The Last Speakers (28 page)
Authors: K. David Harrison
“What I'm finding from most families that still maintain the language,” Shelley says, “is that they maintain important words, such as the words for the directions, the word for creator, certain prayers. They know familial words for mother, brother, father.”
Decades of dedication led to Shelley's current ability to converse in the language, to say prayers, blessings, plain old everyday talk, and even bad words. Shelley also worked with Bob Red Hawk and others to ensure Lenape's adaptation to 21st-century life. As Shelley notes: “There has been modernization of the language by creating new words to apply to technology or modern things: âbrain in a box,'
dumhokus,
for computer;
shukal
for sugar. There are two ways the Lenape have created words, to borrow the word and just change the pronunciation or to make up a completely new word.”
In 2009, a select group of Swarthmore College students enrolled in Shelley's newly formed Lenape class. For the first time ever, Lenape was being taught at an institution of higher learning in the Lenape homeland, the Delaware Valley. It was a historic occasion. The table in the seminar room was piled high with cultural artifactsâbaskets, animal pelts, bead necklaces, and the like. The students grappled with the immense complexity of Lenape verb forms. Their efforts did not go unnoticed by the Lenape diaspora, and they had a positive impact. Shelley recalls telling the Lenape in Canada and Wisconsin about the Swarthmore students' efforts: “I've shown the work that the kids are doing and they [the Lenape in Canada] were amazed! [People] think Native Americans often have this defective attitude like, âNo, our language is just gonna die,' and it brings tears for them to seeâand I'm tearing up right now because I'm amazed at the work that these kids are doingâ¦. So it does feed back into the community the work that they've done.”
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Shelley DePaul, assistant chief of the Lenape Nation of Pennsylvania, teaches Lenape to students at Swarthmore College, 2009.
Even this modest effort to reclaim and propagate Lenape was not without controversy. Scholars who insist that Lenape is extinct have criticized the effort, saying that the Pennsylvania Lenape are not the “real” Lenape, pointing out that the Pennsylvania branch of the tribe is not federally recognized, or suggesting that it is a mixed or impure form of the language. These critiques aside, I believe this bold effort is exactly what is needed to bring languages back from the brink of extinction. What better place than a room full of young, bright, enthusiastic minds to extend the life span of the Lenape language? The fact that college students want to learn it will also have a positive effect on the tribe itself, as tribe members struggle to gain federal recognition and to reconcile their everyday lives in modern America with their ancestral traditions.
HOCKEY SPOKEN HERE
Even for languages that are not yet down to single digits of “last speakers,” the role of key individuals who promote and nurture the language is crucial. I have met many such individuals over the years, some in places you might not expect.
A Tim Horton's restaurant in Ann Arbor, Michigan, was where I heard Anishinaabemowin (also called Ojibwe) spoken for the first time. Howard Kimewon, a genial Anishinaabemowin elder of 60 or so, kindly arrived a full hour early for our scheduled meeting, then waited an extra 30 minutes as I struggled to find the right Tim Horton's (a local fast-food franchise). He showed no impatience whatsoever at my tardiness, greeting me warmly in Ojibwe. I glanced around at the most banal of modern American landscapes: doughnuts, weak coffee, plastic furniture. Anishinaabemowin could not have been more out of place here, yet it seemed utterly natural when Howard answered his cell phone and began chatting in it. I listened as the sibilants of the language tickled my ear.
Howard is a true linguistic survivor. He has made great efforts to keep up his knowledge over the years, going out of his way to seek out elders for conversation, to be corrected by them, to learn. He has overcome the shame he felt as a youth, maturing into dignity and pride as an elder and teacher of the language. His teaching methods include such activities as demonstrating traditional Anishinaabemowin woodworking (making a corn grinder out of a log) while exploring all the Anishinaabemowin words related to that activity.
Later, I received a text message I could not read, but it began with
Boozhoo
, which means “hello.” Who would have thought Anishinaabemowinâwith its long, complex words, requiring a lot of typingâsuitable for messaging! All that effort to send me a message I couldn't fully read! And yet this powerful gesture introduced me to the language in a gentle way, as I was forced to contemplate the beauty and complexity of the words on my iPhone. The lowly text message, and Howard's willingness to put his language out through all possible channels, may indeed be a key to saving it.
Dr. Margaret Noori, a linguist and promoter of the Anishinaabemowin language, frames the question this way: “What would it truly mean for our society to have people speak these languages as part of their personal and professional lives, right now, in the midst of our history?” She reports that a panel of Anishinaabemowin elders convened recently in Michigan to talk about what it means to them. Many of them approved of new, creative uses like translating the lyrics of popular music, comic books, social networking, or sports terms, as ways to inspire young people to participate. Keeping the language alive “gives all young people the opportunity to think differently,” she notes. “Native and nonnative students can understand one another better by learning the language of the land they now share.” A heritage language is part of the glue that helps keep the native identity intact, and may even help in preventing suicides or other social problems.
Margaret is busy populating the Internet with her language. She regularly posts Facebook notes in Anishinaabemowin, such as
“Aapchigwa n'gii bishigendaan pii Gwiigwaa'agag gii maamwizhoozhooshkwaadwewaad Bkejwanong KchiAnongoog!”
which she translated as “I really liked it when t he Wolverines played hockey with the Bkejwanong All Stars!” The “Noongwa e-Anishinaabemjig: People Who Speak Anishinaabemowin Today” Facebook page she created with Howard Kimewon and Stacie Sheldon now has nearly 1,000 members who visit to chat, ask questions, or hear new songs and stories.
What better use of this ancient Great Lakesâcentered language could there be than to promote hockey? In fact, hockey has long been a favorite of the Anishinaabeg (people) and is one of many keys to the language's newfound vitality. Recently, several members of the University of Michigan hockey team have taken Margaret's Anishinaabemowin class. All players leave the class with respect for the language and culture, and some with a renewed sense of cultural pride. National Hockey League player Travis Turnbull, now with the Buffalo Sabres, is an example of an athlete who has embraced his heritage. Recently, Travis and several teammates spent a day with the youth of the Bkejwanong First Nation. For native kids, hearing an NHL player promote Anishinaabemowin was a much more powerful inspiration than anything a teacher will tell them. If hockey players think it's important, it is! Recently, another teammate, Brandon Nurato, now with the Toledo Wall-eye, texted to let Dr. Noori know he'd been teaching teammates to count in Anishinaabemowin.
Margaret has a foot in two worlds: she is a professional academic who holds a Ph.D. and teaches at a university, and she is a tribal member and cultural activist with a deep sense of responsibility. As a scientist, she advocates documentation of languages as they disappear. But she believes this work has to be speaker-centered, not scientist-centered, and putting language into archives should be much more than just “building a graveyard.” “How does this work impact communities,” she asks, “native and nonnative, in ways that support global diversity in a next-generation way?”
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COLLATERAL EXTINCTIONS
In my book
When Languages Die,
I wrote: “When ideas go extinct, we all grow poorer,” to introduce the notion of the “human knowledge base.” In that same book I explored many different systems of knowledge, such as animal and plant taxonomies, calendars, mathematics, and geography, that are uniquely encoded in languages. This may seem to be objectifying language as merely a vessel to convey ideas. But I want to emphasize that ideas and knowledge are not just facts floating around in people's minds. They represent an exchange of thoughts and experiences between intimates and strangers.
An accretion of knowledge, like a giant midden of shells, is what French philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin referred to as the “noosphere”âthe sum of all human beliefs. It is living, in the sense that any complex system has a life, an existence beyond one temporal moment or one mortal mind. It grows and emanates from a speech community over long stretches of richly lived lives, deeply felt experiences, midnight musings, and daytime ponderings. This entity of interwoven ideas outlasts any single speaker. It cannot be disconnected, shut down, or silenced, except by the extinction of the language itself.
Some do try to fetishize language as a thing to be placed under a microscope and examined or on a shelf in an archive to be observed. The crucial work of language revitalization reimagines language in all its situational humor, glory, and banality. How were people cussed out, scolded, admonished, admired, inspired? What were the last words of good night, the first greetings of the day? Language mediates all human interactions, and all facets of knowing, whether making love or feuding bitterly, invoking the gods, cursing enemies, or asking someone to “pass the salt.”
The loss of a language both foretells and causes the loss of a distinct culture and identity. As elderly speakers pass, the language is disconnected from daily lives. Fewer and fewer of the everyday social interactions are conducted in it, and the elders experience a creeping silence. They know the particular loneliness that only linguistic survivorsâor perhaps the muteâcan feel, as they are silenced and invisibilized. This can happen at both ends of the age spectrum and everywhere in between.
Anthropologist Bernie Perley, a member of the Maliseet First Nation in Canada, writes eloquently of the bitter childhood experience of linguistic alienation, of coerced muteness:
Why don't I understand Maliseet? My first language is Maliseetâ¦. When I started first grade, I did not speak English. The one memory I have of first grade is sitting in the front seat of the school bus. The bus driver, sitting in his seat, was twisting around to talk to me. His mouth was moving and sounds were coming out of his mouth. I did not understand anything he said. It was a shock to realize that everything I experienced in my life up to that point was rendered meaningless and irrelevant. Being a solitary Maliseet child in a largely white elementary school was alien enough. But to have my entire worldview muted and rendered meaningless made me feel silent and vulnerable. My mother made the decision that day that I would learn English because, and I quote, “If my son is to survive out there, he'll have to master English.”
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Bernie and his mother were not alone in making this entirely rational calculation. Yet he would come to regret it years later, as a prominent Maliseet intellectual and activist, finding himself unable to understand the elders. The choice made by young children and their well-intentioned parents, as Professor Perley describes it, is not merely to “master English,” but simultaneously to renounce Maliseet.
Many people all around the world do manage to master English without abandoning their own Mandarin or Hindi or Inuktitut. The world is full of bilingualsâso why do children in this case irretrievably shift from heritage to global tongue, never glancing back or bringing along the ancestral wisdom? The answer may lie in Bernie's statement about being a “solitary Maliseet in a largely white elementary school.” The pressure to conform and assimilate can be so intense that there is no quarter for the old ways.
Children are coerced out of their heritage, their religion, their identity. These are what Perley refers to as the “collateral extinctions” of language loss: “We have already lost Maliseet place-names. We have lost evidence of landscape transformations described in our oral traditions. We have already lost much of the esoteric knowledge of medicines. Now we are losing the ability to conduct everyday social relations in the Maliseet languages.” Sounding a note of cautious hope, however, he continues: “These collateral extinctions need not be foreverâ¦. We need to reintegrate all these facets of Maliseet experience so that we can continue to experience Maliseet worlds.”
HOW TO SAVE A LANGUAGE
How are globalization and technology affecting the viability of small languages? How can hip-hop, text messaging, and YouTube help save languages? What are the technological barriers and conduits for small languages, and how are clever speakers leveraging these? What is the global future of the smallest tongues? Is there reason for optimism?
