Thread by @robmaxim

On the 400th anniversary of what is called the ‘First Thanksgiving,’ I want to highlight a project that has changed my and many other Wampanoag people’s lives

Here’s a 🧵 on how a Wampanoag woman, jessie little doe baird, brought our language back from near extinction (1/25):

First, some context. Wôpanâôt8âôk, the Wampanoag language, is an Algonquian language. Algonquian languages are indigenous to a broad swath of what is today called North America.

While this map isn’t perfect, it provides a rough idea of their distribution (2/25):

Some 500 years ago, before the arrival of European colonists, the Wampanoag people received a prophecy. It said that they would not be able to keep their language, but that the language’s spirit would not die, and one day a woman in the east would welcome the language home (3/25)

Wôpanâôt8âôk is also known as Wôpanâak, Massachusett, Massachusee, and Natick. When the Mayflower arrived, it was spoken from what is today Providence, RI to Cape Cod, and from Nantucket in the south to what is now the Massachusetts-New Hampshire border in the north (4/25):

Upon their arrival, English colonizers set out to convert the Wampanoag to Christianity. A Puritan missionary named John Eliot decided that the best way to do so would be to translate the Bible into Wôpanâôt8âôk. (5/25)

In 1663, Mamusse Wunneetupanatamwe Up-Biblum God, known as the Eliot Bible, was printed in Wôpanâôt8âôk and became the first Bible printed in North America.

It predated the first full English-language Bible printed in what is today the United States by nearly 120 years. (6/25)

At the time of the Bible’s printing, tensions were growing between the Wampanoag and the English colonizers. 8sameeqan, the Wampanoag paramount sachem, had died in 1661, and his son and successor Wamsutta died in 1662 (some suspect he was poisoned by the English). (7/25)

12 years later, war broke out between the Wampanoag, whose paramount sachem was by then 8sameequan’s younger son Metacom, and the English. King Phillip’s War, as it’s known today, was the first large-scale war between Native Americans and the English in North America. (8/25)

King Phillip’s War is still the bloodiest war, per capita, on the continent. In its wake, the English led a campaign of violence, land theft, and cultural genocide against the Wampanoag. Christian Wampanoag were confined to ‘praying towns’, a forerunner of reservations. (9/25)

Our language, however, was one of the most resilient parts of our culture. Even among relentless English and American efforts to force us to assimilate, often under threat of death, many Wampanoag people continued using Wôpanâôt8âôk as their primary means of communication (10/25)

In the early 1800s however, that began to change as a complex mix of factors took hold. One was that many Wampanoag children were forced into indentured servitude as “payment” for debts levied on their parents, where they were banned from speaking Wôpanâôt8âôk. (11/25)

Many teenage and adult male Wampanoag joined either whaling boats or the U.S. military as their only viable economic options. In both, they would have spoken primarily English, weakening their day-to-day command of Wôpanâôt8âôk. (12/25)

And, over the course of several hundred years, many Wampanoag people married non-Wampanoag people—often Black residents who faced similar discrimination and second-class status in U.S. society. In many of those families, English became the primary language spoken. (13/25)

The result was that by the turn of the 20th century, there were relatively few fluent Wôpanâôt8âôk speakers. Many maintained a knowledge of Wampanoag words, even if they primarily spoke English. Still, Wôpanâôt8âôk had ceased to be a day-to-day means of communication. (14/25)

That status quo remained until jessie little doe baird, a Mashpee Wampanoag woman, started having visions; a total of three in the early 1990s. In them, she saw familiar-looking people speaking a language she could not understand. (15/25)

One day, upon passing a street sign that was an anglicized version of a Wampanoag word, she realized the people in her visions were ancestors speaking the Wampanoag language, imploring her to welcome the language home. (16/25)

jessie gauged interest in language revival among Wampanoag communities in Mashpee on Cape Cod and Aquinnah on Martha’s Vineyard, and found significant support. She got a research fellowship at MIT and later worked with Algonquian language scholars as a graduate student. (17/25)

While raising four children, jessie completed a master’s in linguistics from MIT, while working and collaborating with MIT linguist Kenneth Hale, a direct descendent of one of the earliest missionaries, Roger Williams, on reclaiming Wôpanâôt8âôk. (18/25)

How did she do it? Well, one of her key sources was Mamusse Wunneetupanatamwe Up-Biblum God, the Eliot Bible. She was able to reconstruct the language using the Bible and other contemporary documents as a sort of Rosetta Stone. (19/25)

In 1993, jessie founded the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project (WLRP), and began offering Wôpanâôt8âôk classes to citizens of the Wampanoag Nation. WLRP also opened Weetumuw Katnuhtôhtâkamuq, The Weetumuw School, a school for Wampanoag children in pre-K to 4th grade. (20/25)

Today, the Wampanoag Nation has its first native-born Wôpanâôt8âôk speakers in over a century. A woman from the east has welcomed the language home: usatoday.com/in-depth/life/…. (21/25)

As both a Wampanoag language student and WLRP board member, I have had the opportunity to see the incredible work that WLRP’s teachers put in day-in and day-out. They are more than teachers—they are culture bearers for our Nation. (22/25)

During COVID, language has been a lifeline for staying connected when we couldn’t travel and gather. I encourage you to read this tremendous @NPRWeekend piece by @savannah_maher talking about her experience taking Wôpanâôt8âôk classes during COVID (23/25): npr.org/2021/02/13/967…

Today, @WLRPorg continues to do amazing work. If you want to support Indigenous Peoples, one way to do so is to support language revitalization projects like WLRP: wlrp.org (24/25)

Finally, today and every day, make sure to follow Wampanoag voices on here! Here are a few (and there are many others out there) (25/25):

@Kisha890
@sdmalt96
@savannah_maher
@BrettOOtis
@1durwood
@lavie_encode
@_hamlee
@josephvlee