Chapter 18
Native Languages
In This Chapter
Looking at languages
Using sign and picture languages
Wielding language as a weapon
There never was, nor is there now, a standard, “universal” language spoken by all Native Americans.
In fact, such a language doesn’t even exist. Members of tribes, if speaking in their own tribal language, will likely not be understood by members of other tribes, nor will what they hear spoken by others be understood by them.
An Impossible Question?
How many spoken Indian languages were in existence when the Europeans first arrived on the North American landmass?
It’s a very good question, yet it is a question that has been a daunting challenge to answer for scholars, historians, and Native Americans for centuries.
Some sources state unequivocally that it is a question that is impossible to answer: Many encyclopedias state bluntly that it is simply not possible to know the number of languages that were spoken in the New World before the Europeans arrived. It’s also impossible to know with certainty the number of people who spoke however many languages were being spoken.
Not possible.
So how do we “speak” intelligently about Indian languages? By concentrating on geographical areas and discussing the tribes of the area and the many individual languages they spoke.
Historians generally agree that there were nine basic Native American spoken language families:
Algic (Algonquin): Parts of the midwestern United States, the Northeast, and most of Canada
Iroquoian: The areas that are now upstate New York, plus a small pocket down in the heart of the U.S. South
Muskogean: Mainly the deep South, including Alabama, Georgia, and parts of Florida
Siouan: Central and northern U.S., including the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, down to Oklahoma and Arkansas
Athabaskan: The Southwest, mainly New Mexico, Arizona, and parts of northern Texas; also, Alaska, California, Oregon, Washington, and parts of the northern Pacific Coast
Uto-Aztecan: The West, including Utah, Nevada, parts of California and Colorado; plus the Comanche area of Texas
Salishan: The Northwest, including parts of Washington, Idaho, and the western third or so of Montana
Aleut: The Aleutian peninsula
Inuit: Interior Alaska
Mayan: Parts of Mexico
All others: Pockets scattered throughout the continental U.S.
The Slow Extinction of Native Languages
If a Native language is only spoken by adults, and is not routinely and consistently taught to the younger generations of a population, the language is considered “moribund”; that is, on its way out. (And I’m not speaking only of Native American languages here, but of all languages around the world in general.)
This means that it’s almost a certainty that the Native language is unlikely to survive for many more generations, because as the elder generation that speaks it dies off, there is no one from succeeding generations knowledgeable enough in speaking and writing the language to continue its use.
It is estimated by linguist Michael Krauss, head of the Alaska Native Language Center, that there are only 175 Native American languages — from an original pool of languages numbering into the many, many hundreds — being spoken today and that close to 90 percent of them are moribund.
Could you repeat that, please?
Some Native languages have the characteristic of “polysynthesism” which basically means there’s no difference between a word and a sentence.
Languages that use this concept take several ideas and create a single word expressing the concept of the original compilation of thoughts.
An example of this, according to Native American linguistic expert Edward Sapir, is this oft-quoted word from the Southern Paiute language:
Wiitokuchumpunkurüganiyugwivantümü
This translates to “They who are going to sit and cut up with a knife a black female (or male) buffalo.”
A 16-word construct is manifested in a single, 34-character word.
Another example is this Wichita word:
Kiyaakiriwaac’arasarikita’ahiiriks
which means “He carried the big pile of meat up into the top of the tree.”
(Source: David S. Rood, “North American Languages.” International Encyclopedia of Linguistics 3 (1991):110–115.)
Today, the word “Wannabe” is a Pan-Indian pejorative term for non-Indians who express their longing to be Native American by doing things like practicing tribal rites or renaming themselves things like Wolf Moon Woman. It can be translated as “wacky non-Indians who thinks they are expressing much-needed sympathy or solidarity with Indian people, but who are really just making fools of themselves.”
The “English only” movement
How did so many Native American languages die off?
There are several reasons, but one of the most significant reasons was the fact that Indian languages were deliberately “exterminated” during the boarding school period in America (beginning in the 1880s and continuing for decades) when Native American kids were punished if they spoke their Native language or did anything that could be considered tribal.
Today, efforts to pass laws making English the official language of the U.S. inadvertently continue this assault on Native languages. It is ironic that the U.S. would try to suppress Native language, given that some of these have been invaluable in our military efforts. Would the War in the Pacific have been won if the Navajo language had been extinguished prior to the recruitment of the code talkers? Would troops in WWI have been saved if Choctaw children had not learned how to speak to one another and if those children had not grown up and decided to fight on behalf of a country of which they were not yet citizens?
Can the damage be repaired?
First of all, why is it important to preserve the few remaining Native American languages?
Cultural diversity is one reason. Many historians, scholars, and ethnic people feel that a knowledge of many languages is beneficial for society in general. It opens people up to new ideas and ways of saying things, and eliminates the natural aversion many people have for anything different from what they’re used to.
Restoring dead languages and furthering the use of moribund languages are no easy tasks. In fact, they are extremely difficult, especially when there are few Native speakers of a language still living.
In 1990, the U.S. House and Senate addressed this problem by passing the Native American Languages Act of 1990. And in 2006, the Esther Martinez Native American Languages Act of 2006 was made Public Law, adding to the resources available to schools and Native groups to ensure the “survival and vitality” of Native American languages.
Will the day come when the average American will have the opportunity in his or her day-to-day life to hear Native American languages spoken conversationally in the mainstream of American society?
Considering the fact that the American Indian population in on the upswing and is projected to grow steadily over the next several decades, the answer to that question is “possibly.”
Sign Language
When people who do not speak a common language meet and need to work something out, they often resort to sign language. Columbus communicated with the Taino through sign language, but it is unknown how his gestures might have communicated the idea “I am here to subjugate you, enslave some of you, and bring devastation and disease upon your community.” But then again, maybe he wanted to hide all that and simply tried to ask for food and water.
In 1540, explorer Francisco Vázquez de Coronado wrote of the Comanche in his journal, “That they were very intelligent is evident from the fact that although they conversed by means of signs, they made themselves understood so well that there was no need of an interpreter.”
Besides being the name of an utterly wonderful movie, smoke signals were used by some tribes who lived in clear areas to communicate with other tribes a distance away. This type of communication would never work in a forested area, but on the open plains or desert could have been effective. There was never a universal code of signals.
Little Written Down?
Until the 1800s, no tribe had an individual written language. In 1821, the Cherokee Nation adopted a syllabary invented by Sequoyah, and this script is still in use today. Prior to this, however, tribes maintained information and stories through oral accounts and through pictures.
Tribal history and stories were kept by men and women and were passed along through the generations in verbal recitation. Today, storytelling maintains its importance to Indian people, as is seen by the popularity of performances by people like Tim Tingle (Choctaw) and Gayle Ross (Cherokee).
Some of the traditional stories were written down by tribal members after they had acquired the skills to read and write. This practice has been controversial, however, because for some stories, the timing and nature of their recitation is important. Many stories that talk about the origins of people and the natural world are meant to be told as a practice of reverence for the world and are thus only told at certain times of the year or at certain times of day. Writing these down could mean that they might be read or told at inappropriate times, by and to inappropriate people. It’s kind of as if somebody started randomly saying Mass while riding the bus to work in the morning.
Many tribes used drawings to express complicated ideas. These drawings are all tribal-specific, and anthropologists sometimes puzzle long and hard over the meaning of some of the earliest pictures. Paintings on rock shelters and cliff walls have been interpreted as representing hunting scenes, religious activity, or aspects of the natural world (see Figure 18-1). In West Texas, the Lower Pecos region has 4,000-year-old paintings and pictographs that may represent religious activity, but the exact meaning is completely unknown, as the descendants of the original artists are unknown.
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Figure 18-1: Some Indian pictograms. |
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In the 19th century, tribes on the Plains began to record images on ledger books and these have been studied and collected by art historians and anthropologists. The ledger drawings are sometimes in the style of hide drawings and sometimes take the form of Winter Counts, or calendars.
Simple symbols that appear on traditional clothing or jewelry are actually representations of complex, ancient ideas. The spirals that appear on southeastern beaded sashes may represent the serpent and consequently bring to mind stories about its role in protecting the people. For the Choctaw, the circle-and-cross motif represents the stickball game, but at least one anthropologist has noted the similarity of this design to an ancient Mississippian design of skulls and crossed bones, thus relating a modern design to a motif that goes back 3,000 years.
Today, artists from Jaune Quick to See Smith reinterpret traditional imagery to make social commentary.
Language As (the White Man’s) Weapon
Racist language against American Indians was, unfortunately, quite common in the 18th and 19th centuries.
One ignoble example (perhaps) was by none other than that American icon, Mark Twain.
In an 1870 issue of the magazine The Galaxy, Twain published an essay called “The Noble Red Man” which was, in essence and on the surface, a scathing excoriation of how Indians had been portrayed in James Fenimore Cooper’s novel The Last of the Mohicans.
Twain approaches the topic by first listing all the attributes Cooper assigns to Indians, and then providing an alternate assessment of the “noble red man,” one which is, at the same time, both dreadfully racist and quite derogatory.
Was Twain being satirical? One could make the case, perhaps, that his “compare and contrast” structure in the piece was used for ironic effect. But his final line that everything he wrote describing Indians was “from personal observation,” combined with the merciless and, let’s face it, vicious assessment of a “typical” Indians leads to the inevitable conclusion that he wasn’t kidding around.
No matter how we twist and turn the words, and no matter how we attempt to recast our perception of the essay, there’s no denying that Twain sounds like he means every word of it.
Language As (the Native American) Weapon
Sadly, modern writers have internalized the opposing concepts of Noble and Savage and this is teeth-grittingly frustrating to a modern Indian person who has to contend with either being thought “Noble and Stoic” or “Stupid and Dirty.”
Despite the tensions between the enforced English language and the traditional ways of conveying stories, many Indian people have embraced writing as a tool, and as a weapon. The Miwok poet Wendy Roses has noted that having a universal language has had unintended consequences, in that for once, tribal members can now all communicate with each other and can unite to fight together against common threats.
Additionally, Indian people have seized the opportunity to begin to portray ourselves as we really are. Forget whatever you’ve learned from either Cooper or Twain, or Louis Lamour, for that matter. If you want to read real Indian writing, try Louise Erdrich, Leanne Howe, or Susan Power. The Shell Shakers, by Howe, contains Indian people who are wise, Indian people who are greedy, Indian people who are silly, and Indian people who are finance moguls. Reading real Indian literature is one of the best ways to understand real Indian people.