many of the citizens, to the extent that deaf people were able to function normally in public places.

An anthropologist named Nora Groce studied this phenomenon, and noted that the very high rate of deafness, one in 155 people, is most likely due to heredity.

Her findings showed that the American Indigenous people have higher rates of deafness than other ethnicities.

Davis began to study Native American “Indian” Sign Language (NAISL), in 1990 after he received a small grant to observe the National Archives in the Smithsonian for information.

Other European Countries have archives, but nothing like the Smithsonian,” Davis said.

During a severe blizzard, he met an archivist who was working on Ken Burn’s documentary about baseball. She told him about the shelves full of videos of NAISL, that were never published. The tapes aided his studies and allowed him to view many more signs.

Not much research pertaining to NAISL was done before the early 1800s. However, some theorize that NAISL had been developing for thousands of years.

NAISL is an Alternate Sign System, which is a very complex type of signed communication.

The use of NAISL was inter-tribal because they all had different speaking languages.

Lewis and Clark noted in their travels that Sacagawea would use hand gestures to communicate with many tribes.

It is theorized that this use of a universal sign language is what allowed the Native Americans to continue using their separate spoken languages. A modern day example is the increased use of English as a second language by many countries.

90 percent of the world’s languages aren’t written, that’s why they are in danger. They die everyday.Professor Jeffrey Davis

The Native Americans of the Plains were the best signers and are the only people to keep the NAISL intact.

Last summer, Davis filmed members of the Northern Cheyenne tribe, in Montana, showing him their different signs. The Northern Cheyenne tribe hopes to save their language and is happy that it is being preserved in film.

Davis then brought up the controversial theory that teaching a child sign language can cause development problems in speaking and writing skills. He then showed how an observation of parents, who did not teach their deaf child ASL, was able to disprove the theory.

The researcher noticed that the parents and child developed their own form of sign language that they would subconsciously use to communicate with one another. The system was very advanced; it used nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs.

The problem with endangered languages is that it is difficult to revitalize them.

The use of sign language began with tribes as a way to help deaf people live normal lives out of isolatin. It eventually grew into a way of communicating during their daily activities.