Found in Translation

Life After Death
Did you know that translation can bring an extinct language back to life? Allow
us to invoke the story of Wampanoag (Wôpanâak), a language that was spoken
by Native Americans back when the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth. Ironically,
many Americans celebrate the Wampanoag each year at Thanksgiving without
even realizing that the group’s descendants still live on their ancestral
homelands in southeastern Massachusetts. Several words made their way into
English thanks to Wampanoag, such as pumpkin (pôhpukun), moccasin
(mahkus), and skunk (sukôk). But unfortunately, the beautiful language of the
native people who reportedly saved the Pilgrims from starvation faded away.
The last fluent speakers died out in the mid-nineteenth century.
And yet, after 150 years of lying dormant, it’s spoken every day by
members of the Wampanoag community and, most important, by children.
This is thanks to a remarkable and determined woman by the name of Jessie
Little Doe Baird, who set out on a mission to reclaim the language or, as she
says, “to bring the language home.” Jessie’s daughter was the first native
speaker of Wampanoag in six generations.
In great part, the language could be revived because of the existence of a
large number of written texts in Wampanoag with corresponding translations
in English. The Wampanoag were the first Native Americans to adopt an
alphabetic writing system, which meant that they left behind many seventeenth-
and eighteenth-century legal documents. Most of these were deeds and wills for
which translations into English had been produced while native speakers were
still alive.
Another important resource was a Wampanoag translation of the Bible. This
enabled Baird to reconstruct a grammar and a sizable dictionary. Anne
Makepeace, who made a documentary about the Wampanoag called We Still
Live Here: Âs Nutayuneân, observes, “The great irony in their story, of course,
is that the key to bringing it back, their Rosetta Stone, is a Bible that was

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translated into Wampanoag and published at Harvard in 1663 to convert New
England Indians to Christianity and force them to give up their traditional
ways, including their language.”
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While it took centuries for the language to fade out, the act of reviving it
came only recently. The tribes of the Wampanoag Nation started the
collaborative Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project in 1993. To take the
project further, Baird applied for a research fellowship in 1996 at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she worked with
renowned scholars in languages of the same linguistic branch (Algonquian).
Of course, translation isn’t the only tool that the Wampanoag could use to
revive their language. Jessie tapped into the work of other Algonquian
languages as well as the Wampanoag corpus to reconstruct the grammar and
build a dictionary and pedagogical materials for the language. After two
decades of devoting her life to this cause, she has succeeded not only in
revitalizing a language but enabling her people to more fully appreciate their
heritage. Baird, whose unprecedented work was recognized with a prestigious
MacArthur Fellowship (or Genius Grant) in 2010, now aims to launch an
immersion school for kids to start learning all subjects in Wampanoag starting
from kindergarten.
MIT linguist Noam Chomsky helps put the revival efforts into context in a
comment in We Still Live Here. He rightly states, “A language is not just words.
It’s a culture, a tradition, a unification of a community, a whole history that
creates what a community is. It’s all embodied in a language.”