File

Ending
the
Silence
The long-dead Native language
that once greeted the Pilgrims
is today again being spoken.
text by
JUSTIN SHATWELL
photographs by
JONATHAN KOZOWYK
Kuweeqâhsun ... This was the first word that
Jessie Little Doe Baird spoke to her daughter,
Mae, the day she was born. The birth hadn’t gone
as planned. Jessie had spent most of the last four
months of her pregnancy in bed. She was 40 years
old and already had four grown children, but Mae
was no accident. Jessie took this last risky plunge
into motherhood with her eyes wide open.
On July 4, 2004, her home was full of guests.
Not only was it Independence Day, but the annual
three-day Mashpee Wampanoag powwow was
also going on, and Jessie’s relatives were suitably
boisterous. “I just went downstairs to tell them to
shut up when I started bleeding,” she recalls.
Jessie was rushed to the hospital for an emergency caesarean. Mae was born fine and healthy,
but her mother’s bleeding wouldn’t stop. Jessie lost
consciousness. In her dreams, she saw herself die
on the table—and things easily could have gone
that way. But Jessie held on. She knew she had
work left to do.
Jessie believes that in 1993 she was given a special task by her ancestors. She experienced a series
of dreams in which they spoke to her in a language
she didn’t understand: Wôpanâak, the ancient language of her people, which had died out sometime
in the mid-1800s. She took it as a sign. A Wampanoag prophecy spoke of a time when their language
would leave them, only to return when the people
were ready. Jessie believed that her dreams were a
message from her ancestors, telling her it was time.
| 95
96 |
translate, but it’s impossible not to see
optimism in that phrase. On that day,
the hopes of an entire people shone
down upon one little girl, the seventh
generation, wrapped in the arms of her
exhausted mother.
—
In a tiny classroom at Boston College,
Nitana Hicks waits for an answer. She
hasn’t been teaching long, but she’s
mastered this skill: staring down her
students after a difficult question and
willing one of them to answer. She’s
had a lot of practice at it. Many of her
questions leave her students speechless.
Eventually the silence breaks. A
female student volunteers to conjugate
the verb on the board. She walks to the
front of the class, picks up a marker,
and starts writing words that to most
anyone outside this classroom seem
like complete gibberish.
The consonants and vowels align in
ways that defy pronunciation. At least
one word ends in the syllable ukw and
the numeral 8 is being thrown around
as though it’s a letter. (It’s pronounced
something like the English oo sound.)
Nitana looks over the work and says,
“Close,” then erases an accent from one
of the words. The student objects. “I
swear to God there’s an accent in the
red book,” she says, as she starts f lipping through a workbook at her desk.
Nitana looks honestly puzzled for
a second, and then, almost questioningly, replies, “I swear to God you’re
wrong.”
Some of the other students start
weighing in, half on either side. Eventually they figure out that Nitana and her
student have different editions. “It’s the
updated one,” Nitana says, holding up
her workbook. “It should be right-er.”
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Since then, Jessie has devoted her
life to resurrecting Wôpanâak, working toward the day when the language
that greeted the Pilgrims could once
more be spoken aloud in southeastern
Massachusetts. Her path has required
one leap of faith after another, but she’s
had more successes than failures along
the way. She’s written a dictionary, gotten a master’s degree in linguistics from
MIT, and has even won a MacArthur
“genius grant.” But Mae remains her
greatest achievement. She was born to
be the first.
Before July 4, 2004, there hadn’t
been a native speaker of Wôpanâak
born into the tribe for six generations.
Jessie marked the end of that sad legacy
with a single word: Kuweeqâhsun …
Translated as “good morning,” it literally means “you are in the light.” Jessie always warns that metaphors don’t
W hen Jessie began her work ,
Wôpanâak existed only in written
form, preserved on aging documents.
Her ancestors were members of one
of the f irst literate Indian nations,
owing in part to the colonists’ eagerness to spread the Gospel; the f irst
Bibles published in Boston were in
Wôpanâak. (Some experts believe the
language was Massachusett, which is
very closely related to Wôpanâak.) The
Wampanoag embraced literacy, having
learned early on that when doing business with the English it helped to have
things in writing. They’d left behind
reams of contracts and letters.
When Jessie Little Doe Baird looks
back at her early linguistics textbooks,
she’s surprised she’s made it this far.
“The writing is a little opaque,” she
admits. When she began her studies,
she was already in her thirties, a workNOVEMBER | DECEMBER 2012
opposite , clockwise from left :
Jessie Little
Doe Baird, founder of the Wôpanâak
Language Reclamation Project; the Mashpee
Wampanoag Indian Museum, which houses
artifacts, heirlooms, and other exhibits
chronicling tribal history over thousands
of years; the new Wôpanâak dictionary.
this page , clockwise from top left : A children’s
“good morning” song at summer languageimmersion camp; apprentices Nitana
Hicks (left) and Tracy Kelley with the next
generation: Nitana’s baby son, Wesley
Greendeer, and nieces Jacelle and Jayline
Steiding; turtle-shell rattle and sage;
work table at language-immersion camp.
ing mother with no better understanding of morphology or umlauting effects
than the rest of us. “I literally cried
reading this,” she recalls. “I thought I’d
feel like I’ve been tasked with this as my
life’s work, and if this is what I have to
deal with, it’s not going to happen.”
But Jessie couldn’t walk away. She
enrolled in the graduate linguistics
school at MIT, where she began work-
ing with Kenneth Hale, Ph.D. Hale
was f luent in 50 languages, an expert
in indigenous linguistics, and a direct
descendant of Rhode Island founder
Roger Williams. It was that last qualification that got Jessie’s attention.
The Wampanoag prophecy also
stated that the children of those who
had had a hand in breaking the language cycle would help heal it. That
was the moment when the prophecy
truly became real for Jessie Little Doe
Baird. Any chance of a normal life was
gone.
—
The first step in reviving the language
was to free those words from the page
and put a living breath behind them.
Jessie and Dr. Hale scoured the language’s written record. Using related
Algonquian languages as a guide, they
stitched Wôpanâak back together, one
| 97
at MIT, Dr. Kenneth Hale (1934–2001), cofounder of
the WLRP, specialized in indigenous languages. below,
Harvard University’s copy of the 1663 Wôpanâak Bible
as translated by Rev. John Eliot and assistants. Although
originally produced as part of Eliot’s campaign to convert
the Wampanoag to Christianity and the Puritan ethic, some
350 years later it helped the Wampanoag to reclaim their
language and a vital part of their heritage.
word at a time. When Hale passed
away in 2001, the language was in
good enough shape for Jessie to deliver
a eulogy in her ancestors’ tongue. But
delivering a speech was one thing;
teaching the language to the rest of her
nation would prove far more difficult.
The students in Nitana’s class continue to struggle through their lesson,
sometimes breaking into laughter over
their shared frustration. Wôpanâak is
not easy to learn. Language is more than
just a tool for communication; it’s a philosophy. The way words and thoughts
are constructed in Wôpanâak is fundamentally different from the way that’s
done in English. Take, for instance,
the formation of nouns. If an English
speaker were to encounter a new animal
in the wild, he would likely give it an
arbitrary name, like dog or cat or emperor
penguin. A Wampanoag, on the other
hand, would describe the animal’s key
features—its size, its action, and how it
moves in relation to other things—and
that whole description would become
its name. For example, the Wôpanâak
word for ant comprises individual syllables that convey the following information: It moves about, it does not walk on
two legs, and it puts things away. If you
were to add another syllable indicating
that the animal is large, the word is no
longer ant. It’s squirrel.
To make things even more difficult,
the Wampanoag were starting from
98 |
zero. When Jessie and Dr. Hale launched
the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation
Project (WLRP) in 1993, there was
no one alive who’d grown up speaking
the language; thus, even today, no one
is fully fluent. Just as Nitana is teaching
this class to beginners, she’s taking les-
half-hour lesson. When asked why he
puts in so much effort to struggle with
a language that has less in common
with English than it does Klingon, he
smiles. “If you want to get an Indian
excited about something,” he says, “tell
him it’s something that’s just for him.”
The first gift we give our children is language.
Our beliefs, our dreams, our heritage—we pass
these things on through the spoken word. Biology
gives us our body, but language delivers our soul.
sons from someone further along. All of
their teaching tools—workbooks, dictionaries, and curricula—they’ve had to
create themselves, revising them as the
language comes into better focus.
The process seems impossibly desperate, like renting out the bottom
floors of a tower you’re still building—
but it’s working. Nitana is the only person in this classroom who’s actually a
student at BC. Everyone else has come
here after work to slog through conjugation drills and grammar lessons. And
they’re not alone. Classes like this have
sprung up in various towns on Cape
Cod and Martha’s Vineyard as well.
One student, Jonathan Perry, drives at
least two hours round-trip every week
to attend Nitana’s one- to one-and-a-
—
The first gift we give our children is
language. That whispered welcome
between a mother and her baby when
the child is first laid upon her breast
begins a lifelong dialogue through
which all subsequent gifts are given.
Our beliefs, our dreams, our heritage—
we pass these things on through the
spoken word. Biology gives us our body,
but language delivers our soul.
Before the language died out in the
19th century, Wô­panâak was passed
down from parent to child for thousands of years. That language cycle
formed a link between each new generation and every one that had come
before. When they lost their language,
the Wampanoag were severed from
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left,
one of their most basic birthrights. The
prospect of winning it back is powerful:
powerful enough for Jessie and people
like her to devote their lives to it.
The dining room of Jessie’s home
in Mashpee is packed with Wôpanâak
material. Workbooks are spread out on
the table and handmade teaching posters are taped to the wall. Jessie is joined
there by three women: Nitana Hicks,
Tracy Kelley, and Melanie Roderick.
In the next room, Melanie’s son,
Muhshunuhkusuw (his name means
“he is exceedingly strong”), a toddler,
is bouncing off the walls. She occasionally calls out to reprimand him,
sometimes in English, sometimes in
Wôpanâak. She hopes he’ll pick up the
language passively and avoid all the
bookwork she’s had to do. Asked if it’s
hard to raise him in two languages, she
just laughs and says, “At this age, you
have to tell them everything six times
anyway before it sinks in.”
NOVEMBER | DECEMBER 2012
top :
A breathtaking view of the Aquinnah
Cliffs on Martha’s Vineyard, part of the
Wampanoag’s ancestral homelands.
above : Pamutahkôm (c. 1639–1676), son of
Oosameeqan, Massasoit (grand sachem)
of the Wampanoag Nation, and known to
Massachusetts’ English colonists as King
Philip. Leading an alliance of New England
tribes, he died fighting the expansion of white
settlement deeper into Indian lands.
These three young women are Jessie’s apprentices. In 2010 the WLRP
received a federal grant that would
pay them to learn the language, train
as apprentices, and develop earlychildhood curricula, with the intention
that they’ll go on to teach others. The
training is for two years, but it would
be a mistake to call it a two-year commitment. “If anyone leaves after two
years, we’ll hunt them down and kill
them!” Jessie says with a laugh. “We’ll
all be with each other, in sickness and in
health, for a very long time.”
“As long as we all shall live,” Melanie adds.
The women are chatty and comfortable together, and sometimes the
lessons veer off into personal matters.
“It gets easier for us everyday to just sit
around and talk about everyone else’s
business in Wôpanâak,” Jessie quips.
There are four major surviving Wam­panoag communities in Massa­chusetts:
| 99
the two large tribes in Mashpee and
Aquinnah, a smaller tribe at Herring
Pond, and a band in Assonet. Together
they number about 4,000 people. Of the
69 Wampanoag tribes in existence in
1620, today’s Mashpee, Aquinnah, and
Herring Pond groups, descended from
historic tribes, are still on their original
lands, the lands their ancestors settled
more than 10,000 years ago, with tribal
governments that have never ceased to
function; the Assonet are descended
from historic tribes that no longer exist
as governments. The WLRP is the only
project on which all four groups work
jointly, because as the United States
grew up around them, the Wampanaog
largely blended in, and speaking their
own language again is about blending in
a little less.
Tracy says that as far as she’s concerned, the world is separated into two
parts: Cape Cod and “over the bridge.”
W hile she was attending UMass
Amherst, she was so determined to
return home after graduation that it
affected her dating life. “ ‘Sorry, if you
have no passion to stay in Massachu-
setts, preferably near the bridge, I really
can’t,’” she recalls saying.
Becoming apprentices was no idle
choice for these women. Jessie regularly refers to the project as “a lifetime’s
work,” and the meaning there is literal.
These women are expected to contribute to the project, in one way or
another, until they simply can’t work
anymore.
her. “The whole purpose of this is to
open a Wôpanâak immersion school.
So by 2015, we’re going to have a school
you can take your child to from kindergarten to grade 2. Once schools open,
you’re good. You’re golden. That’s where
our fluent speakers will be developed.”
The plan is audacious. Jessie’s generation isn’t that interested in being the
first to speak the language in 150 years;
Jessie’s generation isn’t that interested in being
the first to speak the language in 150 years;
they’re more interested in being the last not to.
In the other room, Muhshunuhkusuw loses interest in his toys and comes
bounding onto his mother’s lap. Jessie
explains that although the apprentices
are helping to take some of the teaching burden off her shoulders, the future
of Wôpanâak, if it is to have one, must
come from their children.
“This is only a means to an end,” she
says, gesturing to the materials around
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they’re more interested in being the last
not to. Jessie estimates that about 425
tribal members have taken language
classes. Some can barely say hello, while
others are carrying on entire conversations. Slowly, the language is leaving
the classroom. Mothers are speaking
it in the home, teaching their children
by osmosis. The apprentices chat freely
in the language at bars and restaurants.
There are even Wôpanâak Facebook
posts floating around the Internet.
But there remains so much work
ahead. Not only do Jessie and her
appren­tices need to secure a charter for
the school, they must write a Wôpanâaklanguage curriculum and train enough
adults in the language to serve as teachers. Jessie tries not to get overwhelmed
by the enormous size of the task.
“No, I don’t go there. I try not to think
about it,” she says. “You know, it will
take care of itself.” Pointing to each of
her apprentices, she adds, “And if I can’t
do it, she’ll be able to do it, or she’ll be
able to do it, or she’ll be able to do it. It’s
a community effort. You couldn’t do it
alone.” She also knows that all they can
do is get the language ready and pass
it on. What the children choose to do
with that gift is up to them.
—
It’s early spring, and the sky over Martha’s Vineyard is a field of unbroken
gray. Jason Baird, Jessie’s husband, is
taking me on a tour of the tribal land
in Aquinnah. We’ve stopped at the
Gay Head Cliffs, and we’re walking
through a small shantytown of souvenir stands that have been boarded up
for the season. Mae follows a few paces
behind us. She is a slender 7 years old,
with the willowy arms and legs of a
dancer. Her puffy pink jacket swallows
her whole.
In Wôpanâak, Aquinnah means
“the end of the island.” The way the
cold Atlantic waters crash at the base
of the cliffs, it looks like the end of the
world. As far as the U.S. government
is concerned, this is all that remains of
the Wampanoag nation. Of the four
main Wampanoag communities, the
Aquinnah are the only tribe with a reservation. It isn’t big—these cliffs, some
cranberry bogs, and a few other parcels
amounting to no more than 485 acres in
all—but it’s theirs.
As we reach the cliff edge, Jason
points to the shoreline below. “There
used to be a pier out under the tip,” he
says. “Until about 10 years ago, you
could see the last pylon still sticking up
out there at low tide.” He explains that
around the turn of the 20th century,
tourists would board steamers to come
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out here and buy trinkets from tribal
members.
Jason knows these cliffs. He points
out where an ox cart used to run to the
shore, and where the army built bunkers during World War II. He talks
about how he ran up and down these
hills as a child, and how a few months
earlier the tribe collected clay here for a
pottery class he took Mae to.
“My pot was an indecent-looking
teacup,” Mae chimes in.
“Oh, it was a nice pot,” Jason says.
“No it wasn’t,” she shoots back.
It’s hard to imagine now, but there
have always been Wampanoag here.
Unlike other tribes, these people were
never fully forced from their land. After
King Philip’s War, 1675–76, their territory shrank to a few small enclaves; the
rest of the country has simply grown up
around them.
In the language project, the word
“birthright” gets tossed around a lot.
For many people this concept is vague,
but for the Wampanoag it’s as solid as
the ground beneath our feet. At the
core of Wampanoag society, there is a
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| 101
visceral link between man and earth,
as natural as tendon to bone. As long as
the Wampanoag stay on their ancestral
land, they are linked, spiritually and
naturally, to the first ancestors who
walked these shores.
“In the philosophy of our people,
you’re rooted in the earth just like the
plants,” Jason says, “because what comes
out of the earth is what sustains you,
and when you die, you go back into the
earth. That cycle creates this existence
where you’ve never been separated. That
philosophy is one that we’ve lived with
since the beginning of time. When colonization came upon us, there became
this idea where you could possibly be
severed from that connection. If you’re
removed from the chain of life … I
can’t even think of a word for it. You’re
taken away from everything you’ve ever
known … from your existence.”
I wonder how much of this lesson is
for my education and how much is for
Mae’s. In our mobile age, when success is so often linked to a willingness
to move across the country for work or
education, a philosophy that preaches
staying put is a hard sell. As Mae grows
older, she’ll be increasingly exposed to
the values of the rest of the nation, and
it will be up to her to decide how best
to balance the teachings of her parents
and the demands of the 21st century.
The three of us reach the crest of
a small lookout where the cliffs come
into sharp relief against the cloudy sky.
Once, clay of every color could be seen
in the cliff face, but erosion has dulled it
to an earthy, reddish-brown hue. After
a heavy storm, trails of color can be seen
drifting into the ocean.
Not far from here, beach homes and
summer cottages dot scrubby forests.
Until the 1960s, the Wampanoag here
and in Mashpee had their towns mostly
to themselves, running their local governments as extensions of the tribe.
But over the past few decades, they’ve
become minorities in their own homeland. New developments have blocked
off old hunting grounds. And town governments are more often challenging the
Wampanoag’s aboriginal right to fish
without a license. “We find ourselves in
a shrinking territory,” Jason says, “a continually shrinking environment.”
102 |
Aquinnah, “the end of the island”:
The Wampanoag have been pushed
literally to the edge of the map; the language project is a gentle but powerful
push back against the tide. It’s something
to rally around, a reminder of all they
have to fight for and a declaration that
they’re not going anywhere. With every
new speaker, the roots of their community grow deeper into the soil that has
nourished them through the ages.
—
Mae’s version of her birth story is
somewhat different from her mother’s:
“When I was born, people were so
excited they set off fireworks, and now
they do it every year.” She tells people
this every Fourth of July.
If you frequent the ferry to Martha’s
Vineyard, odds are you’ve seen her,
folded up on a bench playing games on
her mother’s iPhone. She’s clever for her
age, perhaps a little mischievous, but
there’s nothing to suggest that she was
born with a destiny.
Jessie and Jason learned early on
that they had to let Mae find her own
way with the language. After she was
born, they’d tried taking a hard-line
approach: For the first four months, she
wasn’t exposed to English at all. Jessie
remembers this as a diff icult time.
Even with all her training, speaking
Wôpanâak 24 hours a day was something of a strain.
“But it wasn’t as big a problem as it
was telling our loved ones basically to
‘shut your mouth,’ ” she says. Friends
and family members, even Mae’s own
siblings, were informed that if they
couldn’t communicate in Wôpanâak,
they couldn’t come over. “ ‘Sorry, if
you’re going to use English around her,
then you can’t play with her, you can’t
talk to her,’” Jessie recalls telling them.
“People were really pissed off.”
Gradually Jessie and Jason realized
that what they were doing was counterproductive: A birth that was supposed to rally the community around
Wôpanâak was instead making people
resent it. Mae’s parents realized that
if the language were to truly return, it
couldn’t be forced on anyone.
The inf lux of English into Mae’s
world proved less disastrous than Jessie and Jason had feared. One day when
Mae was a toddler, she looked at her
parents and, in the garbled accent of
infancy, said the Wôpanâak word for
“my father”—Daddy, essentially. “I said
to Jason, ‘Did she just say what I think
she said?’ ” Jessie remembers. “And he
said, ‘I think so.’ ” Jason tried to play it
cool, Jessie says with a bemused touch
of jealousy: “I was the one up breastfeeding every two hours!”
Today, when Jessie and Jason speak
to Mae, they alternate Wôpanâak and
English, and they don’t pressure her to
respond in one language or the other.
When it’s just the three of them, she’ll
often use Wôpanâak, but in mixed
company she always defaults to English. Not long ago, Jessie tried to gauge
how much Mae was using Wôpanâak
outside the house: “I just asked her
matter-of-factly one day, ‘Do you
use the language with your friends at
school?’” Mae replied, “Not anymore.”
When Jessie asked why, Mae said, “No
one plays with me then.” Mae may have
sensed that her words upset her mother,
because she immediately went on to
tell her that “Jesse” spoke with her in
Wôpanâak. Jesse was the elderly white
man who drove her school bus. Jessie
chalked this up as a juvenile white lie.
Not long after, Jessie walked down
her long dirt driveway to greet Mae at
the bus stop. The door slid open, and
the bus driver beamed at her. “Kuwee­
qâhsun,” he said. He explained that little by little, Mae had been teaching him
the basics of Wôpanâak on their way
to and from school. Hearing her own
words come back to her through the
lips of a near-stranger was a shock—but
also a moment of pride. Mae had taken
the language into the private part of her
life, the part her parents didn’t oversee.
How Wôpanâak will shape Mae’s
life is still a question. How much will
she use the language as an adult? How
many people will there be with whom
to speak it? It’s impossible to know, but
Jessie has reason to be hopeful. Mae has
accepted the gift of her birthright. She
can choose to live as a modern Wampanoag and never have to fear that something is being lost in translation.
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