Hearing the Unheard III: A Conversation with the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project

Wampanoag mishoon (dug-out canoe) making at Plimoth Patuxet (Photo: EgorovaSvetlana, CC BY-SA 4.0 DEED, via Wikimedia Commons)

The Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project (WLRP) aims to return language fluency to the Wampanoag Nation after a long period of no native speakers. Wôpanâak, or Wampanoag, is an Algonquian language belonging to indigenous people in eastern coastal and southeastern Massachusetts. It became extinct in the 19th century; however, it is experiencing a revival thanks to the WLRP, which offers teaching to native Wampanoag people. I had the opportunity to speak with its founder, Jessie Little Doe Baird, and interim director, Tobias Vanderhoop, who gave me more insight into the founding and impact of the project.

How did the project begin? What inspired its foundation?

Jessie: “I had a series of visions over three nights, and I was asked to reach out [to other Wampanoag people] and see if people were interested in welcoming language home. I didn’t know anything about the language at all, but I was drawn to what I had seen. And so, I reached out to our sister tribe – I’m Mashpee Wampanoag, I reached out to Aquinnah Wampanoag – and spoke to a woman named Helen Manning, who was an elder there and long-time educator … I told her about my vision, and she said, well, why don’t we try to call a meeting together of everybody and see what they think? And so that’s what we did.”

Tobias: “I was there at the time when she’s describing. I was newly back in my home village, and Helen Manning – she is a blood relative to me – reached out to me, and I was able to get in on the ground level discussion in our community and with our sister tribe Mashpee, about whether we wanted to try to undertake this hard work of bringing our language back to spoken form. And I’m very blessed to be able to say that I was there then and that it took off.”

Were there any initial challenges during the formation of the group?

Jessie: “[At the start] we were all completely ignorant. None of us knew anything about Algonquian languages. But we soon learned that there were lots of resources … this huge collection of documents written in Wampanoag from the 1600s, in the 1700s and early 1800s … but the research was really difficult because, number one, we didn’t have the training, and, number two, there was no standardised orthographic system at all.”

Tobias: “We had a linguist come in, with all good intentions, and he started telling us how wrong we were, including up to how each of us set out the name of our tribe. And it upsets a lot of people when you tell them who they are and what they are is wrong.”

Why did the Wampanoag language become extinct?

Jessie: “I think for multiple reasons. There were local ministers saying we don’t think it’s good to be Indian, you have to look different, you have to dress different, you have to follow these rules etcetera … The ministers would say, if an Indian is not a Christian, the Indian is an anti-Christian. And if they are an anti-Christian, they are demons. And if they are demons, they do not have souls. And if you are a Christian, it is your duty to cleanse the world of anti-Christians who do not have souls, so you must kill them. It’s better to kill the gnats before they become fleas … and then they [settlers] told indigenous people, if you want to keep working for me, you have to use English. You can’t use your language. You can’t act like an Indian or I can’t hire you and you won’t have a job, or I won’t buy your products, or I won’t trade with you … economics played a huge role, and they had to speak English to survive.”

Tobias: “For the English society to prosper in our land they needed to divest us of our culture and of our language … except when it was convenient for them, such as the use of our whaling practices in order to make money, or the use of our culture in order to make business transactions, to obtain land.”

What is the extent of discrimination you face now as native people?

Tobias: “[Once] I was dressed in my regalia and I walked into a local general store, and there were people on the porch and they sneered at me … the discrimination extends from something as small as that to preventing my tribal community from being able to establish economic development like a store that would support our community, simply for the fact that they just don’t want us to do it, because they think we as native people get enough.”

Jessie: “Discrimination extends to not having enough resources for policing and for social programs and for education … I can think of several women in my community that have died by domestic violence and drug addiction [which] is rampant in our communities too … in Barnstaple County where I live, you are 400 times more likely to die of an opioid overdose if you’re native than if you’re non-native.”

What impact has the project had in your community, and how does this make you feel?

Tobias: “I prayed about [having our language] when I was a young man … now I can pray and sing … I can call out to my ancestors and even though my understanding might be, in their ears, baby talk, they still can hear me. I can sing songs, we can hold ceremonies, we can have joy … we’re able to do all of these things that for a very long time we were not able to do in our language. We have babies that are born today and the first things that they hear on this earth is our language, their language, and I hear babies babbling in Wôpanâak. If you want to talk about sheer joy, I’ve just described it to you.”

Jessie: “Once I had made the connection that that was my language I was hearing, something in my spirit changed and I could think about nothing else … we’re able to make workbooks, have immersion classes, and people can learn about how the world works from a Wampanoag view. So, there’s traditional knowledge and language that gives people hope and a different way to look at the world and their place in it.”

The WLRP is an exemplar of a community overcoming challenges to protect their culture. I could not include everything Jessie, Tobias and I spoke about, but they were inspiring to listen to. Jessie is so gracious in her position and told me her primary goal is to bring language home to as many people as she can. Few would have the initiative to achieve such a goal, but Tobias sums up her resolve better than I can: “The amount of work that has happened since that time to now, I couldn’t have dreamed of it. But she did.”

The website for the WLRP can be found here, which includes information about its programs and ways to help fund their cause