A LITTLE VOCABULARY RIFF

In the Blackfeet language:

“Amo” means “this” as in the phrase “this here,” as if you were  pointing something out or handing something to another person.   “Amoiauk” you would say.

“Ami” means up, upstream,  “Amiaupi” is to mount.  “Amiawani” is to fly up and “amipuk” is air.  

“Amiskapi” means south as in “amiskapi pikuni” which is the branch of the Blackfeet nation that I know and lived among for a while.

“Ana” also means clear and “ikana” means to shine, to be bright, as in “Mistakisz Ikanaziaw”  which means the “shining mountains,” which are the Rockies, where the Blackfeet ended with their backs against the ramparts of the east slope.

“Ama” means to smell.  “Sipazimoi in” means sweetgrass which is a cleansing incense.

“Ani” means to say, to tell, to mind, to obey.  

“Amap” means always.

I only know a little Blackfeet, but I want to learn more, more about it, to say it always clearer, rising up....

And to be there, to say “this here” and be able to gesture at the shining mountains, the sweetgrass, obedient to what is there.

“Amoni” is a breath or puff of wind.

“Ami” means to be the one.

It is I who speaks in this puff of wind.

"OKI, CHEEKEE!"

Whether it is ironic or harmonic, there are two language movements that are "rhyming" at the moment, but yet they have no relationship at all.  One is the recovery of the indigenous languages of the Americas and the other is represented by an English writer, Robert McFarlane, who pursues the old words of England based on vocation or place.  One could say that both are a result of re-empowering the response of the whole body and brain to the world, but that's probably not so interesting right now, a little abstract.  Rather, people give these nearly forgotten words the power of incantation, able to cast spells.

Once I subbed at the Piegan Institute, an immersion school for Blackfeet language.  This was not usual because I'm white, but it was a product of friendship with Darrell Robes Kipp, founder and director, who was caught by a deadline.  The idea was for me to "teach" for a couple of hours.  The kids were junior high students, non-standard indigenous, and the dynamics were interesting but not relevant here.

One girl stood out.  I can't remember why, but I asked for Blackfeet words about horses.  She went to the board and quickly listed and explained the words for a whole series of ages of horses, states they were in, their uses, and so on.  I was stunned!  Not that they existed, but that she knew the words.  And I had confidence that she knew these kinds of horses, could point them out in a band, and probably learned the words from growing up on a ranch with older generations.

That was forty years ago.  Kipp and his philosophical partner Dorothy Still Smoking had composed a questionnaire as preparation and were startled that most respondents said they didn't approve of learning the old language.  It was useless, too hard, and would just get a person into trouble.  They themselves and their parents had been punished harshly for speaking the old words.  This attack on indigenous languages has become a mantra in tribes.  

It is partly because of the efforts of people like Kipp and Still Smoking that this view has reversed.  Before Piegan Institute, there was Marvin Weatherwax at the Blackfeet Community College, Marvin's mother collaborating with Terri Sherburne to use the classroom French mastery sound system for Blackfeet.  People made fun of Peter Redhorn's little brochures for tourists that listed basic words, but I learned some of them.  Nowaday, one can earn a degree in anthropological linguistics in Missoula.  Robert Hall, defender of Rez Dogs, has done that.
  

Jack Holterman, a free-lance public scholar now gone, was a good friend  of Darrell Robes Kipp and encouraged Piegan Institute.  He says this:

"In more recent times, the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha'i of Canada issued a Message to the Blackfeet Indians, written in both English and Blackfoot. In 1989, Donald Frantz and Norma Jean RusselJ compiled a Blackfoot Dictionary published by the University of Toronto Press. This was followed by a grammar book published a year later. . .

"Among the South Piegans, today called the Blackfeet, several members of the tribe are noted for their dedication teaching the language. Peter Red Horn, Nellie Reevis, Molly Bull Shoe, and Elizabeth Butterfly Lewis made solid contributions to the understanding of the language during the last forty years.

"In 1983, at the tribal college, younger members of the tribe began to acquire a respect for the language, and a strong desire to re-Iearn it. Much of the written work was gathered and studied. Fluent speakers of the tribe soon found themselves sought after in the midst of a renaissance that continues today."

There were compelling reasons for the Blackfeet to revive their old language, but it's more difficult to explain the runaway success of Robert Macfarlane in books that are glossaries of unspoken languages.  The pursuit of language and its development both in depth and across continents, is somewhat similar to exploring genomic information or the broad linguistic questions about how humans learn to speak and write, how languages separate and braid back together.  

Entomologies, the history of specific words and where they came from, are a force back towards standardization instead of being distorted by guesses or simple mispronunciation.  But the only real way to get back to the richness and meaning of old languages is to go to the places and pursuits the words came from, as in Macfarlane's strategy of going to the place where peat is cut in order to understand the many specialized words.   A common use of Macfarlane's concrete but intense vocabulary is in classrooms where the group collaborates on a poem that is a list or a definition of something the students know.  Some of them are quite striking and commonly show up online in social media.

The title I used for this post, "oki, cheekee!" is what Bob used to say if a local tribal person came into the shop, usually to sell something.  It means, "Hello, what's up?"  Sorta.  But besides that is what Darrell explained to me and Bob only half-knew, which is it's a way of addressing a kid, off-hand, not quite respectful.  Bob learned it while clerking at the Browning Merc, his dad's store when he was himself a kid.

My niece, a pretty young mother who drives a pickup, was visiting and we had stopped for gas.  When she opened her door, a big scruffy Blackfeet man, a little bit drunk, came and crowded in beside her behind the steering wheel.  He wanted to borrow money and she was flummoxed by the invasion.  I waited to see what she would do, but she was caught between her romantic notions of Indians and this ruffian.  So I said, "Oki, cheekee!"  He did a quick double-take, got out, and stood at attention.  "I'm Mary Scriver," I said.  Now he could hardly be respectful enough.  He was old enough to remember Bob Scriver and drunk enough to forget he'd been dead for decades.  For once, the slightly patronizing tone was exactly right.  Except that my niece had no idea what I said that worked so effectively.

I laughed and laughed.  It's good to know languages.

REOPENING THE GOLD MINE

Yellow Kidney and Little Plume

Their descendants, whom I knew, were also religionists.

Photo by Curtis

Through the decades after the Civil War and maybe until WWII, a loose cohort of “white” writers, mostly in the West, wrote books about Indians in a faux historical romantic way based on the idea that they were disappearing.  Of course, they really meant the First Contact people, mostly on the prairie, whom we might call “buffalo people.” The US had deliberately eliminated most of the buffalo that were their life foundation, so then they had been blanket people and next in the 20th century wore “citizen’s dress.”  But it's been tough becoming actual citizens.

The quick way to understand what the early 20th century period was like might be to flip through old photos, many of them with glass negatives, as presented in Walter McClintock’s “The Old North Trail” or the photo books of Edward Curtis.  Then compare the photos with the immediately preceding art work of George Caitlin, pre-photo.  They are the rough equivalent of the books written by George Bird Grinnell, Frank Bird Linderman, Charles Marion Russell, Helen Hunt Jackson, Mary Austin, and James Willard Schultz.  (See Paul Seesequasis (@paulseesequa) on Twitter, who posts wonderful old photos.

These books were loved by my mother (b. 1909) and my husband (b. 1914).  Bob was born and grew up on the Blackfeet reservation; my mother was born and grew up in the Pacific NW when lingering historical Indian camps still supplied seasonal labor.  Writing about these people was recently re-examined by professors using post-colonial thought and Native American activists to explore the new reality (they thought) that was neglected by the sentimental and hegemonic books of what I called to myself, “the three-named authors.”  My own kid favorite was “Tangled Waters’ by Florence Crannell Means, written by a Navajo trader’s wife who wrote many books about NA’s for young people.  Sympathetic but accepting assimilation.

Sherry L. Smith

Lately it has been books like “Reimagining Indians: Native Americans through Anglo Eyes, 1880-1940” by Sherry L. Smith, an academic historian, that have reopened the exhausted mines of sentimental assumptions. Smith and company are white scholars of disillusionment and they spared no whites from their new interpretation.  Even McClintock and Curtis took a bashing, McClintock for not using family prestige to reform Washington DC and Curtis for posing his Indian subjects wearing his trunk full of costumes and artifacts.

Then there has been a generation of books lamenting the suffering of reservations and the city ghettos created by the effort to break up reservations through relocation.  Some call it “misery lit” and claim those stories are also exploitations rather than calls to reform.  When AIM took up the flag of revolution and led a new version of Indian Wars,  there was an accompanying new wave of “war” stories with the FBI taking the cavalry role and proud of it.  

Returning again to the mine of drama has slowed because the People themselves have begun telling their own stories.  They recognize that white post-colonials are often just colonialists in disguise.  The result is two completely different approaches to writing about indigenous people.  The split between them exists in the fields of history, anthropology, art and religion.  What had originally been an ecologically-based People had been both feared and attacked by the industrializing forces that consumed land and resources.  These are now in the throes of legal and governmental struggles trying to control mighty international corporations with no perceptible heads except for insatiable mouths.  They leave piles of their dung behind him and crave access to sacred grounds.

The Scriver Collection in book form.

Self-published by Bob Scriver.

What had once been a folk understanding of curiosities to collect and hang on one’s parlor walls has now become a legal battle over entitlement and increasing monetary value that has led to suicide and sweat lodge deaths of whites as well as the stripping of the heritage of Native Americans.  That’s the reality and yet many people hang onto the idea of tribal lives as “child-like” and entirely separate.  After Montana state law was changed to REQUIRE Indian history (millennia-old) to be taught in the schools, an educated woman protested to me,  “Why should WE have to study THEIR history?”  She hadn’t noticed that the head of the Montana  state school system was tribal or that the history of her town dates to WWI.  Not WWII.  World War ONE.

The Scriver family’s memorabilia was sold to the Royal Alberta Provincial Museum for a lot of money.   The Blackfeet felt that the items were acquired in a dishonorable way so demanded them back.  In fact, the items designated Ceremonial Bundles were returned -- not to Scriver but to the Canadian Blackfoot tribes.  This was a new source of pique though the original Blackfoot Nation was on both sides of the 49th parallel.  What IS a nation?  Who controls what?

Attributing high values to ancient and exotic materials is both understandable and a source of mischief, as the “ISIS” destruction of historic temples and statues has demonstrated.  When no one cared about them, they were safe.  As objects become more valuable and symbolic, their trade tends to go underground, disappearing from public access.  Maybe that’s just as well.

"Jimmy P."  Misty Upham is gone.

Both authenticity and spiritual/religious meaning of objects -- whether monumental or territorial (I’m thinking of Badger/Two Medicine) or contemporary books, film and art -- has become an aspect of great concern to worldwide people, attributes that affect practical commercial strategies and raise the question of compensation for presumed loss to the originators, the creators.  Suppression of those whose work is critical of power-mongers.

Is a book written about or by people who have been dead for decades or centuries more valuable if one can establish antiquity or authenticity?  Is a very early and maybe rather primitive Navajo rug more or less valuable than a sophisticated and refined later version?  Should intangibles affect concrete objects?  What is the value of speaking one’s language when the world to which it was fitted is now gone?  Or will the language teach us what we lost?  

Tony Bynum photo

Is something like the spiritual value of pristine mountain slopes quite real and perceptible, as well as “owned” by a People?  In terms of history, wasn't the Badger-Two Med originally the Ceded Strip, which was an ambiguously assigned part of the 1910 purchase of Glacier National Park (urged by Linderman) and therefore unavailable to development?  Wasn’t Glacier Park -- behind the scenes -- a boondoggle to create traffic for the Great Northern railroad at the expense of the Blackfeet tribe, just another industrialist exploitation of resources?  Even forcing dignified adults, through hunger, to perform dances and tell stories on the lawn in front of the Big Hotel?  Or did that honor them?

The fantasies of generations attach to the Real People who once occupied the various eco-niches of the continent, now flattened by resource industries.  The newest revisioning of the tribes focuses on this, trying to rediscover the principles of sustainable life.  We’ve traveled from museums across the spectrum to reburial of the skeletons recovered from museums, feeling our way -- which accounts for the very different paths.  There IS NO rational and logical strategy that will unify peoples on such different sides of viewing the Way or the destination.  UNLESS we face the inevitability of everything passing away no matter what we do.  It might take longer if we try to preserve what we know about.  It will be short if the only goal is commodification.

In truth, whether or not the identity of tribal peoples has been damaged fades when confronting the reality that the whole planet of living creatures is in danger.  Changes in air, water, and climate are affecting us all AS A SPECIES and muddling the ecologies, possibly beyond our ability to live in them.  The books are just now being written.  We thought the Indians were disappearing.  Now it looks like we might ALL be disappearing.  Certainly the glaciers are.

YOU SAY "EEKSOKAPI," I WRITE "OH, SPLENDID!"

I’ve already said that sometimes and in some ways I was a good teacher and in other ways I was not.  Since all but a few months of my sporadic career were on the Blackfeet reservation, the essential nature of that place and the people shaped by it is the main criterion of what was good and what was bad.  But we didn’t agree.  Since I was an English teacher, and since everyone presumes that means reading and writing far more than speaking and listening, my biggest failure was not knowing how to teach people to read, which is the most crucial skill for assimilation education, but almost irrelevant to being Blackfeet.

Blackfeet is an oral language with inflections and pronunciations adding meaning to the plain sounds.  A key problem is that most school materials are written and on paper (as compared to onscreen) and they are English.  The English alphabet does not even have letter symbols for some Blackfeet sounds, so how could it represent true Blackfeet?   If one could read Blackfeet, there’s so little published, what would you read?  Radio and video are the media for an oral language -- video even more, since gestures are woven into sounds.  But it’s really meant for people talking to people.

My preparation for teaching was mostly in theatre and speech with the emphasis on understanding individuals and their culture and on group discussion skills rather than one-against-one debate. What the community wanted then -- and still wants today -- is formal presentation skill: good pronunciation, compliant usage, the rhetoric of business success, computer skill in the Microsoft spreadsheet way -- not Apple graphics.  (I’m aware this exists powerfully because of seeing so many online wild-child kids whose spoken language is likely to be Spanish or French -- a moot point since they talk in street slang and song lyrics.  Not about money so much as love.  They speak YouTube.)  Sometimes modern Blackfeet kids, the high achievers in classrooms, strike me as sort of Japanese.  Other times, they style black urban ghetto.

The theoretical and practical knowledge of how the brain learns to read is just now coming to usefulness.  It appears that there are a number of different ways brains perceive these little strips of markings, left-to-right eye scans that translate into meaning.  Partly it depends on sound associations.  This means that pronunciations and the way they are “seen” by the brain might be different from one person to another.  One of my brothers couldn’t learn to read until a teacher drilled him in phonics.  I sight read, mostly taught myself.  Sometimes I pronounce words funny because I’ve never heard them spoken.  Some people are dyslexic, meaning that it is extraordinarily difficult for them to learn to read, though they are fluent and powerful in oral thought.

Beyond the symbolization of spoken language is what a person thinks reading “is.”  What forms in the head while reading might be like a movie, might be diagrams of how concepts fit together, or might only be a dark blur of shadows.  Some of us “inhabit” what we read.  For others, it remains a wall with graffiti.  But Writing-on-Stone is part of the original indigenous culture and the impulse of kids is to draw is underneath any writing.

Propriety rather than intelligibility is the focus of much "English" teaching, so I was always urged to “drill, drill, drill” the students.  I see the point of this.  Once I was with a bunch of white kids when a Blackfeet leader in his nice suit came to visit.  He was a politician and he had been a student of mine.  His “grammar” was very bad.  The kids’ faces were full of contempt.  I’m sure he thought it was racism.  It was, in a way, since he had failed to assimilate “proper” English, but the kids would have been equally scornful of a white person with bad grammar.  It’s a social marker.

A small part of my preparation for teaching was speech therapy.  I didn’t do it, but I read the theories and observed them in action.  When the problem is the forming of sounds, a trained person sits across from the client and looks into their face to see what they are doing when they talk.  There are games and encouragement while the client learns to do something like make his or her tongue fit just along the ridge behind his or her upper teeth tightly enough to allow only a straw’s worth of air to hiss through.  That makes “sssss” -- too much air and you’ve got “shshshsh” which people describe as a “slushy s" and which makes the speaker harder to understand.  One of the spelling handicaps on the rez is using “non-standard” sounds, so that “saddle” becomes “sattle.”  Kids have fought me over this, insisting on “sattle.”  It’s as though I were challenging their identity.  THEY knew sattles, not me.

Many Blackfeet sounds are made in the back of the throat and some English call it “guttural” which has pejorative connotations: animal-like grunting, a German accent which was a nasty accusation after WWII. “Gutter.”   But English was originally that way and some of the minorities of Britain retain the blurring, back-of-the-throat sounds as well as glottal stops.  It’s a much softer sound.  The melody of pronunciation, the rhythm and emphasis, is also a little bit different.  Having an accent is sometimes considered charming and other times considered “low class.”  The Anglo-Saxon battle against the French includes language in every aspect.  Using four-letter Anglo-Saxon words is still stigmatized.

All this is about the mechanics of speaking and reading, which are so interwoven with culture and nurture.  We all know that the best way to learn reading is sitting next to someone who reads to you, close enough that you can follow the words with your eyes and ears at once and build the associations.  But there is another European dimension that doesn’t quite translate and that is the great romantic notion of what it means to be a writer.  When the “roman” -- the novel -- was invented in Europe, it was associated with exciting adventures that were often a little bit naughty and sometimes full of the individual’s defiance of their society in the name of righteousness and the protection of the innocent.  To Blackfeet we're talking Napi and Scarface here.  Not humans.

The creation of narrative and poetry has been a mixed experience for Native Americans.  On the one hand it often takes up their issues and experience, but on the other hand it seems always to be from a white point of view.  Even if the writing is written by Indians, it won’t be praised unless it fits white assumptions.  Anyway some of the meaning will always elude readers who have never experienced a sweat, a midnight pow-wow drum, hot frybread with Karo syrup on a cold morning.  But there’s a great “romantic” need to know on the part of many whites (and blacks even more so) that makes it intoxicating.  Toxic just enough to make them yearn and crave something they think they can find there.  They’ll fight over the “truth” of it, but without ever looking at the truth of the reality of rez life, which is not what it used to be no matter how romantic buffalo hunting might be.  This blunts the moral demand to support today’s people, who then lash out politically.

Galen Upham once wrote a story about a man who wanted to be a chief and believed that the way to get there was to capture an English teacher and keep her in a cave until she had taught him to read.  Galen has been gone a long time now and I stopped telling people about the story because it’s both romantic and scary -- the Indian captures what the white man has, reversing the pattern.  But it wouldn’t have worked in reality, because it’s no use knowing “how” to read if you don’t read all the time.  It’s a skill (like running), not a body of knowledge.  There would have had to be a library in that cave.  The problem with reading Blackfeet is that there are so few books written in Blackfeet.  It’s STILL an oral language.  But writing can be an mp3.  It doesn’t have to be on paper.  You can listen on your iPod while you run.

DARRICK BAXTER, OJIBWAY

KIKA, KIKA!! WAIT NOW!!

Yoda says,  "Interested I am."

As a former English teacher, I assure you that we teach grammar all wrong.  We think of it as a rote memorization problem so my high school classes would parrot that a noun “is a person-place-or-thing.”  It certainly is not.  A noun is a WORD that is a name.  Grammar is the name of the pattern structure of any language.  Every language has a pattern structure, which is a thinking and analysis skill that people learn about the time they learn to walk.  How hard can it be if a toddler can learn it?  The only thing hard about it is that it’s unconscious so one literally doesn’t know what one is doing.

Getting things that are unconscious up to where they can be thought about is one of life’s valuable skills, esp. in a situation where one is in a culture that’s changing.  Because the changing is often a mess and confusing.  One major change right now is going from conventional print to texting and images.  A lot of what adults learned in school -- under pressure -- is now being replaced and they are offended, at least partly because it’s hard to understand that after all that work, there’s nothing to do with it except patronize other people.  

Anyway, communication has become political, dividing traditionalists and polylingual people, old generations and new generations, people who use jargon like computer terminology, people who are literal (a thing is a thing) and people who love metaphors.  When I watch English movies that are not the “Great Classics,” I have to work to catch their slang, sometimes part-for-the-whole and sometimes rhyme.  It’s great fun if you can keep up, but sometimes I surrender.

Diagramming sentences is not like doing crossword puzzles.  It is more like taking a machine apart to see how it works.  Unless the diagram shows you how the sentence could be made clearer, it’s useless.  Not that it isn’t helpful to do a little bit of memorizing: my students (as I did long ago) memorized the helping verbs and the prepositions, two excellent clues to how the sentence engine operates.

At the recent workshop on Issksiniip some attention was paid to the importance of learning to speak Blackfeet.  One of the problems is that it’s not a written language -- Hebrew was revived from being entirely dead because it was written.  Not only that, it was a religious language, so preserved with respect.  Learning a spoken language means that you have to speak it, which means that it is the task of a community that speaks together.  One of the ways Blackfeet is preserved is as prayer spoken at community events, so even in Western movies (which often has the Indians speaking Blackfeet because they learn it on the set from the stunt riders who are Blackfeet) there is religious language.  The books about Code Talkers fascinates us all, but we forget that they had to speak metaphorically, since there is no Navajo word for sharks and so on.

When I came to Browning in the Sixties, Peter Red Horn and his mom would interface with white people by producing little vocabulary lists and also by praying for occasions.  It was brave of them, because the missionary and government practice of suppressing the culture by suppressing the language (which they had used earlier on immigrants who didn’t speak English) had been so harsh that most the of the People felt it was just too dangerous.  It was considered backwards, hopeless, and hiding in the past.  But then it began to turn around, partly because of G.R. McLaughlin and Terry Sherburne presenting it alongside French classes in the high school with the help of Marvin Weatherwax’s mother.  Partly because of the Blackfeet Free School and Sandwich Shop, not because they taught the language, but because they valued freedom and culture of every kind.  But most of all it was the Piegan Institute and the organizing of Cuts Wood Immersion School that turned everything around.  Now many people know Blackfeet words at least.  Students, especially the youngest, have become fluent speakers again.

Few know the people who first converted oral language into written words and then analyzed them to figure out the grammar.  “Montana, 1911: a Professor and his Wife Among the Blackfeet” is the journal of a summer written by Wilhelmina Maria Uhlenbeck-Melchior.  Her husband, C. C. Uhlenbeck, would get the old-timers to tell him stories in Blackfeet that he struggled to understand and write down.  Then that evening, in the tent where they lived, he would try to recite them back in Blackfeet to whomever was interested.  It was a difficult life, recorded in a Dutch journal so not available to most Americans until Mary Eggermont-Molenar translated it.  She would not have known about it except for conversation about the Plains Indian Cultural Survival School in Calgary with Charles Fidler, a descendant of Peter Fidler, the first white man known to have seen Chief Mountain.  This book is an excellent introduction to the whole concept of anthropological study of language, which at that time was a salvage operation.

Donald Frantz (http://people.uleth.ca/~frantz/) is on the faculty at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta.  His two books, “Blackfoot Dictionary” and “Blackfoot Grammar” show up in many used book sources, because people set out to learn the language, thinking it will be similar enough to English to just concentrate on the names of things, but then it turns out this isn’t true.  As Frantz himself says. “Grammar analysis concentrated on describing word formation, which is much more complicated than that of most languages. Most significant here is the fact that verbs are made up of parts that carry meanings usually carried by separate words in English. For example, "I will not be able to try to go to find you" would be expressed by one word in Blackfoot (kimátaakohkottsssáakotoohkoonoohpa). And of course the inflectional system of verbs and nouns required extensive periods of analysis.”  That means little bits were added to the main “stem words” to modify their meaning.

Frantz is not so well-known in the States, though I myself use his dictionaries all the time.  In part he scares secular people off because he learned the language in order to translate the Bible.  They are afraid of proselytizing even in a different language.  I would love to have a conversation with him about how he translated the spiritual concepts of the Blackfeet into the Euro-Xian concepts.  Of course, the indigenous People of the Blackfoot Nation in Canada have been a precious reservoir of ceremony and language.

Iksista’pssi, according to Frantz, means “a spirit that wanders”; Iksiiyisi means “contact with the earth while moving in a parabolic path”, maybe swinging down like a hawk to catch a ground squirrel.  Iksaii’taki means to be challenged by a task that must be finished.  Issk can mean “a pail” or it can mean “long ago.”  What I love about languages is that they are so suggestive, a poetry, a system of images.  I love it when they are fluid, moving as though they were traveling across a landscape -- which, of course, they are.  

I don’t care about correctness.  I do care about clarity, which is the real purpose of grammar, and about saying things well, with style, but that doesn’t mean being stuffy.  It just means being thoughtful about what’s really being said.  Iksaii’taki.