Tribe’s matriarch speaks to Oneida nation’s past

Many of the 15,000
members are unable to speak in full sentences.

CHICAGO TRIBUNE

ONEIDA, Wis. — She remembers speaking Oneida as a child, in the days when she could still use it to converse in living rooms and corner stores across the reservation. Almost a century later, Maria Hinton is running out of people to talk to.

“There is nobody to speak with,” the 97-year-old great-grandmother says in exasperation. “I’m just walking around my house speaking to myself.”

Unique for its whispered syllables, Oneida uses only 15 letters and three symbols to convey a daily life deeply rooted in nature. The words often evoke a moving image, relying on the senses to illustrate a moment. The word for bear clan, “oskle7wake,” describes the glistening powder color of the animal’s face.

Hinton is one of three elders left who speak this vivid tongue, surviving matriarchs from the last generation to communicate in Oneida. Most members of the Wisconsin tribe today know basic vocabulary but can’t use it in conversations.

“There is still an ember left that’s burning,” said Leander Danforth, the only fluent speaker under the age of 85. “We can get that ember burning and get a fire started, or that ember could go out.” In a final push to revive their language, the Oneida people are using a federal grant to put digital recordings of the elders online and giving eight people the full-time job of learning to speak the language.

The crisis for the Oneida, whose reservation is a few miles west of Green Bay, is a Midwestern example of a global struggle. Experts estimate one language dies every two weeks. At that rate, nearly half the world’s 7,000 languages would disappear in the next century as local dialects are replaced by the dominant languages of globalization. Along with the language, linguists fear losing each culture’s history and traditions.

The Oneida, farmers who were driven in the 1820s from sophisticated villages in upstate New York, have long relied on the complex language to convey the tribe’s tumultuous history.

At first blush, the spoken language has a coarse sound as its long word chains unfold. Then the choppy rhythm becomes soothing under the heavy weight of each word, which stores a chapter in the great oral tradition of the Oneida.

Each word tells a story. Even nouns act as verbs to evoke a living, breathing image, said Randy Cornelius, the man responsible for putting the recordings of the elders online. Take the word “lotikwaho” for the wolf clan, one of three Oneida family lines.

“The language is descriptive,” he said. “It’s like a motion picture going on. You see the wolf baying at the moon. What a speaker sees is the silhouette of a wolf.”

But during the first half of the 20th century, parents began to prevent their children from learning the language because it was seen as an obstacle to success. Many students attended faraway boarding schools that banned indigenous speech.

These days, many of the 15,000 members of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin — about a third of whom live on the reservation — can say greetings and simple words for foods and animals, but few can speak in sentences.

The language also is used by Oneida tribes in New York and Ontario, Canada, but each dialect is subtly different.

At the end of last year, the Wisconsin tribe’s language staff received a coveted $100,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Science Foundation, which have taken up the cause of documenting endangered languages. The agencies have disbursed more than $10 million in the last three years for dozens of projects from Montana and Louisiana to Africa and Central America.