Dying Language Animals & Extinction

[Andre Cramblit]


Last Words
Can dying languages, like animals, be saved from extinction? That's  
the difficult question being debated in Maine, where the Penobscot  
Nation is waging a determined fight to keep its melodic language alive.
By Stacey Chase  |  April 30, 2006

BEFORE BEGINNING TODAY'S lesson, teacher Roger Paul, a dark ponytail  
hanging straight down his back, pulls a blond sweet-grass rope,  
braided like a little girl's pigtail, out of his leather medicine bag  
and sets one end on fire. Gathered in a lopsided circle are two boys  
and seven girls in the after-school language program at the Penobscot  
Nation Boys & Girls Club on Indian Island, Maine. Paul instructs the  
pupils to cleanse themselves in the smoke, and they dutifully pass  
the smoldering, silky braid from one to the next, waving it over  
their bodies like a metal-detector wand. Afterward, they join hands  
and say a prayer using words that sound both unfamiliar and musical.

Smudging ceremonies like this one open every session of "Penobscot  
Days," a new three-times-a-week initiative that teaches children to  
speak Penobscot by pairing instruction with traditional Native  
American activities like drumming, basket making, and snowsnake, a  
game in which players hurtle a carved stick or "snake" down an iced  
snow path. "Whenever we speak the language the ancestors taught us,"  
Paul says, "it pleases them, and they come and listen in and guide us."

The Penobscot Nation's struggle to reclaim its melodic, esoteric  
language - considered severely endangered by linguists - sparked  
public debate in the past several months after the tribe's state  
representative, Michael Sockalexis, introduced a bill in the Maine  
Legislature calling for taxpayer money to be used "to develop a  
program to maintain and preserve the Penobscot language."

The drumbeat to save Penobscot that began in the 1980s has been  
growing louder from inside this insular community for five years now  
with the striking realization that the tribal elders were rapidly  
dying and, with them, the language.

Of all the New England states, Maine is the only one to have any  
Native American languages from tribes recognized by the federal  
Bureau of Indian Affairs that are still "living" - in other words,  
being spoken fluently. Moreover, the languages of all of Maine's  
recognized tribes are living. The Penobscot, Passamaquoddy, and  
Maliseet languages - from Maine's Penobscot Nation, Passamaquoddy  
Tribe, and Houlton Band of Maliseets, respectively - are mutually  
intelligible. The Micmac language, from the Aroostook Band of  
Micmacs, is discrete. While all these languages are in jeopardy, the  
threat to Penobscot, which has the fewest speakers, is especially dire.

According to the best estimates, there are as few as five fluent  
Penobscot speakers among the nation's 2,261 members, about 60 percent  
of whom live in Maine. Fluency, though, is tough to measure. Some  
Penobscots, like Sockalexis, learned their native tongue as children  
but mostly forgot it; some can comprehend it but feel uncomfortable  
speaking the undulating, polysyllabic words themselves; some speak a  
grammatically tortured version of the language; and some know only a  
few words and phrases.

"Now I've lost half of the Penobscot - I've been away so long,"  
laments 94-year-old Valentine Ranco of Wells, Maine, the state's  
oldest Penobscot and a fluent speaker raised on the Indian Island  
reservation. "Fifty years! No one to speak to!"

Ranco may feel alone, but in one respect she's not: Languages are  
disappearing around the world. "We are in a huge wave of linguistic  
extinction," says Norvin Richards, an MIT linguistics professor and  
an expert on obscure languages like Massachusetts's Wampanoag and  
Australian Aborigines' Lardil. "Something like 50 to 90 percent of  
the world's 6,000 languages are expected to die in the next century."

We fight for animals, for the bald eagle and the giant panda and the  
blue whale, with such fervor, but should we fight to keep a dying  
language alive - even if few will ever use or hear it? Maine's  
language preservation bill, which was awaiting action by the  
Legislature's appropriations committee this month, is nothing short  
of a Penobscot rallying cry that forces everyone to ask: What's in a  
language?

THE PENOBSCOT LANGUAGE IS PERCEIVED BYAN ENGLISH speaker, perhaps  
romantically, as a stream of unrecognizable rhythms that rise and  
fall effortlessly like chanting or singing. The stressed syllables  
are generally pronounced higher, not louder as in English, with the  
highest pitch typically falling three syllables from the end of  
polysyllabic words. In addition, Penobscot statements often rise at  
the end of a phrase - similar to the pronunciation of a question in  
English - and therefore produce a kind of lilt.

"When I hear my native language, it puts me at ease. And it brings me  
back to a peaceful place where I feel like I'm part of something  
important," says Roger Paul, 44, a Passamaquoddy who speaks both  
Passamaquoddy-Maliseet and Penobscot. "I feel, I guess . . . like a  
small child who is just held and embraced."

Though it is characterized by polysyllabic words, Penobscot can be  
brilliantly concise. An entire sentence in English can often be  
expressed by a single Penobscot word. For example,  we means "You  
are a very smart, intelligent, dependable person."

"It gets you all at once. It all comes in one rhythmic unit," says  
Conor Quinn, a doctoral candidate in linguistics at Harvard  
University and a Maine native who has worked closely with the  
Penobscots. "That's the poetry of the language."

Linguists consider a language to be living if there are people who  
canconverse fluently in it. But even dead languages - sometimes  
optimistically called dormant - can be resurrected, though not  
without recordings, a body of texts, or both. Modern Hebrew is one  
such success story. Richards and other linguists identify the  
region's federally recognized tribes with dead languages as the  
Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head/ Aquinnah in Massachusetts, the  
Narragansett Indian Tribe in Rhode Island, and the Mohegan and  
Mashantucket Pequot tribes in Connecticut. (There are no federally  
recognized tribes in New Hampshire or Vermont.) All are taking  
measures to bring their ancestral languages back to life. In 1990,  
Congress passed the Native American Languages Act to encourage the  
preservation of languages across the country, acknowledging that  
earlier federal policies helped exterminate some of them.

Maine's Native American tribes speak closely related languages that  
derive from the Eastern Algonquian family of languages once widely  
used from Maine to Virginia. But a common misperception is that  
tribal languages are relics linguistically frozen in the 1600s, when  
they were first heard by missionaries and explorers, and they are  
missing words critical to communicating in today's culture. "It's  
entirely possible to talk about the stock market or auto racing in  
Penobscot if you want to," MIT's Richards says. "There's nothing  
inherent in the language that makes it unsuitable for modern use."

Language, or what some linguists like to call "nonmaterial culture,"  
is an artifact, like a sweet-grass basket or birch-bark canoe.  
"There's more to a language than simple communication," says former  
Penobscot chief Barry Dana, 47, of Solon, Maine. "With the Penobscot  
language - or Passamaquoddy, Abenaki, Maliseet, Navajo, Inuit,  
whatever - trapped in that language is the complete understanding of  
your culture."

DRIVE ABOUT FIVE HOURS NORTH FROM BOSTON TO OLD TOWN, Maine, take the  
short causeway over the Penobscot River, and you'll come to the 315- 
acre island that, together with 146 other islands, make up the Indian  
Island Reservation. Roughly 30 percent of the state's Penobscots live  
on Indian Island itself. The Penobscots are wary of visitors from  
what members often refer to as the "dominant culture" - outsiders who  
sometimes view residents as history exhibits or mere curiosities.  
"We're sort of looked at in a fishbowl," says Linda McLeod, a  
Maliseet and principal of the Indian Island School, a public  
kindergarten through Grade 8 school on the reservation. "People come  
on the island wanting to see the `Indian children,'" she says. "They  
come on the island asking, `Where are the tepees?'"

Penobscot was the first language for nearly every Indian Island  
resident into the 1940s. But with World War II, many Penobscots  
abandoned their language for the employment and educational  
opportunities that came with speaking English. At the same time,  
Penobscots say, the Catholic nuns who ran the island's school would  
punish children who uttered their native tongue.

Over time, the language started disappearing from everyday use.

Barry Dana's cousin Carol Dana, a fluent Penobscot speaker, learned  
the language from her grandmother and great-aunt growing up on Indian  
Island but says she also inherited feelings of inferiority about the  
Penobscot tongue that were imposed by non-Indians. "We've all been  
kind of educated out of who we are and pitted against who we are,"  
says Dana, 53, who left the reservation but returned.

The tribe took the first step toward stemming the precipitous  
language loss in 1985, when Barry Dana began teaching Penobscot as  
part of a native studies program introduced at the Indian Island  
School. Today, the school's 111 pupils get regular classroom  
instruction for two periods a week in Penobscot and occasionally  
Maine's other tribal languages. The emphasis is on speaking; indeed,  
as with numerous other indigenous languages with oral traditions, the  
vast majority of Penobscot speakers cannot read or write their own  
language. "That's the way everybody learns their language - speak it  
first, then you learn the written," says McLeod. (At the mainland  
public high schools where most of these students go after the eighth  
grade, second-language choices are French and Spanish.)

Meanwhile, tribal leaders and ordinary Penobscots recognized that  
language studies also needed to happen outside the school. The  
Penobscot Language Revitalization Project was born, and in the last  
five years, the Penobscot Nation has received $308,605 from the  
federal Administration for Native Americans - and kicked in $90,411  
in both cash and in-kind tribal support - to plan and implement a  
series of community initiatives. Among them are the after-school  
program at the Boys & Girls Club, storytelling at the reservation's  
day-care center, a master-apprentice language tutorial for young  
adults, the creation of the penobscotnation.org website, and weekend  
and weeklong camps where families are encouraged to speak nothing but  
Penobscot.

Carol Dana, the tribe's so-called language master, is mentor to two  
apprentices: Gabe Paul, 20 (who is not related to Roger Paul), and  
Maulian Dana, 21 (who is the daughter of Barry Dana), both students  
at the University of Maine in nearby Orono. They and the younger  
children represent the tribe's best hope for reintroducing broadbased  
fluency in two or three generations. "There used to be a kind of  
shame in using the language. Now young people are taking ownership  
and have a sense of pride about the language," says Bonnie Newsom,  
director of the tribe's cultural and historic preservation  
department. "That has been very healing for us as a community."

BACK AT THE BOYS & GIRLS CLUB, 11-YEAR-OLD Maya Attean is issuing  
commands to Roger Paul, the teacher, to "stand" (sèhken),  
"sit" (ápin), and "turn around" (). As long as she uses the  
Penobscot word for the action, Paul plays along, popping in and out  
of his seat and spinning like the marionette of a mad puppeteer. Maya  
and her classmates giggle themselves silly. Later, she and the other  
girls form a circle around a big drum on the basketball court and  
pound it while chanting "The Pine Needle Dance" of the Passamaquoddys  
and other songs.

Maya's father is Penobscot; her mother is Passamaquoddy. The couple  
live on the reservation and are raising their daughter in a  
multilingual household, encouraging her to use second and third  
languages by labeling household items - the chair, the cupboard, the  
computer - with the appropriate Indian words. And why is a sixth- 
grader so interested? "So the Penobscot language will stay alive,"  
Maya says brightly, "and I can teach it to my kids when I get older,  
and they can teach it to their kids."

Instilling the language in the younger generation was exactly what  
Michael Sockalexis had in mind when he proposed his bill. In  
December, the tribe's state representative introduced Legislative  
Document 1807, "An Act to Establish the Penobscot Language  
Preservation Fund in the Department of Education," partly due to the  
sadness he feels over his own loss of conversational Penobscot. He  
wants things to be different for his six grandchildren, ages 2 to 12.  
"Speaking as a young kid, learning from my grandfather and my great- 
grandfather, I have that in my head now," says the 58-year-old  
Sockalexis. "To have that gone - call it like a song: It's like I  
know the music, but ... I've forgotten the lyrics."

The bill, which the Maine House passed on March 16 and was before the  
Legislature's joint appropriations committee earlier this month,  
would deposit $300,000 into a newly created fund at the state  
Department of Education to be managed by the tribe's cultural and  
historic preservation department. Tribal leaders hope that the money  
would attract additional aid from groups like the National Endowment  
for the Humanities. (Sockalexis was unable to vote on his own bill,  
as he and the representative of the Passamaquoddy Tribe are  
considered intergovernmental liaisons with no voting rights in the  
Legislature.) But passage was far from guaranteed. The bill is vying  
against dozens of requests for new funding, and the appropriations  
panel, which doles out the state's limited resources, could opt to  
table it or send it on to the Senate for a decisive vote.

"Heritage counts. And the tribe has been trying to teach its young  
people about their heritage," says state Representative Richard  
Blanchard, a Democrat from Old Town, Maine, who has co-sponsored the  
bill and whose legislative district encompasses Indian Island. "How  
advantageous the language is going to be to them, I don't know."

When asked why Native American children - unlike those of, say,  
Polish descent - should be encouraged to learn the language of their  
ancestors, linguists tend to bristle. "Even if we don't teach Johnny  
Polish, Polish still exists," says Richards, the MIT linguist. "If we  
decide not to save these languages, there'll be no speakers of them  
at all."

MORE THAN IDLE CHATTER, LANGUAGE IS INTRINSIC to our identity. Even  
if people don't look the same or share the same customs, a common  
tongue binds them together. And the very words used not only reveal  
the speaker's feelings and ideas but shape them. "When I hear  
English, I feel competitiveness," Roger Paul says. "Once I switch  
that worldview and start thinking in Indian, it's difficult to think  
back in English again."

Language preservationists argue it's important to keep languages,  
like animals, from extinction for the sake of diversity. "Every  
language provides us with more knowledge about human thinking and  
behavior ... and a unique perspective. So, when we lose a language,  
we lose a lot of knowledge," says Pauleena MacDougall, associate  
director of the Maine Folklife Center housed at the University of  
Maine in Orono. "It's almost like losing an animal. So what? Why do  
we care about it? Because it's something missing that should be here."

The loss of Penobscot has happened with such swiftness that it was  
almost gone before anyone knew it needed rescuing. The Penobscot  
Nation's eldest member, Valentine Ranco, was born in 1912 on Orson  
Island, next to Indian Island, and did not know how to speak English  
when her grandfather sent her off to the Indian Island School.  
Married in 1929, Ranco and her now deceased husband, Leslie, also  
Penobscot, left the reservation in 1942 when he took a job in a  
military parts factory in Springfield, Massachusetts. A decade later,  
they opened the Indian Moccasin Shop in Wells, Maine, now run by  
their daughter, June Lane. During the war years, "I stopped speaking  
[Penobscot] because I didn't have anyone to speak to," Ranco recalls.  
"Everybody stopped. Everybody!"

While the Rancos, like other Native Americans, had to assimilate into  
the mainstream culture, they did so as if looking over their  
shoulders at the ghosts of old Penobscots whispering secrets in their  
native tongue.

"Within our language, we can maintain who we are and remember our  
place in what part of the environment we belong in," Paul says after  
the smudging ceremony. "That's why I feel ... it's so important to  
maintain the language - because we'll be teaching the kids to look at  
the world through the eyes of our ancestors."

(Speaking Penobscot)

Before the 1930s, there was no offi cial Penobscot alphabet. But in  
that decade, the late pathologist and avocational linguist Frank T.  
Seibert Jr. used the International Phonetic Alphabet - a standardized  
notation system that represents the distinctive sounds used in all  
spoken language - to devise one. Unlike the 26-letter alphabet used  
in English, the Penobscot alphabet has 25 letters, counting double  
consonants and including special characters like the alpha and schwa.

The following line comes from "The Wolverine," a Penobscot tale  
transcribed in the early 20th century by the late anthropologist  
Frank G. Speck and used by permission of the American Philosophical  
Society in Philadelphia. It was translated into the Penobscot  
alphabet by Pauleena MacDougall, Seibert's research assistant in the  
1980s and now the associate director of the Maine Folklife Center.
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