Post by blackcrowheart on Nov 11, 2006 20:31:13 GMT -5
Last Words
Can dying languages, like animals, be saved from extinction? That's the difficult question being debated in Maine, where the Penobscot Nation is waging a determined fight to keep its melodic language alive.
Valentine Ranco (left) speaks Penobscot fluently but laments having no Wells, Maine, neighbors who share her native tongue. Maine's Joe Dana, holding a carved "snake," helps children learn the Penobscot language with games like snowsnake. (Globe Staff Photo / Mark Wilson)
By Stacey Chase | April 30, 2006
BEFORE BEGINNING TODAY'S lesson, teacher Roger Paul, a dark ponytail hanging straight down his back, pulls a blond sweet-grass rope, braided like a little girl's pigtail, out of his leather medicine bag and sets one end on fire. Gathered in a lopsided circle are two boys and seven girls in the after-school language program at the Penobscot Nation Boys & Girls Club on Indian Island, Maine. Paul instructs the pupils to cleanse themselves in the smoke, and they dutifully pass the smoldering, silky braid from one to the next, waving it over their bodies like a metal-detector wand. Afterward, they join hands and say a prayer using words that sound both unfamiliar and musical.
Smudging ceremonies like this one open every session of "Penobscot Days," a new three-times-a-week initiative that teaches children to speak Penobscot by pairing instruction with traditional Native American activities like drumming, basket making, and snowsnake, a game in which players hurtle a carved stick or "snake" down an iced snow path. "Whenever we speak the language the ancestors taught us," Paul says, "it pleases them, and they come and listen in and guide us."
The Penobscot Nation's struggle to reclaim its melodic, esoteric language - considered severely endangered by linguists - sparked public debate in the past several months after the tribe's state representative, Michael Sockalexis, introduced a bill in the Maine Legislature calling for taxpayer money to be used "to develop a program to maintain and preserve the Penobscot language."
The drumbeat to save Penobscot that began in the 1980s has been growing louder from inside this insular community for five years now with the striking realization that the tribal elders were rapidly dying and, with them, the language.
Of all the New England states, Maine is the only one to have any Native American languages from tribes recognized by the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs that are still "living" - in other words, being spoken fluently. Moreover, the languages of all of Maine's recognized tribes are living. The Penobscot, Passamaquoddy, and Maliseet languages - from Maine's Penobscot Nation, Passamaquoddy Tribe, and Houlton Band of Maliseets, respectively - are mutually intelligible. The Micmac language, from the Aroostook Band of Micmacs, is discrete. While all these languages are in jeopardy, the threat to Penobscot, which has the fewest speakers, is especially dire.
According to the best estimates, there are as few as five fluent Penobscot speakers among the nation's 2,261 members, about 60 percent of whom live in Maine. Fluency, though, is tough to measure. Some Penobscots, like Sockalexis, learned their native tongue as children but mostly forgot it; some can comprehend it but feel uncomfortable speaking the undulating, polysyllabic words themselves; some speak a grammatically tortured version of the language; and some know only a few words and phrases.
"Now I've lost half of the Penobscot - I've been away so long," laments 94-year-old Valentine Ranco of Wells, Maine, the state's oldest Penobscot and a fluent speaker raised on the Indian Island reservation. "Fifty years! No one to speak to!"
Ranco may feel alone, but in one respect she's not: Languages are disappearing around the world. "We are in a huge wave of linguistic extinction," says Norvin Richards, an MIT linguistics professor and an expert on obscure languages like Massachusetts's Wampanoag and Australian Aborigines' Lardil. "Something like 50 to 90 percent of the world's 6,000 languages are expected to die in the next century."
We fight for animals, for the bald eagle and the giant panda and the blue whale, with such fervor, but should we fight to keep a dying language alive - even if few will ever use or hear it? Maine's language preservation bill, which was awaiting action by the Legislature's appropriations committee this month, is nothing short of a Penobscot rallying cry that forces everyone to ask: What's in a language?
THE PENOBSCOT LANGUAGE IS PERCEIVED BYAN ENGLISH speaker, perhaps romantically, as a stream of unrecognizable rhythms that rise and fall effortlessly like chanting or singing. The stressed syllables are generally pronounced higher, not louder as in English, with the highest pitch typically falling three syllables from the end of polysyllabic words. In addition, Penobscot statements often rise at the end of a phrase - similar to the pronunciation of a question in English - and therefore produce a kind of lilt.
"When I hear my native language, it puts me at ease. And it brings me back to a peaceful place where I feel like I'm part of something important," says Roger Paul, 44, a Passamaquoddy who speaks both Passamaquoddy-Maliseet and Penobscot. "I feel, I guess . . . like a small child who is just held and embraced."
Though it is characterized by polysyllabic words, Penobscot can be brilliantly concise. An entire sentence in English can often be expressed by a single Penobscot word. For example, we means "You are a very smart, intelligent, dependable person."
"It gets you all at once. It all comes in one rhythmic unit," says Conor Quinn, a doctoral candidate in linguistics at Harvard University and a Maine native who has worked closely with the Penobscots. "That's the poetry of the language."
Linguists consider a language to be living if there are people who canconverse fluently in it. But even dead languages - sometimes optimistically called dormant - can be resurrected, though not without recordings, a body of texts, or both. Modern Hebrew is one such success story. Richards and other linguists identify the region's federally recognized tribes with dead languages as the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head/ Aquinnah in Massachusetts, the Narragansett Indian Tribe in Rhode Island, and the Mohegan and Mashantucket Pequot tribes in Connecticut. (There are no federally recognized tribes in New Hampshire or Vermont.) All are taking measures to bring their ancestral languages back to life. In 1990, Congress passed the Native American Languages Act to encourage the preservation of languages across the country, acknowledging that earlier federal policies helped exterminate some of them.
Maine's Native American tribes speak closely related languages that derive from the Eastern Algonquian family of languages once widely used from Maine to Virginia. But a common misperception is that tribal languages are relics linguistically frozen in the 1600s, when they were first heard by missionaries and explorers, and they are missing words critical to communicating in today's culture. "It's entirely possible to talk about the stock market or auto racing in Penobscot if you want to," MIT's Richards says. "There's nothing inherent in the language that makes it unsuitable for modern use."
Language, or what some linguists like to call "nonmaterial culture," is an artifact, like a sweet-grass basket or birch-bark canoe. "There's more to a language than simple communication," says former Penobscot chief Barry Dana, 47, of Solon, Maine. "With the Penobscot language - or Passamaquoddy, Abenaki, Maliseet, Navajo, Inuit, whatever - trapped in that language is the complete understanding of your culture."
DRIVE ABOUT FIVE HOURS NORTH FROM BOSTON TO OLD TOWN, Maine, take the short causeway over the Penobscot River, and you'll come to the 315-acre island that, together with 146 other islands, make up the Indian Island Reservation. Roughly 30 percent of the state's Penobscots live on Indian Island itself. The Penobscots are wary of visitors from what members often refer to as the "dominant culture" - outsiders who sometimes view residents as history exhibits or mere curiosities. "We're sort of looked at in a fishbowl," says Linda McLeod, a Maliseet and principal of the Indian Island School, a public kindergarten through Grade 8 school on the reservation. "People come on the island wanting to see the `Indian children,'" she says. "They come on the island asking, `Where are the tepees?'"
Penobscot was the first language for nearly every Indian Island resident into the 1940s. But with World War II, many Penobscots abandoned their language for the employment and educational opportunities that came with speaking English. At the same time, Penobscots say, the Catholic nuns who ran the island's school would punish children who uttered their native tongue.
Over time, the language started disappearing from everyday use.
Barry Dana's cousin Carol Dana, a fluent Penobscot speaker, learned the language from her grandmother and great-aunt growing up on Indian Island but says she also inherited feelings of inferiority about the Penobscot tongue that were imposed by non-Indians. "We've all been kind of educated out of who we are and pitted against who we are," says Dana, 53, who left the reservation but returned.
The tribe took the first step toward stemming the precipitous language loss in 1985, when Barry Dana began teaching Penobscot as part of a native studies program introduced at the Indian Island School. Today, the school's 111 pupils get regular classroom instruction for two periods a week in Penobscot and occasionally Maine's other tribal languages. The emphasis is on speaking; indeed, as with numerous other indigenous languages with oral traditions, the vast majority of Penobscot speakers cannot read or write their own language. "That's the way everybody learns their language - speak it first, then you learn the written," says McLeod. (At the mainland public high schools where most of these students go after the eighth grade, second-language choices are French and Spanish.)
Meanwhile, tribal leaders and ordinary Penobscots recognized that language studies also needed to happen outside the school. The Penobscot Language Revitalization Project was born, and in the last five years, the Penobscot Nation has received $308,605 from the federal Administration for Native Americans - and kicked in $90,411 in both cash and in-kind tribal support - to plan and implement a series of community initiatives. Among them are the after-school program at the Boys & Girls Club, storytelling at the reservation's day-care center, a master-apprentice language tutorial for young adults, the creation of the penobscotnation.org website, and weekend and weeklong camps where families are encouraged to speak nothing but Penobscot.
Carol Dana, the tribe's so-called language master, is mentor to two apprentices: Gabe Paul, 20 (who is not related to Roger Paul), and Maulian Dana, 21 (who is the daughter of Barry Dana), both students at the University of Maine in nearby Orono. They and the younger children represent the tribe's best hope for reintroducing broadbased fluency in two or three generations. "There used to be a kind of shame in using the language. Now young people are taking ownership and have a sense of pride about the language," says Bonnie Newsom, director of the tribe's cultural and historic preservation department. "That has been very healing for us as a community."
BACK AT THE BOYS & GIRLS CLUB, 11-YEAR-OLD Maya Attean is issuing commands to Roger Paul, the teacher, to "stand" (sèhken), "sit" (ápin), and "turn around" (). As long as she uses the Penobscot word for the action, Paul plays along, popping in and out of his seat and spinning like the marionette of a mad puppeteer. Maya and her classmates giggle themselves silly. Later, she and the other girls form a circle around a big drum on the basketball court and pound it while chanting "The Pine Needle Dance" of the Passamaquoddys and other songs.
Maya's father is Penobscot; her mother is Passamaquoddy. The couple live on the reservation and are raising their daughter in a multilingual household, encouraging her to use second and third languages by labeling household items - the chair, the cupboard, the computer - with the appropriate Indian words. And why is a sixth-grader so interested? "So the Penobscot language will stay alive," Maya says brightly, "and I can teach it to my kids when I get older, and they can teach it to their kids."
Instilling the language in the younger generation was exactly what Michael Sockalexis had in mind when he proposed his bill. In December, the tribe's state representative introduced Legislative Document 1807, "An Act to Establish the Penobscot Language Preservation Fund in the Department of Education," partly due to the sadness he feels over his own loss of conversational Penobscot. He wants things to be different for his six grandchildren, ages 2 to 12. "Speaking as a young kid, learning from my grandfather and my great-grandfather, I have that in my head now," says the 58-year-old Sockalexis. "To have that gone - call it like a song: It's like I know the music, but ... I've forgotten the lyrics."
The bill, which the Maine House passed on March 16 and was before the Legislature's joint appropriations committee earlier this month, would deposit $300,000 into a newly created fund at the state Department of Education to be managed by the tribe's cultural and historic preservation department. Tribal leaders hope that the money would attract additional aid from groups like the National Endowment for the Humanities. (Sockalexis was unable to vote on his own bill, as he and the representative of the Passamaquoddy Tribe are considered intergovernmental liaisons with no voting rights in the Legislature.) But passage was far from guaranteed. The bill is vying against dozens of requests for new funding, and the appropriations panel, which doles out the state's limited resources, could opt to table it or send it on to the Senate for a decisive vote.
"Heritage counts. And the tribe has been trying to teach its young people about their heritage," says state Representative Richard Blanchard, a Democrat from Old Town, Maine, who has co-sponsored the bill and whose legislative district encompasses Indian Island. "How advantageous the language is going to be to them, I don't know."
When asked why Native American children - unlike those of, say, Polish descent - should be encouraged to learn the language of their ancestors, linguists tend to bristle. "Even if we don't teach Johnny Polish, Polish still exists," says Richards, the MIT linguist. "If we decide not to save these languages, there'll be no speakers of them at all."
MORE THAN IDLE CHATTER, LANGUAGE IS INTRINSIC to our identity. Even if people don't look the same or share the same customs, a common tongue binds them together. And the very words used not only reveal the speaker's feelings and ideas but shape them. "When I hear English, I feel competitiveness," Roger Paul says. "Once I switch that worldview and start thinking in Indian, it's difficult to think back in English again."
Language preservationists argue it's important to keep languages, like animals, from extinction for the sake of diversity. "Every language provides us with more knowledge about human thinking and behavior ... and a unique perspective. So, when we lose a language, we lose a lot of knowledge," says Pauleena MacDougall, associate director of the Maine Folklife Center housed at the University of Maine in Orono. "It's almost like losing an animal. So what? Why do we care about it? Because it's something missing that should be here."
The loss of Penobscot has happened with such swiftness that it was almost gone before anyone knew it needed rescuing. The Penobscot Nation's eldest member, Valentine Ranco, was born in 1912 on Orson Island, next to Indian Island, and did not know how to speak English when her grandfather sent her off to the Indian Island School. Married in 1929, Ranco and her now deceased husband, Leslie, also Penobscot, left the reservation in 1942 when he took a job in a military parts factory in Springfield, Massachusetts. A decade later, they opened the Indian Moccasin Shop in Wells, Maine, now run by their daughter, June Lane. During the war years, "I stopped speaking [Penobscot] because I didn't have anyone to speak to," Ranco recalls. "Everybody stopped. Everybody!"
While the Rancos, like other Native Americans, had to assimilate into the mainstream culture, they did so as if looking over their shoulders at the ghosts of old Penobscots whispering secrets in their native tongue.
"Within our language, we can maintain who we are and remember our place in what part of the environment we belong in," Paul says after the smudging ceremony. "That's why I feel ... it's so important to maintain the language - because we'll be teaching the kids to look at the world through the eyes of our ancestors."
(Speaking Penobscot)
Before the 1930s, there was no offi cial Penobscot alphabet. But in that decade, the late pathologist and avocational linguist Frank T. Seibert Jr. used the International Phonetic Alphabet - a standardized notation system that represents the distinctive sounds used in all spoken language - to devise one. Unlike the 26-letter alphabet used in English, the Penobscot alphabet has 25 letters, counting double consonants and including special characters like the alpha and schwa.
The following line comes from "The Wolverine," a Penobscot tale transcribed in the early 20th century by the late anthropologist Frank G. Speck and used by permission of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. It was translated into the Penobscot alphabet by Pauleena MacDougall, Seibert's research assistant in the 1980s and now the associate director of the Maine Folklife Center.
Stacey Chase, a Maine journalist, last wrote about the search for Bigfoot for the Globe Magazine. E-mail her at storychaser@earthlink.net.
Can dying languages, like animals, be saved from extinction? That's the difficult question being debated in Maine, where the Penobscot Nation is waging a determined fight to keep its melodic language alive.
Valentine Ranco (left) speaks Penobscot fluently but laments having no Wells, Maine, neighbors who share her native tongue. Maine's Joe Dana, holding a carved "snake," helps children learn the Penobscot language with games like snowsnake. (Globe Staff Photo / Mark Wilson)
By Stacey Chase | April 30, 2006
BEFORE BEGINNING TODAY'S lesson, teacher Roger Paul, a dark ponytail hanging straight down his back, pulls a blond sweet-grass rope, braided like a little girl's pigtail, out of his leather medicine bag and sets one end on fire. Gathered in a lopsided circle are two boys and seven girls in the after-school language program at the Penobscot Nation Boys & Girls Club on Indian Island, Maine. Paul instructs the pupils to cleanse themselves in the smoke, and they dutifully pass the smoldering, silky braid from one to the next, waving it over their bodies like a metal-detector wand. Afterward, they join hands and say a prayer using words that sound both unfamiliar and musical.
Smudging ceremonies like this one open every session of "Penobscot Days," a new three-times-a-week initiative that teaches children to speak Penobscot by pairing instruction with traditional Native American activities like drumming, basket making, and snowsnake, a game in which players hurtle a carved stick or "snake" down an iced snow path. "Whenever we speak the language the ancestors taught us," Paul says, "it pleases them, and they come and listen in and guide us."
The Penobscot Nation's struggle to reclaim its melodic, esoteric language - considered severely endangered by linguists - sparked public debate in the past several months after the tribe's state representative, Michael Sockalexis, introduced a bill in the Maine Legislature calling for taxpayer money to be used "to develop a program to maintain and preserve the Penobscot language."
The drumbeat to save Penobscot that began in the 1980s has been growing louder from inside this insular community for five years now with the striking realization that the tribal elders were rapidly dying and, with them, the language.
Of all the New England states, Maine is the only one to have any Native American languages from tribes recognized by the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs that are still "living" - in other words, being spoken fluently. Moreover, the languages of all of Maine's recognized tribes are living. The Penobscot, Passamaquoddy, and Maliseet languages - from Maine's Penobscot Nation, Passamaquoddy Tribe, and Houlton Band of Maliseets, respectively - are mutually intelligible. The Micmac language, from the Aroostook Band of Micmacs, is discrete. While all these languages are in jeopardy, the threat to Penobscot, which has the fewest speakers, is especially dire.
According to the best estimates, there are as few as five fluent Penobscot speakers among the nation's 2,261 members, about 60 percent of whom live in Maine. Fluency, though, is tough to measure. Some Penobscots, like Sockalexis, learned their native tongue as children but mostly forgot it; some can comprehend it but feel uncomfortable speaking the undulating, polysyllabic words themselves; some speak a grammatically tortured version of the language; and some know only a few words and phrases.
"Now I've lost half of the Penobscot - I've been away so long," laments 94-year-old Valentine Ranco of Wells, Maine, the state's oldest Penobscot and a fluent speaker raised on the Indian Island reservation. "Fifty years! No one to speak to!"
Ranco may feel alone, but in one respect she's not: Languages are disappearing around the world. "We are in a huge wave of linguistic extinction," says Norvin Richards, an MIT linguistics professor and an expert on obscure languages like Massachusetts's Wampanoag and Australian Aborigines' Lardil. "Something like 50 to 90 percent of the world's 6,000 languages are expected to die in the next century."
We fight for animals, for the bald eagle and the giant panda and the blue whale, with such fervor, but should we fight to keep a dying language alive - even if few will ever use or hear it? Maine's language preservation bill, which was awaiting action by the Legislature's appropriations committee this month, is nothing short of a Penobscot rallying cry that forces everyone to ask: What's in a language?
THE PENOBSCOT LANGUAGE IS PERCEIVED BYAN ENGLISH speaker, perhaps romantically, as a stream of unrecognizable rhythms that rise and fall effortlessly like chanting or singing. The stressed syllables are generally pronounced higher, not louder as in English, with the highest pitch typically falling three syllables from the end of polysyllabic words. In addition, Penobscot statements often rise at the end of a phrase - similar to the pronunciation of a question in English - and therefore produce a kind of lilt.
"When I hear my native language, it puts me at ease. And it brings me back to a peaceful place where I feel like I'm part of something important," says Roger Paul, 44, a Passamaquoddy who speaks both Passamaquoddy-Maliseet and Penobscot. "I feel, I guess . . . like a small child who is just held and embraced."
Though it is characterized by polysyllabic words, Penobscot can be brilliantly concise. An entire sentence in English can often be expressed by a single Penobscot word. For example, we means "You are a very smart, intelligent, dependable person."
"It gets you all at once. It all comes in one rhythmic unit," says Conor Quinn, a doctoral candidate in linguistics at Harvard University and a Maine native who has worked closely with the Penobscots. "That's the poetry of the language."
Linguists consider a language to be living if there are people who canconverse fluently in it. But even dead languages - sometimes optimistically called dormant - can be resurrected, though not without recordings, a body of texts, or both. Modern Hebrew is one such success story. Richards and other linguists identify the region's federally recognized tribes with dead languages as the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head/ Aquinnah in Massachusetts, the Narragansett Indian Tribe in Rhode Island, and the Mohegan and Mashantucket Pequot tribes in Connecticut. (There are no federally recognized tribes in New Hampshire or Vermont.) All are taking measures to bring their ancestral languages back to life. In 1990, Congress passed the Native American Languages Act to encourage the preservation of languages across the country, acknowledging that earlier federal policies helped exterminate some of them.
Maine's Native American tribes speak closely related languages that derive from the Eastern Algonquian family of languages once widely used from Maine to Virginia. But a common misperception is that tribal languages are relics linguistically frozen in the 1600s, when they were first heard by missionaries and explorers, and they are missing words critical to communicating in today's culture. "It's entirely possible to talk about the stock market or auto racing in Penobscot if you want to," MIT's Richards says. "There's nothing inherent in the language that makes it unsuitable for modern use."
Language, or what some linguists like to call "nonmaterial culture," is an artifact, like a sweet-grass basket or birch-bark canoe. "There's more to a language than simple communication," says former Penobscot chief Barry Dana, 47, of Solon, Maine. "With the Penobscot language - or Passamaquoddy, Abenaki, Maliseet, Navajo, Inuit, whatever - trapped in that language is the complete understanding of your culture."
DRIVE ABOUT FIVE HOURS NORTH FROM BOSTON TO OLD TOWN, Maine, take the short causeway over the Penobscot River, and you'll come to the 315-acre island that, together with 146 other islands, make up the Indian Island Reservation. Roughly 30 percent of the state's Penobscots live on Indian Island itself. The Penobscots are wary of visitors from what members often refer to as the "dominant culture" - outsiders who sometimes view residents as history exhibits or mere curiosities. "We're sort of looked at in a fishbowl," says Linda McLeod, a Maliseet and principal of the Indian Island School, a public kindergarten through Grade 8 school on the reservation. "People come on the island wanting to see the `Indian children,'" she says. "They come on the island asking, `Where are the tepees?'"
Penobscot was the first language for nearly every Indian Island resident into the 1940s. But with World War II, many Penobscots abandoned their language for the employment and educational opportunities that came with speaking English. At the same time, Penobscots say, the Catholic nuns who ran the island's school would punish children who uttered their native tongue.
Over time, the language started disappearing from everyday use.
Barry Dana's cousin Carol Dana, a fluent Penobscot speaker, learned the language from her grandmother and great-aunt growing up on Indian Island but says she also inherited feelings of inferiority about the Penobscot tongue that were imposed by non-Indians. "We've all been kind of educated out of who we are and pitted against who we are," says Dana, 53, who left the reservation but returned.
The tribe took the first step toward stemming the precipitous language loss in 1985, when Barry Dana began teaching Penobscot as part of a native studies program introduced at the Indian Island School. Today, the school's 111 pupils get regular classroom instruction for two periods a week in Penobscot and occasionally Maine's other tribal languages. The emphasis is on speaking; indeed, as with numerous other indigenous languages with oral traditions, the vast majority of Penobscot speakers cannot read or write their own language. "That's the way everybody learns their language - speak it first, then you learn the written," says McLeod. (At the mainland public high schools where most of these students go after the eighth grade, second-language choices are French and Spanish.)
Meanwhile, tribal leaders and ordinary Penobscots recognized that language studies also needed to happen outside the school. The Penobscot Language Revitalization Project was born, and in the last five years, the Penobscot Nation has received $308,605 from the federal Administration for Native Americans - and kicked in $90,411 in both cash and in-kind tribal support - to plan and implement a series of community initiatives. Among them are the after-school program at the Boys & Girls Club, storytelling at the reservation's day-care center, a master-apprentice language tutorial for young adults, the creation of the penobscotnation.org website, and weekend and weeklong camps where families are encouraged to speak nothing but Penobscot.
Carol Dana, the tribe's so-called language master, is mentor to two apprentices: Gabe Paul, 20 (who is not related to Roger Paul), and Maulian Dana, 21 (who is the daughter of Barry Dana), both students at the University of Maine in nearby Orono. They and the younger children represent the tribe's best hope for reintroducing broadbased fluency in two or three generations. "There used to be a kind of shame in using the language. Now young people are taking ownership and have a sense of pride about the language," says Bonnie Newsom, director of the tribe's cultural and historic preservation department. "That has been very healing for us as a community."
BACK AT THE BOYS & GIRLS CLUB, 11-YEAR-OLD Maya Attean is issuing commands to Roger Paul, the teacher, to "stand" (sèhken), "sit" (ápin), and "turn around" (). As long as she uses the Penobscot word for the action, Paul plays along, popping in and out of his seat and spinning like the marionette of a mad puppeteer. Maya and her classmates giggle themselves silly. Later, she and the other girls form a circle around a big drum on the basketball court and pound it while chanting "The Pine Needle Dance" of the Passamaquoddys and other songs.
Maya's father is Penobscot; her mother is Passamaquoddy. The couple live on the reservation and are raising their daughter in a multilingual household, encouraging her to use second and third languages by labeling household items - the chair, the cupboard, the computer - with the appropriate Indian words. And why is a sixth-grader so interested? "So the Penobscot language will stay alive," Maya says brightly, "and I can teach it to my kids when I get older, and they can teach it to their kids."
Instilling the language in the younger generation was exactly what Michael Sockalexis had in mind when he proposed his bill. In December, the tribe's state representative introduced Legislative Document 1807, "An Act to Establish the Penobscot Language Preservation Fund in the Department of Education," partly due to the sadness he feels over his own loss of conversational Penobscot. He wants things to be different for his six grandchildren, ages 2 to 12. "Speaking as a young kid, learning from my grandfather and my great-grandfather, I have that in my head now," says the 58-year-old Sockalexis. "To have that gone - call it like a song: It's like I know the music, but ... I've forgotten the lyrics."
The bill, which the Maine House passed on March 16 and was before the Legislature's joint appropriations committee earlier this month, would deposit $300,000 into a newly created fund at the state Department of Education to be managed by the tribe's cultural and historic preservation department. Tribal leaders hope that the money would attract additional aid from groups like the National Endowment for the Humanities. (Sockalexis was unable to vote on his own bill, as he and the representative of the Passamaquoddy Tribe are considered intergovernmental liaisons with no voting rights in the Legislature.) But passage was far from guaranteed. The bill is vying against dozens of requests for new funding, and the appropriations panel, which doles out the state's limited resources, could opt to table it or send it on to the Senate for a decisive vote.
"Heritage counts. And the tribe has been trying to teach its young people about their heritage," says state Representative Richard Blanchard, a Democrat from Old Town, Maine, who has co-sponsored the bill and whose legislative district encompasses Indian Island. "How advantageous the language is going to be to them, I don't know."
When asked why Native American children - unlike those of, say, Polish descent - should be encouraged to learn the language of their ancestors, linguists tend to bristle. "Even if we don't teach Johnny Polish, Polish still exists," says Richards, the MIT linguist. "If we decide not to save these languages, there'll be no speakers of them at all."
MORE THAN IDLE CHATTER, LANGUAGE IS INTRINSIC to our identity. Even if people don't look the same or share the same customs, a common tongue binds them together. And the very words used not only reveal the speaker's feelings and ideas but shape them. "When I hear English, I feel competitiveness," Roger Paul says. "Once I switch that worldview and start thinking in Indian, it's difficult to think back in English again."
Language preservationists argue it's important to keep languages, like animals, from extinction for the sake of diversity. "Every language provides us with more knowledge about human thinking and behavior ... and a unique perspective. So, when we lose a language, we lose a lot of knowledge," says Pauleena MacDougall, associate director of the Maine Folklife Center housed at the University of Maine in Orono. "It's almost like losing an animal. So what? Why do we care about it? Because it's something missing that should be here."
The loss of Penobscot has happened with such swiftness that it was almost gone before anyone knew it needed rescuing. The Penobscot Nation's eldest member, Valentine Ranco, was born in 1912 on Orson Island, next to Indian Island, and did not know how to speak English when her grandfather sent her off to the Indian Island School. Married in 1929, Ranco and her now deceased husband, Leslie, also Penobscot, left the reservation in 1942 when he took a job in a military parts factory in Springfield, Massachusetts. A decade later, they opened the Indian Moccasin Shop in Wells, Maine, now run by their daughter, June Lane. During the war years, "I stopped speaking [Penobscot] because I didn't have anyone to speak to," Ranco recalls. "Everybody stopped. Everybody!"
While the Rancos, like other Native Americans, had to assimilate into the mainstream culture, they did so as if looking over their shoulders at the ghosts of old Penobscots whispering secrets in their native tongue.
"Within our language, we can maintain who we are and remember our place in what part of the environment we belong in," Paul says after the smudging ceremony. "That's why I feel ... it's so important to maintain the language - because we'll be teaching the kids to look at the world through the eyes of our ancestors."
(Speaking Penobscot)
Before the 1930s, there was no offi cial Penobscot alphabet. But in that decade, the late pathologist and avocational linguist Frank T. Seibert Jr. used the International Phonetic Alphabet - a standardized notation system that represents the distinctive sounds used in all spoken language - to devise one. Unlike the 26-letter alphabet used in English, the Penobscot alphabet has 25 letters, counting double consonants and including special characters like the alpha and schwa.
The following line comes from "The Wolverine," a Penobscot tale transcribed in the early 20th century by the late anthropologist Frank G. Speck and used by permission of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. It was translated into the Penobscot alphabet by Pauleena MacDougall, Seibert's research assistant in the 1980s and now the associate director of the Maine Folklife Center.
Stacey Chase, a Maine journalist, last wrote about the search for Bigfoot for the Globe Magazine. E-mail her at storychaser@earthlink.net.