Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center

By Dr. Kathleen Bragdon
Professor of Anthropology and Director of Graduate Studies at the College of William and Mary in Virginia

Skillful speech was highly valued by the speakers of Massachusett, an Algonquian language spoken by members of the Wampanoag tribe of what is today eastern Massachusetts. Englishman William Wood recorded that:

In serious discourse our southern Indians use seldom any short colloquiums but speak their minds at large without any interjected interruptions…the rest giving diligent audience to his utterance.

Roger Williams also noted a strong emphasis on speech skills among the related Narragansetts, who, “if they be eloquent, they esteme them as Gods.” The use of mnemonics, as well as “great action” in sachems’ “harangues,” in powwow’s curing rituals and prophecies, greeting rituals and the use of practiced insults between enemies all point to a strong cultural emphasis on speech, its delivery and its use as an art form. Since much of the elaborated speech and speech behavior recorded for the southern New England and Pequot languages was that of powerful and/or high status members of their communities, it appears that skilled speech and status were interrelated. Social hierarchy was thus marked and reinforced by the ritual, formal and public nature of speech.

A three-day conference titled “Revitalizing Algonquian Languages” was held at the Museum and Research Center in February 2002. Sponsored by the office of Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Councilor Charlene Jones and the tribe’s Historical and Cultural Preservation Committee, it drew more than 130 scholars and tribal members and officials from throughout the United States. Among those giving papers was Wayne Newell, an educator for the Passamaquoddy Tribe of Maine and a fluent Passamaquoddy speaker who was one of two keynote speakers; Dr. Bruce Pearson, University of South Carolina Professor Emeritus of Linguistics; and Dr. Lori Quigley, Dr. Mary Todd and Yolanda Smith (Seneca) of the Seneca Language Program.

This article was excerpted from the paper of the conference’s other keynote speaker, Dr. Kathleen Bragdon, who is an author, professor of anthropology and Director of Graduate Studies at the College of William and Mary in Virginia.

The appropriation of Native territories by English settlers, particularly in the “great migration” of the 1630s, contributed to the weakening of traditional political and social alliances that was already underway as a result of the massive population loss in the “plague years” of 1616-1619 and 1633 to 1634. Attenuated communities of Massachusett-speakers survived in what is now southeastern Massachusetts (including Cape Cod and the islands of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket) and Rhode Island. There, surviving Natives came under the increasing influence of English missionaries who sought the establishment of settled “praying towns” where Christianized Natives might be educated and “civilized.”

The unique coincidence of the Native emphasis on public speaking and speech as an art form combined with the Puritan text-dominated missionary effort created conditions for an “oral literacy” within these Native Christian communities. The “print” culture of Puritanism in the seventeenth century led John Eliot and other missionaries, was funded by the Society for the Propagation of the Bible, to develop the justly famous “Indian Library,” translations of the Bible and other Puritan-inspired religious works in Massachusetts. The entire Bible, translated into Massachusett by Eliot, with significant contributions from a Native speaker, appeared in 1663, with another edition in 1685. A copy of this second edition is part of the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center library collections.

The small cadre of English missionaries dedicated to introducing vernacular literacy into native communities were soon joined by a larger number of Native teachers who taught reading and writing skills throughout the region. As a result, by the end of the seventeenth century nearly 30 percent of the Native population could read and write in their respective Native languages.

Over the next two centuries, however, literacy in Massachusett and many other eastern Algonquian languages declined. The last known writing in Massachusett is a grave marker dated 1787 (see page 11.) The ironic symbolism of such evidence is many-layered. The marker names a Native minister whose stone dramatizes the end of the long connection between vernacular literacy and native Christianity. The Massachusett language continued to be spoken in church services, particularly on Martha’s Vineyard, until the early decades of the nineteenth century. However, as Native ministers and local leaders bowed to pressure to conduct services in English, and as fewer were able or willing to employ Massachusett in other public contexts, the sociability of vernacular language use on which its literacy depended disappeared. When Massachusett ceased to be the language of public interaction, and became restricted to home use, literacy in it was no longer viable.

This is a lesson that modern programs of language preservation should consider. At the same time, the notion of success in language revitalization does not require the acquisition of Native fluency. The intimate links between language and culture make efforts at awakening a dormant language inherently valuable. If, as some argue, we think of language as a tool to mark identity, then its repression and the encouraging of language shift by the dominant population, is a step towards controlling the weaker population’s identity. Revitalizing language, then, is the first step in a process of regaining control over one’s identity.

L. Frank Manriquez (Tongva/Ajachmen) described this concept eloquently in a 1998 article in the publication Terralingua:

If I know one word in my language my creator will let me go to where I have to go when I pass away. I don’t have a whole language. It is silly to think I will bring an extinct language back to fluency…But if I have one word, it is the power of one word, and whoever is at the garden gate – the pearly gates, the happy hunting grounds – will recognize me and it will be enough for me to go in. There is so much power in just one word. Somebody asked: ‘Why save the language or save your dance, why bother? Why don’t you just give it up, become one of us?’ Well, you can’t give up the color of your eyes. You can’t give up what has been running through your blood for ages.