‘I Want You To Learn How To Talk,’ Tribal Elder Says Puget Sound Tribes Racing Against Death To Save Ancient Language

Eons ago, in every pocket of the Puget Sound, the ancient language “Lushootseed” echoed in longhouses and mixed with the crackle of camp fires.

Elders used it to teach youngsters about geography, humor and literature through stories of the coyote, the crow and the creator.

Today, fewer than 100 descendants of the Puget Sound’s first peoples speak their native tongue fluently. And each week, death winnows the ranks of those few.

The Puyallup Tribe of Indians has embarked on a project to prevent the words of its ancestors from becoming a relic of times forgotten.

“If we allow our language to be lost completely, then very soon our culture will go with it because our language and our culture are one,” said Vi Hilbert, an Upper Skagit tribal member.

“All the feelings, all the teachings, all the instruction come through our language,” said Hilbert, a retired professor who taught Lushootseed for 15 years at the University of Washington.

Hilbert joined Bruce Miller, a Skokomish whose Indian name is Subiyay, and Puyallup tribal elder Jack Moses for a recent discussion on the language and some songs and stories in the traditional tongue.

“I want to be here and do the right thing for my people,” 77-year-old Moses said to the crowd of about 35 tribal members, students and employees. “I want you to learn how to talk.”

The preservation effort is literally in a race against death. Last year, three Puyallups who fluently spoke “Twelshootseed” - the southern dialect of Lushootseed - died.

Fewer than 10 Puyallups can speak the language, estimated Roberta Basch, a consultant who coordinates the language project.

“We’re under some real time pressure because of the age of the elders,” said Kay Rhoads, president of the tribe’s Medicine Creek Tribal College. The college is organizing the language project, which attempts to preserve and teach Twelshootseed.

Twelshootseed differs slightly in pronunciation from the northern dialect and encompasses a few different words for various flora and fauna, Hilbert said.

The tribal college in October won a oneyear, $50,000 grant from the federal Administration for Native Americans to plan the project, Rhoads said.

The college recently submitted a request for a three-year, $375,000 implementation grant.

The ambitious proposal would enlist a team of specialists, who would translate Hilbert’s dictionary of Lushootseed into the southern Twelshootseed; record elders as they speak; and develop a comprehensive curriculum to teach the language from kindergarten through college.

The tribe-operated Chief Leschi Elementary School offers a limited program of Lushootseed to first- through sixth-graders, Rhoads said.

Under the proposal, lessons and elder interviews would be recorded on videotape as well as audio cassette tape so students could see how elders moved their mouths when speaking.

Interactive CD-ROMs would tell the students whether they are speaking and writing the language correctly.

In some ways, such efforts are an accommodation to the present. Miller, 51, said that when he was a child, he was forbidden from writing or recording his grandfather’s stories because the words were only “a shadow.”

Nowadays, Miller said, elders trying to compete with television and computers must make information accessible.

“Now we have to be flexible like the cedar,” he said.

Hilbert, who speaks throughout the country on language preservation, said Lushootseed seems to move listeners emotionally, even if they cannot understand the words.

“The feelings are all in our language,” Hilbert said. “When people listen to that ancient language the spirituality that is maintained in the sound of that language is what moves them.

“They have come in touch with the spirit of Lushootseed.”