The Last Speakers (15 page)

At this point, having met four people who were unable to hear or speak Chulym coherently, we felt nearly defeated. I put away my notebook and shut off the video camera, and we prepared to say goodbye to our hosts. Just at that moment, Vasya cleared his throat and stood up. He leaned down and put his mouth next to Anna's ear. In perfect Chulym, he said, “What clan are you from? Whose daughter are you? Can you tell me in our Chulym language?”

We were floored, suddenly realizing that our reliable guide of the past several days was himself a fluent speaker, and a relatively young one at that.

Over tea, Vasya explained why he had not revealed himself earlier as a speaker. He and his peer group, now in their early 50s, had been made to feel ashamed of their skin color, language, and ethnicity. “From first through third grade, we felt ashamed to speak our language at school. The kids would tease us, call us ‘black ass,' and so we felt ashamed.” They had also, he told us, been made to feel ashamed of their language and forbidden to speak it. Under such pressures, he and his generation made the decision (one that they now regret) to avoid using Ös, as they call it, and to speak exclusively Russian. They made this decision at a very young age, not thinking that it would mean the loss of their ancestral language, thinking only about how to fit in, to avoid ridicule for being different.

Once the floodgates of Vasya's mind were opened, his mouth poured out a wealth of stories, songs, and words. We could barely keep up—it was like holding a teaspoon under a waterfall as we hurried to catch every word. Stories about bear hunting and moose hunting, about the first automobile that drove into the village and what a scary racket it made. Vasya was a “skipped-generation” speaker. He had learned the language largely from his grandmother, which explained why almost no one else his age knew it. He was the youngest speaker by 20 years, and if he lives out his expected life span, he will surely one day be the very last, with no one else to talk to.

If the Chulym people ever had an epic storytelling tradition, it is long forgotten. Only fragments of their folklore and oral tradition have survived. In two expeditions, linguist Greg Anderson and I managed to collect one aphorism, one wool-spinning song, and a few dozen stories about hunting moose and bears. We also collected plain old everyday speech, people talking about their lives, hunting and fishing, and their history. Already faded from the Chulym cultural landscape are ancestral hunting stories that once were verbally shared, retold, and embellished. Tales about bears, for example, never mentioned the word “bear” directly; instead they might say “furry one” or “brown animal.” For the Chulym, the bear is a mystical animal to be both feared and respected. The powerful creature demands special rituals be performed to assuage its spirit. These rituals formed part of an animistic belief system, which holds that spirits inhabit inanimate objects—rocks, trees, bodies of water—as well as living creatures.

But when these same tales are told in Russian, they are mere skeletons of the originals. As the Russian language absorbs Ös speakers, these stories are relegated to the recesses of the Chulym minds and culture, weakening their animistic religious beliefs. At one time, shamans, which the Chulym called
qam
, were prevalent in traditional society. They functioned as experts at interacting with the spirit world and were called upon in dire situations, such as serious illness or death.

During our visit, we met the only two Chulym old enough to have seen a shamanic ritual with their own eyes. One of them was the 90-year-old lady named Varvara. Though frail and largely incoherent when we met her, in 1972 Varvara had told the following story to visiting Russian researchers. The telling itself was a courageous act, for expressions of religion were severely frowned upon in Soviet society, and many shamans had been brutally repressed in the 1950s and 1960s. Even before the Soviets, shamans faded from Chulym society because native Siberians and Russians were converted to Orthodox Christianity, which forbade shamanic practices. After she told it and the researchers dutifully noted it in their notebook in phonetic transcription, it lay dormant for over three decades in the archives of the local university. Varvara's story is the last surviving eyewitness account of now-forgotten shamanic rites.

This fragment of a firsthand account is a glimpse backward into prehistory—perhaps the only one we will ever have—of a lost religious tradition. The Chulym get along relatively well without their traditional religion, and some have converted to Orthodox Christianity, but scholars of religions and culture worldwide are impoverished. Given that so much of history is filled with the eradication of belief systems and the colonial imposition of religions, we should be sensitive to the impending loss of any more. As belief systems approach the vanishing point due to language shift, the best we can do, perhaps, is to write down or record texts or first-person accounts of what people once believed in.

Although Ös did not develop as a written language, we learned that there was at least one example of written Ös. A born outdoorsman, Vasya would spend weeks at a time out hunting. During the day, he would patiently track bears and other animals, and at night, sitting alone in his small cabin in the forest, he made an audacious decision—he would keep a hunting journal in his own native Ös language. He knew how to read and write in Russian, but Ös has at least four sounds not found in Russian. Since Vasya was not a trained linguist, he decided that he would not invent new letters for these sounds, but would use novel combinations of letters he already knew. After some time, he worked out a system and began to make regular entries in his journal. He was encouraged in his efforts by something his mother had told him as a young boy: “My mother told me that it is necessary to speak our Ös language…. Let the Russians speak Russian and let the Ös speak Ös.” This expression of linguistic pride inspired him to keep writing, and perhaps to even dare to think that Ös might be passed onto his children's generation. But his journal was ill-fated.

One day Vasya got up his courage and showed his journal—now containing several years' worth of entries painstakingly written—to a Russian friend. The reaction was catastrophic for him. “What are you writing there, in what language?” the friend demanded. “Why write Ös?” When Vasya heard these scornful words, he felt as if he had done something very wrong. All the shame of the schoolyard and stigma of being different came back to him. In a fit of anger, he threw his journal—the first and only book ever written in his native tongue—out into the forest to rot. “I might have wanted to show it to you,” he told us, “but it's not here, it's there where I threw it away.”

Despite this rocky start, Vasya agreed to demonstrate his writing system. He wrote a simple story and allowed us to film him talking about his writing system. He felt secure enough to express pride once more in his tongue. “I have always loved the Ös language and spoken it…. I will never throw away my language. I still speak it.”

In the hope that we might encourage Vasya to let his writing system gain wider use in the community, we used it to produce the storybook that the tribal council had requested. We also commissioned local children—none of whom spoke the language—to draw illustrations for it. Their efforts, and Vasya's brilliant orthography, led to the very first published Ös book.

Though never written down, the Chulym people's history is a rich one. They were traditionally hunter-gatherers and fishers. Their livelihood, and also their name for themselves, derives from the Chulym River, which flows for over a thousand miles in a westerly direction and empties into the Ob River. At the time of their first contact with Europeans, in the mid-18th century, the Chulym people lived in birch-bark tepees, wore fur clothing, and had no domesticated animals other than dogs.

The Chulym watershed is a low-lying, marshy ecosystem rich in plant, insect, bird, and mammal species and experiencing drastic seasonal fluctuations in temperature. Chulym culture, subsistence, and traditional knowledge center around river navigation and fishing, gathering of berries and roots, and hunting with snares and weapons. All Chulym knowledge systems are in decline. Use of medicinal plants has mostly been forgotten, as have the ecological (lunar) calendar systems, taxonomies of plants and fish, and techniques for making wooden dugout canoes, fur-covered skis, and fur clothing.

The Chulym people pose an interesting puzzle for genetics and the history of human migration. Descendants of an ancient local population, they are genetic and cultural kin to New World populations found in Alaska. At an unknown point in the past (possibly as late as the 18th century), they shifted from their ancient and unidentified language (likely belonging to Yeniseic, a now nearly extinct language family) and began speaking a Turkic language. They underwent a linguistic conversion of the same kind as their fellow Siberians, the Tofa, discussed in chapter 9. The Chulym did hold on to many ancient words, especially pertaining to rivers, fish, and traditional lifeways. Though they shifted languages, they kept many old place-names (especially river names) as well as vocabulary specific to animal, plant, navigation, and canoe-building technologies. By digging into the language of the Chulym, scientists can gain insights into ancient Siberian prehistory, as well as an understanding of human adaptation to some of the harshest living conditions known to mankind.

That work has become even more urgent today. Our work within the Enduring Voices project is to salvage, record, and analyze the fragmented knowledge that remains. In our field trips, we have collected, recorded, and translated a dozen new texts (stories, songs, and personal narratives), not only from Vasya but also from several others that we have discovered since. We met and recorded Maria Tolbanova (born 1931), previously unnoticed by us, and the oldest living fluent female speaker who is able to tell stories. In addition, we visited Anna and Aleksei Baydashev, the only remaining married couple who speak the language daily at home.

Nonetheless, the Ös-speaking population continues to decline sharply. Six speakers we interviewed in 2003 and 2005 have passed away. Only three speakers remain who are able to work with us. And only a single speaker, Maria, was able to tell an extended narrative about her life. What she chose to recall made her shake as she told it and brought tears to her eyes. It was a harrowing story of how, as a young girl, she nearly drowned. This is Maria's story:

We sat silent as Maria concluded her tale. The near-death experience had been so traumatic for her that it still brought a quaver to her voice more than 60 years later. Her own daughter, watching with us, had not heard this story before. Besides the privilege of hearing this heartfelt and deeply authentic life history, we were thrilled to have heard so much Ös spoken, and so passionately. The number of people who could tell such stories can be counted on one hand, and those who could understand, perhaps on two hands. Ös is dying of embarrassment and shame, hidden away, neglected, silenced.

“It would be very difficult to bring the language back now,” opines Vasya. “But perhaps not impossible.”

He has taken small steps, assisting me and other linguists in recording his stories, helping us locate speakers, and speaking the language to his wife and daughter. Coaxing an intentionally hidden language out of its hiding place is an arduous process. Ös was so effectively concealed that the few remaining speakers themselves, we found, were not aware of other speakers, who might have been living in the same village. Families were often unaware that their elders still spoke it, or they dismissed it as the rantings of the senile. It has lain deep in the recesses of memory, undisturbed for decades. And when it did come out, it stirred great emotion. The floodgates of memory opened, and stories from childhood and reminiscences of a lifetime spilled out.