Chris Fitzpatrick reports for ABC Alice Springs on a cheering initiative:
In March, four-year-old Zoday Bearpaw stood before a crowd at a language forum in Alice Springs and told a story in the Native American Yuchi language. “The rabbit went back inside the bag and rolled down the hill. The turkeys wanted to try that too,” he said. It sounds like a simple folktale, but for the Yuchi tribe of Oklahoma, USA, it marked something far more significant. Zoday is among the first new generation in 100 years to speak Yuchi as a first language.
That moment unfolded in Alice Springs, on Arrernte Country, where Yuchi families who had travelled to from Oklahoma to meet with the Pertame people — one of the First Nations groups whose country lies south of the town.
Samantha Armstrong, a Pertame language worker and coordinator of the Pertame school, was in the crowd that day. Despite the distance between them, the Yuchi and Pertame people have discovered deep common ground in saving their languages. “We have less than 31 language speakers of Pertame that grew up only speaking Pertame as their first language — they’re mostly grandparents or great-grandparents,” Ms Armstrong said.
Zoday’s parents, Micha and Keland Bearpaw, are among those leading the revival, raising their children to speak Yuchi as a first language. “We dropped down to one speaker … and from her, we’ve been able to create at least 40 to 60 speakers now,” Yuchi man Keland Bearpaw said. […]
Despite being oceans apart, the Yuchi and Pertame are walking parallel paths — reviving their languages not through institutions, but by raising children to speak, live and dream in their mother tongue. The connection between the Pertame and Yuchi people began in 2019, when Pertame woman Vanessa Fairly and her grandmother, Kathy Bradshaw, attended a UN Indigenous Language workshop in New York. It was organised by Richard Grounds, a Yuchi elder and inventor of the Yuchi’s written language. There, they learned about the Yuchi immersion methods and their shared struggle in saving their languages, sparking a friendship that’s continued across years and continents.
More at the link, including photos. (Yuchi, by the way, is a language isolate; Pertame is Arandic.) I think it’s great that representatives of struggling languages are banding together; we unpowerful folk need to help one another.
Mary Sarah Linn’s grammar of Yuchi can be found for download with a bit of enterprise. It looks pretty good. (A PhD thesis, as so often.)
Yuchi has come up here before, briefly. It may be related to Siouan and Catawba.
Yuchi has come up here before, briefly.
I should have known: zaelic in 2003 (“When I read about Richard Grounds’ projects maintaining the Yuchi language in Oklahoma […]I get the sense that maintaining these languages is similar to maintaining natural resources”), Y in 2019 (“The Yuchi connection has moved from speculation more toward the mainstream, I think”), Josh Martin in 2022 (“Günter Wagner was probably the most famous German to do fieldwork during the interwar period and his research focused on the Yuchi, who numbered only 216 members per the 1930 census”).
Yuchi has a chapter in the book Spoken Here, described in a post here in 2003. It’s also one of the “Top Ten Endangered Languages” picked as favorites by linguist Peter Austin, discussed here in 2008: “Yuchi nouns have 10 genders, indicated by word endings: six for Yuchi people (depending on kinship relations to the person speaking), one for non-Yuchis and animals, and three for inanimate objects (horizontal, vertical, and round).” Neither of those pages here is currently google-indexed.
Another brief mention in comments, from Xerîb in 2024: “Unfortunately, much of the research done on the Yuchi language in the previous two centuries seems to lie unpublished in archives, so this question is hard to investigate online.”
Somehow, Americanists don’t have much of a tradition of… publishing. No idea how they escape “publish or perish”.
Where are those “Americanists” of whom you speak?
No idea how they escape “publish or perish”
Where are those “Americanists” of whom you speak?
Où sont les Américanistes d’antan?
Yuchi nouns have 10 genders
Linn says six: inanimate, divided into sitting, lying and standing; animate, divided into non-Yuchi and Yuchi, which is divided into male and female. She carefully distinguishes these “genders”, which are unalterable properties of the lexemes in question, and command agreement in verbs and pronouns, with various subdivisions within the “Yuchi” genders, which she describes as “socially deictic”:
It’s a good grammar. (Thesis from 2001; seven years before Peter Austin’s Grauniad piece, incidentally. Just sayin’.)
I’ve read horror stories about Siouanists who freely shared their data if you asked them personally but never published them their whole life.
Jack Martin, author of A Grammar of Creek is described on the flyleaf as an “Associate Professor of English.” I imagine that being an Americanist is no longer the ticket to wealth and power that it once was.
(During the ongoing Moral Zombie Apocalypse, being an Americanist may well be actually hazardous to one’s health.)
There is some academic activity in the Pacific Northwest (UBC, UVic, Alaska, UW) and in Arizona and New Mexico; not coincidentally, there are first-language speakers of indigenous languages in those areas. More and more work these days is conducted by tribes (recognized or otherwise), either by themselves or by hired academics, and much of that work is not made public, to academics or anyone, at least not at first.
If you look at IJAL, the only English-language journal dedicated to American languages, these days most of what it publishes is about South American and Central American languages. Very different from, say, 60 years ago.
Yes, the idea that one’s language is private property may well have a lot to do with it.
I get the impression that it’s always been fairly widespread in North America. The Shawnee used to say that they would rather see their language die than have Long Knives learn it; the Koasati used to teach outsiders Mobilian Jargon if they asked to learn Koasati.
What’s changed may be more that the speakers are in a better position to enforce it. Partly due to the prevalent orthodoxy in the US that everything is either private property, or ought to be; reinforced by “liberal” ideas about the necessity for everyone to stay in their own lane and not “appropriate” from other cultures. (See, I can do “balance” too!) But also from a belated awareness that the speakers might possibly be entitled to some actual agency of their own.
I gave up on IJAL years ago. It seems nowadays to consist entirely of reviews and mind-numbing treatments of some peripheral “fragment” of the grammar of a language which is of some abstract theoretical interest to the authors (and presumably editors.)
reinforced by “liberal” ideas about the necessity for everyone to stay in their own lane and not “appropriate” from other cultures. (See, I can do “balance” too!) But also from a belated awareness that the speakers might possibly be entitled to some actual agency of their own.
You’re speculating about their motives, and you’re off. Real appropriation does happen, on a big scale. So-called pretendians used to be found among new-agers and such, but more recently they have found homes in academia as well. In the last few years quite a number of academics, including tenured faculty at respectable universities (including language teachers) and museum curators, as well as artists and self-styled cultural experts, have been found to misrepresent themselves as native. Some have become proficient in their pretended ancestral language.
The matter of agency is important too. A great many tribes have little they can call their own, after so much has been taken from them. A little bit of control of what is recognized by outsiders as precious counts for much.
You can also look at it as a matter of privacy. People have family stories and histories that they share among their family members. There is no compelling reason why they should share them among the general public. The same state of mind can apply to an interrelated group of 50 or 5,000 people.
quite a number of academics, including tenured faculty at respectable universities (including language teachers) and museum curators, as well as artists and self-styled cultural experts, have been found to misrepresent themselves as native
Instructive (also disturbing.) I was wrong.
… after so much has been taken from them. A little bit of control of what is recognized by outsiders as precious counts for much.
Absolutely.
Also, I don’t understand why you’re so down on IJAL. Looking at the contents for the last several issues I see articles on stress / tone / prosody, and fewer each on historical linguistics, syntax, and comparative typology. Nothing aggressively theoretical. It’s no Linguistic Inquiry.
Ignorance. Pure ignorance.
I tend to misinterpret the American situation, I think, for all that I understand it theoretically.
Kusaal (for inevitable example) is spoken currently by about half as many again people as when I lived in the area, and everybody in the ethnic group speaks the language by default in all everyday situations, unless people from other groups need to be communicated with too, or the situation is one of the quite well-defined ones in which a different language has always been thought appropriate.
The Kusaasi are so far from feeling culturally threatened that most of them show no interest in becoming either Christian or Muslim. People are quite happy to tell you about traditional culture and pleased that you are interested in it.
All this could hardly be more different than with an American language – for reasons which are all too clear.
Not all African languages are like this, but a good many are. And Kusaal is a fairly minor language even within Ghana: Swahili or Hausa (or even Twi) it is not.
(agreeing with Y) i think the context of settler-colonialism* and ongoing genocide make a large part of the difference from post- or neo-colonial situations (especially where there wasn’t a major attempt at settlement or extermination**).
but i wonder whether there’s also a role played by the confluence of ritual practice as a site of language survival/preservation and active limitation of who has access to what ritual knowledge? both elements being, clearly, very variable from group to group. what’s rattling around in my head is (1) some very interesting accounts of the design process for the back-of-the-house spaces at the National Museum of the American Indian, which needed to make sure that the specific needs of each item in the collection would be respected, and (2) experiences of accidentally bumping into questions about afro-atlantic ritual practices whose answers are not properly available to people without initiation in the relevant tradition. neither strictly relevant, but suggestive.
.
* in north america, emphasized by what i think of as the supercessionist approach to thinking about indigenous culture and communities, which goes back to Tammany Hall and beyond.
** or attempts that in the long term have not been very effective – i’m thinking of what wikipedia tells me is properly called otijiherero, for instance.
supercessionist approach to thinking about indigenous culture and communities
Thought-provoking analogy. Thanks. That actually makes a lot of sense.
Not to say that it’s all straightforward and uncomplicated. Sometimes the siege mentality is overdone, and sometimes it gets entrenched as a tradition. But as they say, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you. Indian sovereignty is never a sure thing. There certainly are people in the same circles as the current administration who would love to do away with every Indian reservation and treaty, if they could come up with a way to do so.
Last year I went to an exhibition at the British Columbia museum in Victoria about the suppression of native languages and about revitalization projects. The suppression part made me sad and angry at turns (I had known about that, but to see the details and individual testimonies was shocking nevertheless). The revitalization seems to be driven by the speakers themselves, using all kinds of media (there were even clips of an impressive young woman doing rap in her native language.) While that was hopeful, I was still struck by how low the numbers of speakers were; the nations with the highest percentage had around 20% speaking their ancestral language, while for most it was between zero point something and 5%… so, still a long way to go.
@Y There certainly are people … who would love to do away with every Indian reservation and treaty, if they could come up with a way to do so.
Yeah. We’ve just had the brouhaha in NZ of the ‘Treaty Principles Bill’. ‘Treaty’ of Waitangi = the 1840 founding agreement between Māori and the British Crown for supposedly equal governance. Beware that link is to the right-wing minor party’s attempt to dismantle the Treaty by replacing it with “equal rights”.
The vast majority of the country, and both major political parties were strongly opposed. And the only people who’ve suffered consequences for wasting Parliament’s time in this deeply unpopular attempt were those amongst the majority. I believe this protest in Parliament went viral overseas. Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke (for whom I’d vote If I were eligible) has been banned for three weeks, by far the longest sanction ever handed down.