Trip of the Tongue (12 page)

Literal translations are incredibly useful for the linguist and language student, but if translators rely too heavily on them, polysynthetic languages can seem to evince a lack of sophistication—a dangerous perception, particularly when that language belongs to a people also routinely stereotyped as “primitive.” Now, English is a far more analytic (or isolating) language, which means that its ratio of morphemes to words is closer to 1:1. So it's hard to come up with a precise parallel to illustrate what I mean here. But imagine if translators of English insisted on breaking down each word not into morphemes but into its etymological parts. A word like “telephone” could be literally translated as something like “far-off sound thing.” Which sounds completely ridiculous, of course.

It's easy to forget that my sense of a language in translation is very different from the sense a native speaker of that language would have. I would have a very different perception of a person depending on whether they use “far-off sound thing” or “telephone,” “going-along device” or “paddle.” I know it seems obvious when I spell it out that a dumb-sounding translation does not imply a dumb language—or, worse, dumb speakers of that language. But given the way the Makah language has historically been treated by outsiders, I don't think it's the worst thing in the world to belabor this point.

Although Europeans first landed on the Olympic Peninsula in 1774, the Makah didn't come into contact with the new arrivals until 1788, when an English captain and fur trader by the name of John Meares dropped anchor off Cape Flattery. The Makah called the outsiders
babałids
—“house-floating-on-the-water people.” It would take nearly seventy years for the outsiders to decide what to call the Makah.

The Makah don't use the name Makah—or at least they didn't used to. Instead they call themselves
, “the people who live by the rocks and seagulls.” They are hardly the only group in the country to be saddled with an exonym that, like so many other tribal monikers throughout the country, bears little resemblance to their traditional name. Remember, after all, that the Crow are also the Apsáalooke and the Navajo the Diné. Sometimes these names are mere accidents of fate. Sometimes, however, they are accidents of misunderstanding. Take, for instance, the Nuu-chah-nulth, a closely related tribe that lives on the western coast of Vancouver Island and was for many years known as the Nootka. Helma Ward, a Makah elder, told anthropologist Patricia Pierce Erikson the story of how the Nootka got their name:

They were asked, “What is your people's name?” They responded, “nootka.” They thought the men wanted to get out of where they were. So they were saying “nootka,” telling them to go out around the island. But the men decided to stay. So they stayed and were fed. The next day they were told again how to leave—“nootka”—go out around the island. So they've been called Nootka people ever since.

By comparison, I suppose the Makah should be relieved. Their adopted name may come from another language, but at least it doesn't mean something so wholly unrelated.

The name Makah was codified in 1855, when the governor of Washington Territory and members of the Makah Tribe signed the Treaty of Neah Bay. Among other provisions, the treaty established the boundaries of the Makah reservation—a mere 28,000 acres of the 700,000 acres the tribe had traditionally inhabited—and codified tribal fishing rights. The treaty was written in English only, and whether it was due to intent or ignorance, government officials elected to use the word
, the Klallam name for the tribe. It means, depending on your source, “generous with food” or “well-fed.” Makah has been the “official” name of the tribe ever since.

For the Makah, then, the Treaty of Neah Bay marked not only the beginning of reservation life, a time when the U.S. government would involve itself in every aspect of daily life, from trade to agriculture to education, but also the first time the United States tried to undermine their language.

The interaction between English and Makah started off innocently enough. One of the first European Americans to live among the Makah was a man named James Swan, the author of
The Indians of Cape Flattery
, the first ethnographic work on the Makah. Swan (no relation to Bella) first visited Neah Bay in 1859 as part of his travels throughout the Olympic Peninsula. Eventually he settled in the area, and in 1862 he was hired as the reservation schoolmaster. Over the next four years he compiled his monograph, which included an extensive Makah word list.

Though a dedicated amateur, Swan was no linguist, and his translations were sometimes unreliable—he wrote, for instance, that
meant “the people who live on a point of land projecting into the sea.” This was due in part to the fact that the Makah were not uniformly supportive of his endeavors. Many years later, Helma Ward—the same elder who told researchers the story of “nootka”—was working as a language specialist for the Makah Cultural and Research Center. After working with Swan's materials, she remarked, “We had to go through and fix Swan's vocabulary. It was full of bum words. Swearwords. People were giving him the wrong information just to be mean to him.”

Even so, Swan's lists were used to teach English to Makah-speakers—and Makah to English-speakers.

But not all efforts on behalf of language education were so feckless or relatively benign. Consider the case of C. A. Huntington, an agent assigned to the Makah reservation in April 1874. In his first annual report to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, filed that September, he wrote of his plans for the children of Neah Bay:

I have taken the buildings at Bahada Point two miles distant from the nearest Indian camps. Here I propose to separate the children entirely from the homes and as much as possible from the ideas and habits of their parents. I propose to take them entirely out of barbarous surroundings, and put them into the midst of a civilized, Christian home.… In connection with all this, I shall make it my first endeavor to teach them to speak the English language, not by the slow process of letters and books, but by the usage of common parlance. The Indian tongue must be put to silence and nothing but the English allowed in all social intercourse.

With enough effort, one might be able to locate a well-meaning humanitarian sentiment in that statement, but all I see is disdain for non-white, non-Christian culture. Unfortunately, it was this attitude that permeated the schools that Makah children were sent to. Like the other Native students at assimilationist schools throughout the country, Makah children were threatened with punishment for any outward expression of their native culture and language.

Mary Lou Denney's account of her father's time in school is typical:

When he was caught [speaking Makah], they took him outside and it was raining. The weather was very bad and they put him to a harness and they had to walk around just like animals when they were, I don't know what they would do, but anyway they just kind of walked in a circle and they were chained.… They didn't have a coat on, just their clothes that they wore to class. He said he'll never forget that because there were some pretty sick kids that were having to do the same thing. So him and my mom decided that they wouldn't allow us to go through that kind of treatment and that we would learn the English.

The Makah language might well have died out completely were it not for the intervention of Mother Nature. But in 1970 a series of powerful waves exposed hundreds of centuries-old artifacts near Ozette, a largely abandoned Makah village about twenty miles south of Neah Bay. Over the next eleven years, archaeologists uncovered more than 55,000 artifacts and 40,000 structural remains from the site, a village that had been buried and amazingly well preserved by an eighteenth-century mudslide. Reporters flooded the area, eager to see for themselves “North America's Pompeii.”

The local community came together to participate in the dig, to aid with cataloging and identification, and to ensure that their cultural legacy remained in their control. Tribal elders spent hours sifting through the archaeological inventory, explaining what the objects were and how they were used, and dredging up long-forgotten facts and stories. Regular school trips to the site sparked interest not only in archaeology but also in traditional Makah culture. Soon enough the tribe declared its intention to establish a museum.

The Makah Cultural and Research Center (MCRC) opened in 1979. It sits on the eastern end of Neah Bay, just across the street from the sign welcoming visitors to the reservation. The exterior is squat and unassuming, but inside is a world-class anthropological museum. The Makah employed an exhibit designer from the staff of the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria, but a group of eight tribal elders largely determined the thrust of the design, and instead of trying to maximize the quantity of artifacts on display, the tribe chose to focus on presenting the clearest and most compelling cultural narrative possible. Though only about 1 percent of the Ozette artifacts are shown at the museum, the exhibits provide a remarkably clear and compelling introduction to Makah culture, surely an indication of the epic scope of the full collection.

Today the museum is an unqualified success. It is the tribe's main tourist attraction, drawing more than 14,000 visitors a year, and it plays a major role in the community with regard to matters of cultural and historical preservation. It is also, as I discovered, home to the Makah Language Program.

Beginning in the 1960s, the Makah fought to put their language and culture back in their classrooms. Although Makah was eventually offered to students as an elective, it took the energizing effects of the Ozette dig to generate interest in large-scale plans for language study and instruction. The renewed vitality paid off. In 1978, the tribe received a grant of just over $90,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities to put toward language preservation efforts. The first act of the newly established Makah Language Program was to establish an official orthography and train native speakers in its use.

Soon, elders were working side by side with teachers to develop an appropriate language curriculum. In 1984 the program offered Head Start and elementary-school instruction. In the 2009–10 school year, classes covered grades K–12, and Makah III, the most advanced course to date, was offered at the high school level for the first time.

At the MCRC I met Crystal Thompson, an animated young Makah woman in her late twenties who was in her seventh year with the Makah Language Program. One of four part-time teachers on staff, Crystal taught Head Start through fifth grade. In addition to their teaching duties, Crystal and her colleagues made up what is essentially the Makah version of the Académie Française. In the absence of any living native speakers, these are the tribe's linguistic authorities, so when a need arises for a new word, the task falls to them. When I spoke with Crystal, she had recently been thinking over a word for “toolbox.” She and her fellow teachers eventually decided on
babuksac
—“working container.”