No Sound Needed. A partial exploration of Bellingham’s Deaf and Hard of Hearing community, Deaf history, and American Sign Language. Story by Sadie Fick.
Meet several members of the local community.
Linda Boyd. Boyd has been immersed in Deaf culture her whole life. She grew up using ASL at home and with family, as all four of her grandparents, both parents, cousins, and other extended family members were Deaf. She attended a school for the Deaf for her primary education and graduated from Gallaudet College, now called Gallaudet University, the only university in the world that focuses on serving Deaf and Hard of Hearing students. She got her Master’s degree from San Francisco State University, where she had ASL interpreters for her classes because they were taught by hearing professors who did not know ASL. Recently, she set up a new ASL program at Western Washington University and is currently a professor there.
Gareth Magiskog. Magiskog grew up using SEE signs. In college, he became immersed in the Deaf world and ASL in the community. “[ASL is] more than just producing the movement of the hands,” they said. “I take a picture of my head and just kind of describe it in sign language and produce it.”
Mizeal Zamora-Guillen. Zamora-Guillen is completely Deaf but occasionally uses hearing aids. He is a Western student majoring in early childhood education. He first used a unique system of gestural signs with his family, then learned SEE signs when he went into the public school system, and finally learned ASL later. Zamora-Guillen has vocabulary from multiple languages in his head. He is Mexican and his family speaks Spanish. “I don't actually know how to speak that language,” he said. “It's hard for me to communicate with my family sometimes, but I also tend to use like home gestural signs with them, it makes it easier to communicate without speaking.” Art: A cut-out of a head with a thought bubble. In the thought bubble is the ASL sign for the letter K, the English word “leaf” and the Spanish word “cucina.”
What is SEE sign? Signed Exact English, or SEE sign, uses signes like ASL but uses English word order and grammar, and uses less facial expression and body language than ASL, Magiskog said.
When Zamora-Guillen is using his hearing aids, he enjoys listening to nature sounds. Art: A person wearing hearing aids listens to nature sounds, including birdsong and a waterfall. The birdsong is visually represented as a series of blue and red straight lines that go sharply upward at the end and the waterfall noise is visually represented by gently wavy lines of in blue, green and yellow. Zamora-Guillen also uses hearing aids as an emergency back-up. “If there's an emergency or a car accident, you know, something like that, [if] somebody needs to get my attention, I like to be able to know where to stand and be aware of what's going on and my surroundings,” he said. Still, hearing aids aren’t how Zamora-Guillen usually engages with other people. “I tend to use ASL most often,” he said. “That's my preferred language and I like having an interpreter who can change my signs into English word structure.”
Deaf community. “I kind of feel in the middle of both [Deaf and hearing] worlds sometimes,” Mizeal Zamora-Guillen said. “I have to kind of acclimate myself to which situation I’m in.” Art: A person’s head is in the middle of two overlapping circles, one light red and one blue. Zamora-Guillen’s partner is a hearing man and Zamora-Guillen wants to be involved in his partner’s hearing social circles, but also with his own Deaf social groups. “Deafness has its own separate culture,” he explained, adding that Deaf people support each other.
Linda Boyd grew up surrounded by the Deaf community and said she has always felt very supported and positive about herself because of all the role models she’s known. Boyd said she doesn’t feel like she’s missing anything by being Deaf. “I feel completely normal and at ease as I am,” she said. “I’m a fully visual person.” It is easy to find details about local events within the Deaf community online, Boyd said. The Northwest Washington Community of the Deaf also provides a space for Deaf and Hard of Hearing people to build a community in Whatcom and Skagit counties. “Basically it’s a social club,” explained Gareth Magiskog, the current president of the group. “[We have] a range of ages, from senior citizens getting together for social gatherings, all the way to newborns to introduce them to the language and the culture.”
How do kids learn to sign?
Deaf history. In the early 1900s, teaching ASL was banned in schools, instead, Deaf children were taught oral skills, like lip reading and learning verbal speech. When Northwest Washington Community of the Deaf was established in 1982, part of its mission aimed to give Deaf and Hard of Hearing children access to a community and ASL users to learn from as they grow up. The push to teach oral skills, known as oralism, set back rights for the Deaf community by decades and didn’t work for many Deaf people. Hearing aids or cochlear implants can help some hear enough to communicate orally. For people like Boyd, who can only hear vague rumbles with hearing aids and very loud noises without hearing aids, oral skills are difficult and unhelpful. Boyd explained that reading lips is hard, for example, the shapes the mouth makes when saying “mat” and “bat” look the same. However, in sign languages, those words are easy to tell apart. Art: A person tries to lip-read. Above the person’s head is a thought bubble with question marks and a drawing of a bat and a mat. Before teaching sign language was banned at the Milan Conference in the 1880s, there were Deaf elites Magiskog said. Deaf artists, Deaf attorneys, Deaf doctors and others were highly respected by their communities. “As a result of the conference in Milan, Deaf teachers lost their jobs, as there was an overall decline in Deaf professionals, like writers, artists, and lawyers,” wrote Jamie Berke in an article about the Milan Conference of 1880. “Also, the quality of life and education of Deaf students was negatively impacted.” * * Source: Berke, Jamie. (2021, January 21). The Milan Conference of 1880: When sign language was almost destroyed. Very Well Health. https://www.verywellhealth.com/deaf-history-milan-1880-1046547 “I feel like Deaf people are a whole lot more limited today in this generation than we were back in the early years because we went through this history and time of oppression,” Magiskog said.
American Sign Language. Despite the ban, Gallaudet College (now Gallaudet University) kept teaching classes in ASL, and in 1970 a linguistics professor there, William Stokoe, declared sign language a true language, according to Berke. Thanks to that and students at other schools using signs despite the bans, ASL survived the oralism movement. ASL is very important for communication, Zamora-Guillen said. “It's important that sign language is very visual,” he said. “I feel like a lot of people enjoy watching ASL being used because again, it's almost like an art form. It's just an interesting way of using language.”
Knowing how to sign also helps Deaf people connect with others who use one of many different sign languages worldwide, Magiskog said.
Sign languages are often considered “young” languages. However, there is some historical evidence that LSF, French sign language, is as old as spoken French, according to the 2022 study “Perspectives: On the historicalness of sign languages” by Yann Cantin and Florence Encrevé. * * Source: Cantin, Y. &Encrevé, F. (2022, March 16). Perspectives: On the historicalness of sign languages. Frontiers In Communication. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2022.801862 ASL evolved into a language separate from LSF, and was also influenced by Indigenous sign languages like Plains Indian Sign Language. Indigenous sign languages also undermine the narratives of sign languages as young. ** ** To learn more about Indigenous sign languages, see “The hidden history of ‘Hand Talk’” by Vox https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1-StAlw3aE
Lessons. Magiskog said that someone doesn’t have to know ASL to talk to Deaf people. He encouraged hearing people not to be afraid and just ask Deaf people how they want to communicate. Zamora-Guillen encouraged anyone who is interested to learn some ASL. “I encourage [the hearing community at Western to] use ASL, even just simple signs like ‘Hello’ and ‘Welcome,’ just to make it a more positive environment.” Art: The ASL signs for hello and welcome.
Story by Sadie Fick. Video recording assistance by Evan Upchurch. Thanks to Linda Boyd, Gareth Magiskog, Mizeal Zamora-Guillen, Gretchen Rumsey-Richardson from Western’s Disability Access Center, and several ASL interpreters. Image credits: Back of head by Sadie Fick, The letter K in ASL by Jen Zwick via Flickr (CC BY 2.0), Waterfall by Dinkerdoo via Deviant Art (CC BY-SA 3.0), Bird - priyakrishnan948 via Deviant Art (CC BY-SA 3.0), Bat - HauntingVisionsStock via Deviant Art (CC BY 3.0), Mat by Sadie Fick, Paper by Wise-online (CC0), Hello in ASL by Sadie Fick, Welcome in ASL by Sadie Fick.