[lg policy] NY: Indian Tribes Go in Search of Their Lost Languages

Tue Apr 6 15:12:37 UTC 2010

April 6, 2010
Indian Tribes Go in Search of Their Lost Languages

By PATRICIA COHEN

As far as the records show, no one has spoken Shinnecock or Unkechaug,
languages of Long Island’s Indian tribes, for nearly 200 years. Now
Stony Brook University and two of the Indian nations are initiating a
joint project to revive these extinct tongues, using old documents
like a vocabulary list that Thomas Jefferson wrote during a visit in
1791.
The goal is language resuscitation and enlisting tribal members from
this generation and the next to speak them, said representatives from
the tribes and Stony Brook’s Southampton campus. Chief Harry Wallace,
the elected leader of the Unkechaug Nation, said that for tribal
members, knowing the language is an integral part of understanding
their own culture, past and present.

“When our children study their own language and culture, they perform
better academically,” he said. “They have a core foundation to rely
on.”  The Long Island effort is part of a wave of language reclamation
projects undertaken by American Indians in recent years. For many
tribes language is a cultural glue that holds a community together,
linking generations and preserving a heritage and values. Bruce Cole,
the former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities,
which sponsors language preservation programs, has called language
“the DNA of a culture.”

The odds against success can be overwhelming, given the relatively
small number of potential speakers and the difficulty in persuading a
new generation to participate. There has been progress, though, said
Leanne Hinton, professor emerita at the University of California,
Berkeley, who created the Breath of Life program in California in 1992
to revive dormant languages in the state.

Representatives from at least 25 languages with no native speakers
have participated in the group’s workshops so far, she said. Last
month Ms. Hinton and a colleague at Yale received a federal grant to
create a similar program based in Washington, D.C.

Of the more than 300 indigenous languages spoken in the United States,
only 175 remain, according to the Indigenous Language Institute. This
nonprofit group estimates that without restoration efforts, no more
than 20 will still be spoken in 2050.

Some reclamation efforts have shown success. Daryl Baldwin started
working to revive the dormant language of the Miami Nation in the
Midwest (part of the Algonquian language family), and taught his own
children to speak it fluently. He now directs the Myaamia Project at
Miami University in Ohio, a joint effort between academics and the
Miami tribe.

Farther east is Stephanie Fielding, a member of the Connecticut
Mohegans and an adviser on the Stony Brook project. She has devoted
her life to bringing her tribe’s language back to life and is
compiling a dictionary and grammar book. In her eyes language provides
a mental telescope into the world of her ancestors. She notes, for
example, that in an English conversation, a statement is typically
built with the first person — “I” — coming first. In the same
statement in Mohegan, however, “you” always comes first, even when the
speaker is the subject.

“This suggests a more communally minded culture,” she said.

Now in her 60s, Ms. Fielding knows firsthand just how tough it is to
sustain a language effort over time, however. She said she was still
not fluent.

“In order for a language to survive and resurrect,” she said, “it
needs people talking it, and for people to talk it, there has to be a
society that works on it.”

Chief Wallace of the Unkechaug in Long Island already has a willing
student from a younger generation. Howard Treadwell, 24, graduated
from Stony Brook in 2009 with a linguistics degree. He will
participate in the Long Island effort while doing graduate work at the
University of Arizona, where there is a specialized program
researching American Indian languages.

Mr. Treadwell is one of 400 registered members of the tribe, which
maintains a 52-acre reservation in Mastic, on the South Shore. The
Shinnecocks have about 1,300 enrolled members and have a reservation
adjacent to Southampton.

Robert D. Hoberman, the chairman of the linguistics department at
Stony Book, is overseeing the academic side of the project. He is an
expert in the creation of modern Hebrew, the great success story of
language revival. Essentially unspoken for 2,000 years, Hebrew
survived only in religious uses until early Zionists tried to update
it — an undertaking adopted on a grand scale when the State of Israel
was established.

For the American Indians on Long Island the task is particularly
difficult because there are few records. But Shinnecock and Unkechaug
are part of a family of eastern Algonquian languages. Some have both
dictionaries and native speakers, Mr. Hoberman said, which the team
can mine for missing words and phrases, and for grammatical structure.

The reclamation is a two-step process, the professor explained. “First
we have to figure out what the language looked like,” using remembered
prayers, greetings, sayings and word lists, like the one Jefferson
created, he said. “Then we’ll look at languages that are much better
documented, look at short word lists to see what the differences are
and see what the equivalencies are, and we’ll use that to reconstruct
what the Long Island languages probably were like.” The Massachusett
language, for example, is well documented with dictionaries and Bible
translations.

Jefferson’s Unkechaug word list was collected on June 13, 1791, when
he visited Brookhaven, Long Island, with James Madison, later his
successor in the White House. He wrote that even then, only three old
women remained who could still speak the language fluently.

Chief Wallace said he had many more records, including religious
documents, deeds and legal transactions, and possibly a tape of some
tribal members speaking in the 1940s.

“When we have an idea of what the language should sound like, the
vocabulary and the structure, we’ll then introduce it to people in the
community,” Mr. Hoberman said.

While it may seem impossible to recreate the sound of a lost tongue,
Mr. Hoberman said the process was not all that mysterious because the
dictionaries were transliterated into English.

“Would someone from 200 years ago think we had a funny accent?” Mr.
Hoberman asked. “Yes. Would they understand it? I hope so.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/06/books/06language.html?ref=nyregion&pagewanted=print

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