Mandan elder seen as language's last hope (fwd)

[Phil CashCash]

Mandan elder seen as language's last hope

By the Associated Press
http://www.bismarcktribune.com/articles/2003/09/15/news/local/nws03.txt

FARGO -- Edwin Benson stumbles through a few false starts before he
catches his rhythm telling an old story about how a coyote turned into
a buffalo.

He sits on a stool draped with a woolly buffalo hide across from a man
recording him with a digital video camera mounted on a tripod.

After only a few minutes, Benson holds up his hand to stop the camera.

"My throat got a tickle," he explains. "I didn't want to cough."

Then, once Benson catches his stride, his tale of a conniving, hungry
coyote tempted by a lame buffalo calf begins to unfold.

Benson's occasional apology in English interrupts his low rumble of
guttural sounds, with inflections that rise and fall like rolling
hills. He's speaking Mandan, the first language he spoke growing up in
his grandfather's house along the Little Missouri River.

Now, with more than seven decades behind him, Benson's command of his
native tongue is rusty from disuse.

He speaks Mandan mostly on ceremonial occasions and in the classroom,
where he teaches fundamentals of the language to children in a school
three miles from his rural home on the Fort Berthold Reservation, which
straddles Lake Sakakawea in west-central North Dakota.

Benson has watched as the language of his childhood has disappeared
around him, dying a little more with the passing of each elder in a
dwindling pool of fluent native speakers. Now only a handful remain.

Linguists consider Benson the last truly fluent speaker of Mandan. Even
his wife, Annette, who watches quietly from the corner as Benson tells
his story, can't speak the language.

"It's a lonely life, it's a lonely life," he said. "If I want to say any
Mandan words, I've got to say it to myself and I don't want to say it
too loud, otherwise people might think I'm going wacky."

When Edwin Benson dies, the main living library of the Mandan language,
a language spoken for thousands of years along the valley of the Upper
Missouri River and its tributaries, will die along with him.

The Mandan Edwin Benson learned while growing up often came to him as a
stream of stern paternalistic commands and lessons.

His teacher was his grandfather, who raised him and taught him some of
the old ways the Mandan had followed for centuries.

Ben Benson was a living link to the ancient practices of the Mandan. He
was born in the latter part of the 1800s in Like-a-Fishhook Village,
the last traditional earth-lodge village of the Mandan, Hidatsa and
Arikara, three neighboring tribes that came together as their numbers
dwindled from disease.

Traditional ways were in long decline when Edwin Benson was born in
1932. Like-a-Fishhook Village was abandoned in 1882 when its residents
were moved to the reservation's agency village, Elbowoods. Cabins made
from split logs replaced the domed earthen lodges.

After his mother died, his grandfather kept Edwin, the youngest of five
children, at home with him. Several sisters were sent to a boarding
school in Billings, Mont., where speaking native languages was
forbidden.

Growing up in his grandfather's household, Benson heard and spoke only
Mandan. He encountered English when he first attended school, at age 7.

"English language didn't make no sense at all when I attended classes,"
he said. "But I picked up the language watching what others did."

He served a tour in the Army, then spent a couple of years as an
itinerant laborer in the Pacific Northwest, a time when he drank
heavily.

After he returned to Fort Berthold, he married in 1955 and eventually
settled on high land that had been in his mother's family, three miles
from the Mandan community of Twin Buttes.

Occasionally, Benson drives down as close as the waters of Lake
Sakakawea will allow, to the place where the Little Missouri joins the
Missouri River, where his grandfather's house and father's cabin once
stood beneath the cottonwoods.

"I still feel bad when I go back down there to look," he said. "A lot of
our ways, how we did things, is all kind of buried there under water,
under the big body of water.

"My language is down there, my culture is down there," he said. "It's
not really with me."