Leaving a linguistic legacy (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

Leaving a linguistic legacy

Patrick Springer, The Forum
Published Monday, August 06, 2007
Twin Buttes, N.D.
http://www.in-forum.com/News/articles/174106

The art of capturing words spoken in a language threatened with extinction,
and putting them in writing so they can achieve immortality in print, is
work best done while nibbling brain food.

Or at least Edwin Benson and Sara Trechter have found that it’s nice to be
able to munch on blueberries and carrot sticks while he speaks in Mandan
and she jots down his words.

Mandan, the language spoken by the tribe famous for hosting Lewis and Clark
during the explorers’ winter encampment in North Dakota, hangs by a
linguistic thread that frays a little more as each year slips by.

Benson, a 75-year-old horse rancher, is the strongest strand left in that
thread. Experts regard him as the only fluent speaker of Mandan still
alive.

[photo inset - Edwin Benson, left, and Calvin Grinnell make silent prayers
before dropping cigarettes as tobacco offerings at a Mandan shrine near
Twin Buttes. Similar shrines once occupied the center of each Mandan
village.]

So for the past three summers, working for six hours at a stretch, Trechter
and Benson have camped out in a small office, where he speaks his deep,
rumbling voice into a microphone on his desk, and she scribbles notes on a
yellow legal pad.

The two recently reached an important milestone. They finished transcribing
the last of seven Mandan folk stories Benson told for posterity, recorded
several years ago on digital videotape.

Trechter, a linguist who specializes in Siouan American Indian languages,
has made these perennial summer pilgrimages from Chico, a college town in
northern California, where she teaches at a state university.

Their work is strenuous but sedentary, filled with painstaking repetition to
ensure accuracy. Hence the snacks, and lots of bottled water – all that
talking works up a thirst.

As if summoning the past, Benson often leans back in his chair, closing his
eyes in concentration while he gropes for the right word, either in Mandan
or to find its counterpart in English.

Although Mandan was his first language, he seldom has a chance to use it in
conversation. Occasionally he speaks with his 82-year-old sister, who lives
more than an hour away on North Dakota’s Fort Berthold Indian Reservation.

But she never matched her brother’s fluency. Benson, alone among his
siblings, was raised by a grandfather who insisted on keeping alive Mandan
traditions and language. Ben Benson forbade speaking English in his home, a
log cabin near the mouth of the Little Missouri River.

These days, Trechter sometimes serves as Edwin Benson’s conversational
partner in Mandan, a language she acquired after branching out from Lakota
Sioux, a linguistic cousin of Mandan, also a Siouan tongue.

Trechter’s mission to help rescue Mandan required her to master its
linguistic quirks. She has learned, for example, that a bird is said to
“stand” while flying but “sit” when perched on a tree.

And at times, she’s had to accept that some words or phrases simply defy
translation into another tongue. One instance came last week as she was
about to wrap up her field work this summer.

She was transcribing a recording of Benson conducting a naming ceremony, a
traditional practice still carried out on the reservation, when she ran up
against a word that sounds, to the untrained ear, like “ay-posh.”

“That word has a long history,” she explained to a visitor. To supplement
her transcription, the process of converting spoken Mandan into writing,
she includes a version in English.

But maybe not with ay-posh. “It has no English translation,” Trechter said.
Still, because even an approximation might help, she offered her rough
English equivalent, “I say.”

Benson, who has been coaching Trechter as she transfers his words onto the
page, took up the challenge.

“Wah-ha-noh-sh,” he said in his sub-baritone, repeating the phrase in
Mandan. “I am sounding it.”

“I kind of give up,” the linguist replied, smiling but flustered.

Benson takes another stab. “I’m echoing what I’m saying.”

Then he, too, finally surrendered. “It’s untranslatable.”

‘No finishing with Mandan’

Trechter first learned about efforts to preserve the Mandan language when
visiting with her doctoral thesis adviser, a Siouan language expert at the
University of Kansas.

He’d heard the project was looking for a linguist to join the team. She got
in touch with the man who’d sent out a query over an Internet network for
linguists in native languages asking whether anyone was interested.

That man is Calvin Grinnell, who works in the cultural preservation office
of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation at Fort Berthold. In partnership
with Joseph Jasztrembski, a history professor at Minot (N.D.) State
University, he directs the Mandan language preservation project.

Their endeavor started seven years ago with a grant from the National Park
Service, which paid to videotape Benson telling the folk stories at its
Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site near Stanton, N.D.,
which features replicas of earth lodges used at the Mandan and Hidatsa
villages that once dotted the area.

The project’s ultimate goal is to produce learning materials for language
labs on the reservation, ideally with the videotapes of Benson telling his
stories in Mandan with follow-along captions of Trechter’s transcriptions
on the bottom of the screen.

Work has been slow, plagued at times by technical problems, sporadic funding
and busy schedules. But things have moved along more quickly since Trechter
joined the team in 2004, replacing a linguist who was unable to devote as
much time because he was finishing his doctoral thesis, in Hidatsa.

One afternoon last week, as Benson and Trechter were winding up their work
for the day, Grinnell and Jasztrembski stopped by to talk about where they
should focus their future efforts. They crowded into the office Benson uses
near Twin Buttes Elementary School, where he teaches Mandan.

Since finishing the last of the folk stories, Trechter and Benson have
turned their attention to recording and transcribing Mandan social and
cultural customs, such as the naming ceremony.

To find old Mandan names, Trechter went to the archives of the North Dakota
Cultural Heritage Center in Bismarck, and was pleasantly surprised by what
she found.

“There’s tons of stuff,” she said. “Boxes and boxes of it,” including a
Mandan dictionary compiled in the 1970s and 1980s as well as manuscripts
from the 1920s and 1930s, the work of earlier linguists now dead.

Grinnell, who said he thought the project now had a solid foundation for a
language-learning program, asked whether they should record more old
stories. That would be fine, Trechter replied, but she said it also would
be good to help people who want to speak Mandan in social and cultural
occasions.

“We’ve been doing things people should know how to say,” she said, giving as
an example a farewell poem traditionally spoken by the senior pallbearer at
a Mandan funeral, one of their current pieces. Benson said he is unaware
that anyone had previously recorded or written about Mandan burial rites.

Jasztrembski agreed that a proper balance must be struck in choosing what to
preserve, given limited time and funding. Reviving a language takes many
years, and progress is slow, much like restoring an endangered plant or
animal species, he said.

“I think language revitalization is something like that,” the historian
said. “It takes a great deal of time to do.”

At one point, as the discussion over what to tackle next continued, Trechter
volunteered that she could record and transcribe dialogue with Benson.

“My pronunciation isn’t great, but it’s OK,” she said. “We could talk back
and forth.”

Grinnell added that the tribal college archives has hours of tape recordings
of elders from the 1970s that also might provide helpful material.

“There is no finishing with Mandan,” Trechter said. At age 44, she’s already
seen enough material to keep her busy for the rest of her career and beyond.
“It’s ongoing as far as I’m concerned.”

Sites, stories hold tribal importance

Without coming to any firm conclusion about their next step, the group left
the confines of the office in Twin Buttes and drove to two nearby sites
that hold cultural significance for the Mandan.

They stopped first by a grassy hillside, on top of which was a monument of
seven large stones – the subjects of a legend Benson recently told
Trechter, a tale they’re considering transcribing.

Benson gave a brief version of the story, which involves a young boy who was
left behind on a hunting trip because he overslept. Undeterred, he set out
on his own and encountered a Sioux raiding party. The boy, who had the
element of surprise, slayed all seven warriors.

Swollen with pride, the boy returned to his village and told about his
adventure – and nobody believed him. Skeptics asked him to show them the
bodies. He agreed, and when they reached the site, they found seven stones,
not seven bodies.

>From the hillcrest, Benson and the others walked down to a woody draw, the
site of a Mandan shrine, relocated years ago because of the reservoir
created by Garrison Dam. It consisted of four sides of wooden posts, all
roughly shoulder-high, with a slightly shorter wooden pole in the center –
representing Lone Man, who created humans, lakes and trees in the Mandan
creation story.

A band of willow surrounded the four sides, representing the level of water
in a flood from the time of creation.

Benson, who seems at times like a linguistic Lone Man, made a silent prayer,
then dropped a cigarette as a tobacco offering. It landed inside the shrine,
where other offerings lay scattered on the ground.

On the drive back to Twin Buttes, the party passed a country cemetery.
Benson said his grandparents and other relatives were buried in the
cemetery.

“I’m not ready for that,” he added, chuckling.

“You better not,” Trechter replied. “You have a lot of work to do.”

Readers can reach Forum reporter Patrick Springer at (701) 241-5522

[photo inset - Edwin Benson, left, the last fluent speaker of Mandan,
concentrates as he helps linguist Sara Trechter transcribe a traditional
Mandan naming ceremony. The pair have spent three summers working to
preserve Mandan, an endangered native language.]