Âs Nutayuneân / We Still live Here trailer, with beautiful animation.
A month ago, I attended the NYC NMAI’s “At the Movies – in the Language” screenings on Native languages.
The first short, called The Amendment, set up the significance of language loss by highlighting the 1895 Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs, which refers to language as the thing that makes a community a people. As long as they know their language, it explained, they will not be assimilated. The Amendment asks viewers to consider what it means when four generations of a family progressively loses its language. Next came Our First Voices which included several shorts: Spelling Bee, which I especially appreciated because of the subtle way that spellers’ question about “word origin” indicates the historical breadth of Native languages; Airplane, which deals with the translation of the safety announcements on planes to Bella Bella; Earl Smith, about a man who, after 12 years of living in a boarding school, where students would be hit or have their mouth washed out with soap for speaking their languages, was unable to speak Chinook; and Mom N Me, about a woman with a linguist mother and monolingual mother who attempts to learn her native language. These shorts were followed by the award-winning short Horse You See,about a horse named Ross who shares his inner thoughts (in Navajo). The audience loved this one!
These shorts were followed by the full length documentary Âs Nutayuneân / We Still Live Here. It was probably not a coincidence that I watched this film with a colleague who practices the Yoruba Lukumi faith, which emphasizes individuals’ connection to ancestors and spirit guides. I am not always in circles where people feel or openly discuss this connection, and so her comment helped situate my mind in another concept of space and time (no small feat in this bustling city). It was almost like she opened a door to this film, where the protagonist, a Wampanoag woman named Jessie Little Doe, begins her quest to revitalize the Wampanoag language when her ancestors reach out to her through visions and dreams. They ask if she would intercede for them and ask her people if they would like to welcome their language back. The Wampanoag story of language loss goes back to the early colonization of the U.S., when war, yellow fever, Christianization, and displacement decimated their population.
Besides being the fascinating story of an inspiring woman, the film does a beautiful job of unpacking how much of a culture resides in language. Jesse Little Doe seems never to have had an interest in pursuing academics before, but goes on to pursue a doctorate in linguistics at the venerable MIT and leads her community’s effort at language revitalization. During a lesson on animate and inanimate nouns in the Wampanoag language, Little Doe notes that the categorization of the sun as inanimate shows that the Wampanoag knew that the world was heliocentric even before they were introduced to Europeans.
This film was made all the more memorable to me for its goose bump inducing ironies. Like her awkward first encounter with her future beloved mentor at MIT, Ken Hale. Or the fact that a translation of the Bible (and texts in related Algonquian languages), which wass originally used to colonize her people, is what she uses to figure out pronunciations in Wamponoag. Or the fact that Hale’s ancestor was one of the Puritans who originally colonized the area, showing how some things really do come full circle.
During the Q&A with Little Doe, director Anne Makepeace, and co-producer Jennifer Weston, who also works at Cultural Survival, Little Doe noted her community had initial trepidation about being filmed because they did not want their culture to be commodified or disenfranchised by the experience. Her community is not allowed to use the Wamponoag language on objects for sale or accept money for language classes.
One Wamponoag audience member asked Little Doe if their community had been able to use colonial documents in land reclamation efforts and she replied that the language used to describe land in these documents has helped them trace what the territory was at the time of Contact.
In terms of the future of the Wamponoag language, in the film we learn that Little Doe’s daughter, Mae, is the first native speaker in generations. During the Q&A, Little Doe notes that there has been a spike in pregnancies among language apprentices in her community so they will probably have more native language speakers soon. She also noted the importance of parents setting an example in this endeavor; even if children know Wamponoag, they will switch to English as soon as it is spoken among the parents.
I really enjoyed this film, which besides being a great story also employed animation in a beautiful and meaningful way. I think the film would be great for scholars interested in language revitalization, linguistics, colonization, women, commodification, and self determination.
For those of you interested, producers Weston and Makepeace created Our Mother Tongues (ourmothertongues.org), a website which highlights several Native American language revitalization projects in the U.S.
