ILAT member news (article)

[Phil Cash Cash]

Dear ILAT members,

I hope Bruce Stonefish doesn't mind, but I thought people might appreciate
the news on Bruce's efforts.

Phil Cash Cash (cayuse/nez perce)
ILAT, UofA

~~
The vanishing voice of the Lenape

BY STEVE CHAMBERS
Star-Ledger Staff
November 17, 2002

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- In a tiny cubicle a block off Harvard Square, Bruce Stonefish
sits alone, a Delaware language dictionary open on his desk.

A photo of his three young children is pinned to an otherwise blank bulletin
board behind his head, framing his spiked black hair. His modern office chair
seems too small for his 6-foot-2, 250-pound frame.

In the second year of a Harvard fellowship, Stonefish has made the painful
decision to leave his family behind in Canada while he pursues a quixotic
quest.

All his life, Stonefish has spoken, thought and dreamed in English, but he
felt drawn to another rhythm beating deep inside, strong and steady, like
the heartbeat of mother earth.

Stonefish, 30, is Lenape, a proud member of the Delaware Nation and descendant
of a sad and bloody history. Growing up in Ontario, on the world's only reservation
of his far-flung tribe, he came to recognize that the drumming he felt was
the sound of an ancient culture, the language of his people.

The Lenape once dominated a broad region that included all of what is now
New Jersey, but by the time Stonefish was born, their language and culture
were careening toward extinction. Stonefish believes he can change that.

"In my heart, I think I'm going in the right direction and doing the right
thing," he says softly. "I think this language can be saved."

To accomplish that goal, he spends hours consulting his dictionary or surfing
the Web for guidance on a language he desperately wants to speak fluently
and already has begun teaching to willing students.

The secret is in the words that sound so friendly and foreign at the same
time.

Nii Dushiinzii Bruce. My name is Bruce.

Dulaangoomawak takwax. My clan is Turtle.

Nii Noonjiiyea Moraviantown. I am from Moraviantown.

THE 'COMMON PEOPLE'

By 1609, when Henry Hudson sailed up the river that now bears his name, the
Lenape had been living in what is now New Jersey for more than 10,000 years.

They had evolved from nomadic hunters into a sophisticated network of loosely
connected clans with cultural and linguistic similarities. They planted vegetable
gardens, built sturdy bark houses, hunted with bows and worshipped nature.

Gradually, they adopted a common language that originated in the Great Lakes
region, part of a far-reaching language family called Algonquian. As Italian
and French are members of the Romance language family, Lenape and dozens
of other languages are members of the Algonquian family.

Although no political structure connected these bands, they referred to themselves
as Lenape, or "common people." Their territory sprawled across four present-day
states -- New Jersey and parts of Pennsylvania, New York and Delaware. When
the English arrived, they gave the Lenape the name "Delaware."
(Tribal members today use both terms -- Delaware and Lenape --
interchangeably in conversation. Most linguists also refer to the language
as Delaware.)

Although some of the initial contacts with Europeans were friendly ? the
Lenape famously sold Manhattan to the Dutch and deeded land to William Penn
-- the tribe was eventually decimated, stricken by smallpox and caught in
the cross fire of warring Colonial interests.

By the mid-1700s, the Lenape had been driven from New Jersey. They joined
with other displaced Lenape and began a seemingly endless search for a place
to root their new Delaware Nation.

But promises of land were often broken as the American frontier moved west.
 The tribe settled for a time in Kansas, but by the time of the Civil War
was caught once again between warring parties. The tribe agreed to relocate
once more, this time to Oklahoma.

Today, the largest group of Lenape is clustered north of Tulsa, in and around
the little town of Bartlesville, while a smaller group is based to the west
in Anadarko. In the 2000 Census, about 16,000 Americans declared themselves
to be of Delaware descent.

The forced march to Oklahoma took its toll on the language, and in 1878 the
government began opening boarding schools that made matters worse.

"Kids were taken from their parents and there was no choice," said Alice
Anderton, executive director of the Intertribal Wordpath Society in Norman,
Okla., which promotes the preservation of native languages. "They were forbidden
from speaking their language or wearing their clothes or practicing
their customs. They were forced to become more like white people."

These days, there are no more fluent Delaware speakers in Oklahoma, nor are
there any in the homelands of the New Jersey region, where traces of the
language survive in the names of towns, rivers and parks -- Hoboken, Hackensack,
Kittatinny.

[to be continued]