Esther Martinez

Chelsea

Before Christopher Columbus arrived in Hispaniola in 1492, an estimated three hundred distinct indigenous languages were spoken across what is today the United States and Canada. But when Esther Martinez, a member of the Pueblo people whose Tewa name was P’oe Tsawa, was born in 1912, indigenous languages in the United States were already in steep decline—the consequence of purposeful efforts to eradicate them under a system of brutal colonization. After spending her early years in Colorado, Esther became one of the Native American children sent to schools with the objective of aggressive assimilation. At her school in New Mexico, Esther was punished harshly for speaking her native Tewa. The efforts to suffocate her Tewa didn’t succeed. When she graduated from high school in 1930, Esther still knew that her native language had immense value.

After raising her ten children with her husband, and supporting her family by working as a janitor and in other service jobs, Esther went to work at a middle school in San Juan Pueblo—now known as Ohkay Owingeh—New Mexico. A chance meeting with linguist Randall Speirs in the 1960s helped her find her life’s purpose. “He went up and spoke to her in our Tewa language,” said Esther’s grandson Matthew Martinez Jr. “She was stunned and taken aback, how this white guy could crisply pronounce the language.”

Speirs encouraged Esther to document her language, and he taught her the fundamentals of linguistics. Working with Speirs and her family, she helped compile the first Tewa dictionary. It was an involved, painstaking process. “When my grandfather said something that I didn’t know,” she said, “I would ask him and he would write it on a paper. It took me a long time.” She also translated, for the first time, the New Testament into Tewa, and a traditional Tewa children’s story, “Naughty Little Rabbit and Old Man Coyote,” into English. She later wrote a book of many stories translated from Tewa.

“Stories were told to teach us tips for survival and for socialization in the community. They were fun. Our whole life is about storytelling.”

—ESTHER MARTINEZ

Esther began teaching Tewa at Ohkay Owingeh Community School; she would eventually become its director of bilingual education. It was a very different environment from the schools she had attended as a girl in Santa Fe and Albuquerque decades earlier; its philosophy today is “Don’t teach me my culture; use my culture to teach me.” Esther’s work as a teacher was widely recognized, and she won multiple awards, including from the National Council of American Indians and the New Mexico Arts Commission. In addition to her teaching, Esther embraced her role as a tradition bearer for her pueblo, giving advice to families, helping parents choose traditional names for their children, and sharing Tewa stories in their original language.

Her storytelling took her around the country, from schools to national parks. She also shared her knowledge generously with linguists, other academics, and anyone who believed in the importance of Tewa. In 2006, the National Endowment for the Arts made Esther a National Heritage Fellow. She was killed in a car accident shortly after the ceremony.

HILLARY

Less than three months after Esther’s tragic death, President George W. Bush signed the Esther Martinez Native American Languages Preservation Act, providing new funding for the preservation of Native languages. I was honored to support the bill while I served in the Senate.

When Esther was just a child, the people who were supposed to educate her tried to take Tewa from her. It took bravery to defy those efforts, and a love of her culture to preserve Tewa and ensure that it didn’t disappear. Thanks to her legacy, multiple efforts to preserve, document, and expand Native languages have received federal support through the Esther Martinez Native American Languages Preservation Act; it is a small fraction of what is needed to undo the centuries of targeted destruction. Today, approximately 150 Native North American languages remain actively spoken across the United States, but many of those languages are spoken by only a few thousand or a few hundred people. The best way to respect Esther’s work would be for the United States government to fully fund all efforts to preserve Native languages, and revive those that haven’t been spoken in decades or even centuries.