Trip of the Tongue (4 page)

But though their dramatic accoutrements felt outwardly more authentic, the Crow reenactment was, in the end, still a twenty-first-century show starring enthusiastic but amateur performers. The children in the Real Bird production had the same braces, sneakers, and eager expressions as those in the Hardin production.

It wasn't until much later that I recognized why the Crow reenactment—or any Crow reenactment, for that matter—was potentially problematic. In laying claim to the so-called Native American perspective, the Crow had glossed over an important fact of history: the Crow actually fought on Custer's side.

I feel the need to emphasize that an alliance between Natives and the U.S. military was not standard practice. The Crow, like so many other Native groups, suffered the brutal one-two punch of disease and diplomatic trickery. The first treaty the Crow signed with the United States was an 1825 “treaty of friendship” that laid out very little in real terms save an official acknowledgment of the supremacy of the U.S. government. It wasn't until the signing of the Fort Laramie Treaty in 1851 that boundaries for Crow lands were set down. And though this treaty granted the Crow 38 million acres, their territory was reduced just seventeen years later to only 8 million acres. Over the course of the next forty years, Crow Nation was further reduced to 2.3 million acres, the reservation's current size.

Nevertheless, at the time of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, the Crow were at odds with the Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho, whom they believed to be encroaching on their territory. So the Crow, briefly, allied with the U.S. Army. Today, I understand, there still exists some discord between the groups both on account of the proximity of the Northern Cheyenne and Crow reservations and the fact that territorial boundaries give the Crow the right to conduct “Native American” tours of the area where the Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho claimed their historic victory.

It would be very easy at this point to pretend I'd known this from the start. But in the interest of making a larger point, I'll own up not just to not knowing these things but also to the sticky bit of prejudice that led me to assume the Crow had fought against the United States. I had been so focused on the potential dichotomy between Native and non-Native that I'd fallen into an old trap and let myself forget that all Native peoples are not, in fact, part of one big, homogenous culture.

I realized then that if I was going to learn about the Crow language, I would probably benefit from a general familiarity with the breadth of Native American language.

As I've said, my exposure to Native history and culture was next to nothing. But my exposure to American Indian languages was even less—which is to say
actually
nothing. And I'm not alone in this. Fewer than 4 percent of American high schools offer instruction in languages other than Spanish, French, German, and Latin, much less in languages such as Crow, Cherokee, or Algonquin. Colleges are little better. Harvard, for instance, offers courses in Old Church Slavonic, Medieval Welsh, Akkadian, Hittite, Sumerian, and Egyptian. But the only indigenous American language you can take is Classical Nahautl, the language of the Aztecs.
^b

Now, this isn't true across the board. You can, for instance, get an associate's degree in Shoshoni at Idaho State University. You can also go to the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, which offers majors in Inupiaq and Central Yup'ik, or to its affiliated Alaska Native Language center, which offers courses in Aleut and other indigenous Alaskan languages. But according to the Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition at the University of Minnesota, there are currently only about a hundred two- and four-year programs—that's about 2 percent of all institutions—that offer Native language instruction in the United States.

So for me and many other Americans, the history of the relationship between English and indigenous American languages began in one of two places: sometime around the fourth Thursday in November or the second verse of “Colors of the Wind.” There isn't really any popular conception of Native languages that is much more sophisticated than the fictions propagated by old Hollywood westerns, where Indians played the villains or sidekicks, invariably relying on pidgin English and the word
kemosabe
. Somewhere along the line most of us are taught to hold up our hands and say “How” in a deep, booming voice, and we are often given the idea that most Native personal names are of the verb-preposition-animal variety. And that's about as nuanced as it typically gets.

Luckily, I'd put together something of a traveling language library before leaving New York, and so it took only a few minutes of digging around in the trunk of my car to pull together a crash course in indigenous American languages. Here's what I learned—what I wish I'd learned long ago.

Estimates of the pre-contact population of North America are varied and unreliable, and the same goes for the estimates of the number of pre-contact languages. Nevertheless, reputable sources have suggested that anywhere from 250 to more than 400 languages were spoken prior to the fifteenth century. Modern-day estimates are more reliable, but still less than conclusive; Michael Krauss of the Linguistic Society of America estimates that 175 indigenous languages are still spoken in the United States.

The two most well-known language families in the eastern United States are probably the Algonquin and Iroquois languages. The Algic family, which according to linguist Marianne Mithun “covers the widest territory of all North American families,” includes Mi'kmaq and Malecite-Passamaquoddy in the East; Arapaho, Blackfoot and Cheyenne in the Plains; and Wiyot and Yurok in California. The Iroquoian languages, largely concentrated in the East, include Seneca, Mohawk, and Oneida.

Then there are the Caddoan languages (Pawnee, Wichita, and Caddo), which are spoken in several Plains states, and the Muskogean languages (Choctaw, Creek, Alabama, Chickasaw), which can be found in the Southeast. Kiowa-Tanoan languages (Kiowa, Oklahoma), meanwhile, are spoken on the southern Plains and in the Southwest. Also found in the Southwest is the Yuman family, which includes Mohave and Havasupai-Hualapai-Yavapai, the languages of the Grand Canyon. (Havasupai is spoken by the people who live at the bottom of the canyon, Hualapai by those on the south rim.)

The Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit family, which encompasses more languages and more modern-day speakers than any other North American language family, includes Navajo, Apache, and eleven Alaskan languages.
^c
Other large families include Salishan in the Pacific Northwest (Clallam, Skagit, Snohomish, Lushootseed, Spokane, Coeur d'Alene, Quinault), Siouan in the Great Plains (Crow, Hidatsa, Mandan, Assiniboine, Dakota, Lakota, Osage, Ho-Chunk), and Uto-Aztecan in the Southwest (Hopi, Comanche, Shoshoni).

Also found in Alaska are the Eskimo-Aleut languages—languages such as Inuktitut, Inupiaq, and Yup'ik that are spoken not just in the United States and Canada but also in Russia and Greenland. And far to the west but still under the auspices of the U.S. government are the Pacific Islands of Hawai'i, Guam, Samoa, and the Northern Mariana Islands and the indigenous Austronesian languages Hawaiian, Chamorro, Carolinian, and Tanapag.

All in all, an impressive number of indigenous languages are spoken in the United States. Though this level of linguistic diversity isn't unheard of—more than 400 languages are spoken in India, for instance, while SIL International's Ethnologue currently lists 830 living languages in Papua New Guinea—neither is it unremarkable. Because if you compare the languages of North America to, say, the languages in Europe, you'll notice that the vast majority of European languages are actually all from the same Indo-European family. Though there are outliers—Basque, Hungarian, Finnish—there is certainly nothing to approach the linguistic diversity of North America.

As such, you can cast aside any assumptions of broad mutual intelligibility among indigenous American languages. In a 1946 article, the influential linguists Edward Sapir and Morris Swadesh presented sample sentences—translations of the phrase “he will give it to you”—in order to highlight the differences between North American languages. According to Sapir and Swadesh, speakers of Wishram, a Chinookan language in Oregon and Washington, said
a
č
imlúda
, while speakers of Takelma, a language isolate also in Oregon, said
. For Southern Paiute (Uto-Aztecan; Utah, Arizona, and Nevada) they recorded “he will give it to you” as
; in Yana (isolate; Northern California) it was
. The idea that these groups could understand one another seems ludicrous on even the most casual inspection.

Nevertheless, the fact remains that the most widespread misconception about Native languages is that there's only one of them.
^d
This is as instructive as any of the linguistic detail I just shared, because for such a nonsensical notion to exist there has to be an incredibly deep and pervasive preconception that the only distinction that matters is the one between Native and non-Native—a preconception so deep and so pervasive that we often don't even realize it's there. This assumption is wildly counterproductive, obscuring not only the diversity of Native languages but also the relationship between Native languages and European languages such as English. After all, it's almost easy to overlook the fact that American English actually owes much of its distinctiveness to words it has acquired in the New World.

Our popular understanding of the early history between English colonists and American Indians relies heavily on narratives of cultural exchange and cooperation facilitated by translators of near-mythic proportions. In Plymouth, that translator was Tisquantum (more popularly known as Squanto), a member of the Patuxet tribe; in Jamestown it was Pocahontas, the daughter of a Powhatan chief. Though we often read of their skills with English, we rarely learn about their native languages, Wampanoag and Powhatan. These languages have nevertheless had a notable impact on American English.

Wampanoag (also called Massachusetts) and Powhatan are both members of the Eastern Algonquin subfamily, a group that also includes Munsee and Mohegan-Montauk-Narragansett (which was spoken, among other places, on Long Island). Wampanoag was spoken in and around Boston and Cape Cod, while Powhatan was spoken in Virginia from the Potomac to the James River. Along with Eastern Iroquois languages such as Mohawk, Cherokee, and Oneida, they provided many early colonial borrowings into English.

Some of these borrowings were used to identify unfamiliar plants and animals, giving us English words such as
woodchuck
(Cree),
raccoon
(Algonquin),
skunk
(Abenaki), and
squash
(Narragansett).
Opossum
, the name of what I consider to be a singularly nasty creature, comes from a Powhatan word. William Strachey, the first secretary to the Jamestown colony, recorded the word as
aposoum
, a “beast in bignes[s] of a pig and tast[e] alike.” I prefer John Smith's description: “An Opassom hath a head like a Swine, and a taile like a Rat, and is of the bignesse of a Cat.”