Reclaiming a Language
By CHRIS BURRELL
The language hasn't been spoken for the last 150 years. While virtually dead, it has been saved on brittle pages in library archives and preserved on microfilm. The language belongs to the Wampanoags, and three years ago, the tribal councils from both Aquinnah and Mashpee banded together and made a commitment to reclaim it.
It's called Wopanaak, and hardly any tribal members know more than a few words. Fortunately, one among them has mastered the language and become their teacher, and starting on Monday, at least five members of the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head/Aquinnah will begin a weekly journey to the mainland to learn from this teacher one of the main building blocks of their culture.
Indeed, this is not some language class that precedes a trip overseas, satisfies a requirement for college or helps someone get a job. It turns out that for dozens of members of the Wampanoag Tribe, the experience of learning Wopanaak is like a trip back in time, reconnecting a broken link to one's heritage. It is at once personal and even religious.
"It's the most rewarding thing for some people," says the teacher, Jessie Little Doe Fermino. "It means a lot to get up in the morning and thank the Creator for all that you have in the language that was given to you. You can't imagine that feeling."
Ms. Fermino may hold a master's degree in linguistics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but there's little of the pure academic present when she speaks of the personal connections both she and her students now hold for their language.
The class roster is strictly reserved for members of the tribe. There's a strong proprietary feeling about their language, and if you know anything about Native American history, you can understand why they would want to hold onto this intangible piece of their heritage.
Still, they are eager to share their enthusiasm for the reclamation project. Other tribes have embarked on similar efforts to reclaim and revive their native languages, notably the Native Americans in Hawaii, according to Ms. Fermino.
And Tobias Vanderhoop, the one Vineyarder who has already studied with Ms. Fermino, says that at national gatherings of tribes, there are always some that speak among themselves in their own language. "They tend to be tribes that remained isolated from the mainstream on reserves or tribal lands," he says.
But it is also a mark of distinction, and Mr. Vanderhoop, a member of the tribal council here and part of the tribe's education department, wants that distinction for the members of his tribe.
But getting to that point is not a simple task. "It is very challenging. There's no point in saying it's easy," says Ms. Fermino of the process of learning Wopanaak. The nouns are not so hard, says Mr. Vanderhoop; it's the verbs that are tricky.
Wopanaak is part of the Algonquin group of languages that extended from Canada all the way to Florida. There are sounds in this language that do not exist in English. There's even a letter that looks like the numeral "8" but sounds more like an "O."
Ms. Fermino's biggest challenge in teaching Wopanaak was in finding materials. Most anything written about the language is intended for linguists, she says, not for a class that ranges from 20 to 77-year-old students with varied academic backgrounds.
She ended up creating many of her own teaching tools and aids. Flash cards were the most obvious, but then there was the game of bingo, roughly translated as "peenk8," and played like any bingo game except that the English words were called out and students had to match their chips to the Wopanaak word on their peenk8 sheet.
Often, she would group students in teams, and as an added incentive, the team with the highest scores would be treated to snacks or even dinner brought in by the rest of the class. But Mr. Vanderhoop points out the approach was the antithesis of high-pressure. "If it took a few weeks longer for everyone to learn something, we agreed to allow that," he says.
It may not be a cinch to learn, but it is a language with a rich history. You might think that there would be only scant evidence of the language, but that's not the case. In fact, it is one of the most extensively documented Native American languages, according to Ms. Fermino.
The first Bible ever printed in the Western Hemisphere in 1663 was the King James version written in Wopanaak, she says, and copies of that Bible are held in the rare book archives at both Harvard University and MIT. Before the arrival of English settlers and missionaries, the language - one of 33 strains of Algonquin - was oral and not written.
But by the 1700s, Wopanaak was being written down using the alphabet brought by the newcomers. Lexicons were published and legal documents drafted. The Wampanoags quickly became very literate. "Their literacy rate was high, as high as that of the white people," Ms. Fermino says.
The prevalence of so many primary documents - diaries, letters and petitions - is one of the things which drew Mary Lopes of Mashpee to begin studying the language. The wife of the Mashpee tribe's sachem, Silent Drum, she wanted to learn history firsthand by reading what early Wampanoags thought or felt so long ago.
"History books can get things all screwed up," she says. "I wanted to see what they were saying, to understand things from their perspective." With her new-found knowledge, Mrs. Lopes has been researching a petition made by some tribal members in 1753 to the general court of the Massachusetts colony. She has an English version of the text to help her, but she is moved by the content of the letter.
"These young men were saying to the court," explains Mrs. Lopes, "‘You have made laws and now we need laws. The Englishmen were dividing up our land and now our young people will have to go to sea to make a living.'"
But beyond the historical insights, what Mrs. Lopes gleaned most from her time in the class was a new awareness of the Wampanoag's spirituality, a sensibility that is built right into the language.
"I was very surprised at where the language took us," she says. "In Wopanaak, the stars are animate. They are considered alive. The language touches on understanding the religion. I was just dumbfounded."
Indeed, Ms. Fermino explains that learning the language is like getting a window into the tribe's beliefs. "In English, you can say about someone, ‘He's a father or he's a friend,' but you can't say that in Wopanaak because no person in the circle stands by themselves," she says. "Every kinship term depends on someone else in the circle."
Nouns are similarly connected to the people who say the word. Endings, or suffixes, on the nouns indicate whether something is alienable or inalienable, that is, separate or spiritually connected to the person. Land, for example, was considered by the Wampanoags as part of the people so the word for land has an inalienable ending.
To engage in this kind of learning is to reawaken a deep piece of personal heritage, says Mr. Vanderhoop. "Just for people to look at something and be able to say, ‘I know what that means,' or to be able to pray in their language or to have a conversation amongst each other," he says, "they know that makes them a part of who they are."
 Print
|
 Email link
|
 More from this issue
|
 Back to top
|
