Growing up, many of our American readers learned about the first Thanksgiving in elementary school. While we learned varying accounts, with a varying accuracy, depending on what generation we are, most of us were made familiar with Squanto, the first “Indian” to make contact with the Pilgrims of the Mayflower.
We now know more of Squanto, including how he came to be an early indigenous interpreter. He was kidnapped and enslaved in England, then returned to the Americas. On his return, he learned he was the last of his people, the Patuxet. We rarely see more information on the other indigenous people living in what is now modern day Massachusetts and parts of Rhode Island, let alone learn of their language.
The Massachusett people, for whom the state is named, spoke the same-named language, also known as Wampanoag, an Algoniak language spoken in eastern Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire.
Wampanoag was not initially written. John Eliot, a Puritan missionary who realized language would be a powerful and necessary tool for his conversion efforts, noticed 29 unique phonemes in his efforts to create a text for the language. He found different long and short o sounds, written as o and oo, respectively, and a “chee” sound written as ch. Due to these missionary efforts, we have several examples of translated texts, such as the Eliot Bible, originally published in the 1650s. Due to these translations, many of the Massachusett tribe were literate, and this tradition continued for almost a century.
One interesting linguistic feature, shared with many of the Algonquin languages, is nouns that are divided into animate and inanimate. For example, as linguist jessie little doe (lack of capitalization intentional) points out, the Sun is considered an animate object, so they may have been ahead of the times, which little compares to the ban the Inquisition had placed on Galileo’s heliocentric theory; during the times having knowledge the Church does not may result in the oppression of this knowledge.
Unfortunately, the “first Thanksgiving” story we were taught in school did not have a happy ending, as many of us are now aware, and one of the consequences of colonization was a loss of the Massachusett language and the shift towards forced English usage. The population also suffered losses caused by diseases such as smallpox and scarlet fever. With the tribe already decimated by disease by the arrival of the Mayflower in 1620, the population became smaller and smaller, and the last recorded written use of the language outside of some legal documents was in 1720. By 1798 only one advanced-age speaker could be identified.
However, thanks to the vast amount of written records, a language revival was nearly inevitable. One of the earlier efforts for revival came from Native Writings in Massachusett, a 1988 work that used The Natick Dictionary from the early 1900s, in addition to interviewing what few speakers remained, in an attempt to create a grammar using clues about syntax, vocabulary, and more. The previously mentioned linguist, jessie little bird baird, has been a force in revitalizing the language among indigenous people, and has taught classes, given lectures, and is raising her daughter exclusively in the language.
As we celebrate this year’s Thanksgiving, and others in the future, we should be thankful for the dedicated linguists, anthropologists, and scholars, who make these revivals possible. Indigenous culture is a rich tapestry, of which language is an important link weaved throughout, but without this sort of dedication it could be a thread lost forever.
Further Reading:
http://www.native-languages.org/wampanoag.htm
https://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-survival-quarterly/language-out-time