Trip of the Tongue (5 page)

English has, quite naturally, also adapted words from American Indian languages to describe American Indian culture.
Squaw
,
papoose
, and
wigwam
are of Algonquin derivation.
Tipi
, meanwhile, comes from a Lakota word for “dwelling.”
^e
But there are also Native words that have become wonderfully, quintessentially American. One of my favorites is an Algonquin word meaning “marshy meadow.” It eventually gained traction as a dismissive term for an unsophisticated village the middle of nowhere. You probably know it as
podunk.

The greatest Native linguistic influence, however, is to be found in American place names. Take the Abenaki, an Algonquin people who lived in New England, Quebec, and the Maritime Provinces, and who were particularly important for their contribution to Maine place names such as
Ogunquit
, derived from an Abenaki phrase meaning “a sand bar lagoon,” or
Kennebunk
, the combination of the Abenaki words
kenne
, “long,” and
benek
, “cut bank.”

Wampanoag, the language of Tisquantum, has left traces all over New England. In Wampanoag and other Algonquin languages, a final
-t
is a locative marker (meaning “at”), which accounts for many of the New England names that end in
-t
or
-tt
—for instance,
Swampscott
(“at the red rock”) or
Cohasset
(“at the stone ledge”). The notorious
Chappaquiddick
also comes to us via Wampanoag. The island, which is separated from Martha's Vineyard by a narrow strait, gets
chappa
from the word
chippi
, “separate,” and
quiddick
from
acquidne
, “island.”

The vast majority of state names are also derived from indigenous American languages. Some, such as
Alabama
,
Illinois
,
Kansas
, and
Missouri
, are versions of tribal names. Others are more localized place names that were appropriated for the larger state.
Alaska
, for instance, comes from an Aleut word meaning “the object toward which the action of the sea is directed”—that is, the mainland.
Texas
, reflecting that area's complex linguistic history, is a Spanish rendition of a Caddo word for “friend.” The name
Oklahoma
was originally suggested by Choctaw chief Allen Wright—from the Choctaw
oklah
, “people,” and
hommaʔ
, “red”—as an alternative to “Indian Territory.”
^f

Wyoming is a particularly interesting case. Although there has historically been a diverse group of American Indians who have called Wyoming home, the name
Wyoming
actually comes from the same language that was spoken in and around what is now New York City. In the Munsee language,
chwewamink
means “at the big river flat.”
Wyoming
, the anglicization of this word, was first used to name a valley in northeastern Pennsylvania before being popularized by Thomas Campbell's poem about the Revolutionary War–era massacre:

On Susquehanna's side, fair Wyoming!

Although the wild-flower on thy ruin'd wall,

And roofless homes, a sad remembrance bring,

Of what thy gentle people did befall;

Yet thou wert once the loveliest land of all

That see the Atlantic wave their morn restore.

Sweet land! may I thy lost delights recall,

And paint thy Gertrude in her bowers of yore,

Whose beauty was the love of Pennsylvania's shore!

Whether due to the popularity of the poem or perhaps to some inherent appeal to the rhythm of the word itself, there are now Wyomings in thirteen other states, Ontario, and New South Wales, Australia.

To be sure, the American place names that have been borrowed from Native languages have something of a phonetic leg up in that they sound different from the boring old Indo-European sounds we're used to. In
Made in America
, Bill Bryson writes, “You have only to list a handful of Indian place-names—
Mississippi
,
Susquehanna
,
Rappahannock
—to see that the Indians found a poetry in the American landscape that has all too often eluded those who displaced them.” Though I don't disagree, I would argue that these names have an emotional resonance—that they have poetry—not because of their sound but rather because so many words from Native languages are words Americans use for “home.”

Once I'd generally oriented myself within the universe of indigenous American languages, I was ready to start thinking about the specifics of Crow. On a hunch, I went back to the girls at the visitor center. Without batting an eye, they pointed me toward a bookshelf where, among the usual titles about Custer and the battle, I found a surprisingly extensive selection of books on the Crow language. I bought a heavy blue grammar by Randolph Graczyk and spent the rest of my afternoon poking about in it.

The Crow call themselves Apsáalooke, or Children of the Large-Beaked Bird.
^g
Their ancestors migrated to the plains in search of buffalo in the sixteenth century, leaving a “Land of Many Lakes” (an area thought to be in Wisconsin) for the Dakotas. Here, the tribe split in two, with one band—the Apsáalooke—moving up into the area in eastern Montana that they today call home.

The Crow language is a member of the Siouan family, which includes Mandan, Ho-chunk, Lakota, and Dakota, among others, and extends primarily throughout the Plains, east into Minnesota and Wisconsin, and south to Arkansas and Mississippi. Within the family, Crow is most closely related to the language of the Hidatsa, and based on linguistic evidence, scholars such as the linguist G. Hubert Matthews have concluded that the Crow and the Hidatsa were originally part of one larger tribe before they split nearly 500 years ago. The languages of the Crow and Hidatsa have also diverged in more immediately apparent ways, however. While Hidatsa has only a small group of fluent speakers still living and is struggling to survive, there are still several thousand living speakers of Crow, making it one of the more widely spoken American Indian languages.

As I sat in my hotel room in Billings and paged through my grammar, the first thing I noticed is that Crow has—to use something of a technical term—really long words. Much like many other American Indian languages, Crow is polysynthetic, which means that a single word in Crow can contain lots of information. Consider
baawaashbaaléewiawaassaak
, which means “I'm not going to go hunting.”
^h
When I was learning Spanish, it took me ages to remember that I could just say
hablo
instead of
yo hablo
, because
hablo
is necessarily first person. I can't even imagine how long it would take me to accustom myself to single words that can contain three verbs, a negative marker, an indefinite marker related to
hunt
, and a declarative marker.

Even more unusual is the typology of Crow. Linguists use the phrase “morphosyntactic alignment” to describe the way a language treats the arguments of transitive and intransitive verbs—what we in English call subjects and objects. Some languages (like English) treat transitive subjects the same way as intransitive subjects: “
she
hits
her
”; “
she
runs.” Other languages (say, Basque) treat intransitive subjects the same way as transitive objects. So “
she
hits
her
,” but “
her
runs.” Then there are the languages that use combinations of these two systems. Crow is one of these languages. Known as an “active-stative” language, Crow is sometimes a
she
-runs language and sometimes a
her-
runs language.

If you grew up speaking Crow, you wouldn't think twice about any of this, but when you're approaching the language from the perspective of an English-speaker—particularly from the perspective of a non-linguist English-speaker—it can seem overwhelming to have to rethink ideas as basic as “subjects,” “objects,” and even “words.”

But the feature of Crow that most intrigued me—in part because I had never seen it before—is something called switch reference. Switch reference was first observed by the linguist William Jacobsen in his study of Washo, a language of Nevada. Roughly speaking, switch reference is a grammatical way of distinguishing multiple subjects. If in English, for instance, you were telling a story about multiple members of the same gender, you would have to use proper names (“she—Jill, I mean”) to keep the story straight. In Crow, however, there are markers that indicate “different” and “same” subjects, respectively, allowing listeners, readers, and speakers to do away with clumsier forms of clarification.

Then there is something called the mirative. A mirative—from the Latin for “to wonder”—is a grammatical indication of surprise. There are, of course, many ways to express surprise in language, the ones most familiar to English-speakers involving intonation, stress, or the words “get out.” But languages such as Tibetan, Korean, or Crow can encode surprise in the word itself. In Crow this is accomplished through the use of a suffixal verb, the rough grammatical equivalent of a spit-take.

Like so many aspects of the Crow language, these are all grammatical tools of eloquent distinction. They also serve to remind us that the monolithic “how” and exaggerated monosyllables of silver-screen Indians are gross misrepresentations of the complexity and elegance of Native languages; indeed, they would be gross misrepresentations of any language.

For years the relative isolation of Crow Nation helped keep its language strong. Just over forty years ago a survey showed that 82 percent of students on the reservation spoke Crow as their first language and that 79 percent of twelfth graders reported being primarily Crow-speakers. The prospect for future language maintenance at this point looked extremely promising. By 1995, however, the numbers had taken a startling turn. Only 25 percent of children ages three to nineteen were fluent in Crow, while only 50 percent of their parents spoke the language. Though numbers were higher among tribal elders—85 percent of the students' grandparents spoke Crow—the statistics indicated that the younger generation was in the middle of a major shift away from the traditional language. Unfortunately, it's this generation that typically gives the greatest insight into the life span of a language.

I decided to make a visit to Little Big Horn College to find out more about the current state of the Crow language. Located in Crow Agency, Little Big Horn College opened in 1980 as a vocational-technical school with only a handful of students. Today the college has more than three hundred full-time students and is one of the few places in the country where you can study Crow.

Despite my best attempts to get lost in what is not much more than a three-street town, I eventually found the college and made my way to a small office where I met with Tim McCleary, a historian and Crow-language instructor. The son of missionaries, Professor McCleary was versed from a very young age in the business of language study. I liked him immediately. Affable and generous with his time, he seemed only slightly bemused by my interest in Crow grammar, and he was patient as he walked me through the patterns for a few Crow words. The language, he explained, was extremely accommodating to new words. Some of these new words were Crow-English hybrids. A favorite word of his daughter's was
baachúuxinneeted
. The
baa-
is a Crow prefix meaning “one of,” and the ending –
inneeted
is an approximation of an English participle.
Chuux
, meanwhile, is related to the sound of “jack.” What does the phrase mean in its entirety? “To be jacked up.”
ⁱ

When I asked Professor McCleary about the vitality of the Crow language, his smile dimmed. Nineteen years ago, he told me, the only language spoken was Crow. Three years ago he first started noticing that Crow wasn't being spoken in the hallways. That summer, even though 98 percent of his students were Crow, he had only one primary speaker of Crow in each of his two classes. “There is,” he suggested, “a false sense that everything's OK.”

By the time I left Crow Agency, I had more questions than answers. I had managed to get a rough sense of the Crow language, and I felt appreciably better informed about Native languages in general. But I wanted to know more about language preservation specifically. Crow has a reasonably strong and visible presence in a decent-sized community, and yet it lost a huge proportion of its speakers in just twenty-five years. What would I find in larger language communities—or in much smaller ones?

As I drove out of town, I noticed a smattering of Crow-language signage—above the door to the Laundromat, for instance, is the Crow word
ammaaiisshuuwuua
. The exit off I-90 for Crow Agency, meanwhile, is labeled
Baaxuwuaashe
(“flour mill,” a reference to the days when the Bureau of Indian Affairs was also home to the government-built mill). I later discovered that as part of a recent initiative, Crow place names have been added to a number of rest stops and highway signs. Though the public use of the language doesn't approach anything like the density one sees in non-English language communities in major U.S. cities, it nevertheless serves a purpose: you are aware, at the very least, that there is a language other than English here. All in all, it seems a noble effort. Still, I couldn't help but wonder if it was going to matter.

Before I left Montana, I had one more stop to make. I figured I couldn't see two historical reenactments and then leave without seeing the battlefield itself.