Native Son Helps Tribe Regain Its Voice Coeur D’Alene Elder Helps Teach Difficult Language

Lawrence Nicodemus smiles as the students cringe, forcing out the difficult consonants.

They’re guttural. Formed in the back of the throat. Sounds that don’t exist in English.

Emulating Nicodemus’ “pharyngeals” is just one challenge of the Coeur d’Alene tribal language.

Even with new dentures that don’t quite fit, 88-year-old Nicodemus’ Coeur d’Alene phrases sound fluid and easy. One of a handful of native Coeur d’Alene speakers left, Nicodemus is helping teach high school classes daily and college courses twice weekly.

The students - teenagers, tribal members, school teachers, college students - carry the burden of fulfilling Nicodemus’ greatest wish: “to hear them talking.”

The Coeur d’Alene language is among scores at risk of disappearing.

In early history, humans may have spoken between 10,000 and 15,000 languages. Now it’s down to 6,000 and dropping fast, according to the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

A series of computer programmers, anthropologists, graduate students and linguists have tried to document the Coeur d’Alene language over the years.

But the tribe finally has the most important element needed for its language to survive - interest.

“They’re having a hard time, but they’re sure trying,” Nicodemus said of the nearly two dozen students taking the Lewis-Clark State College course. “I am hopeful, especially because the youngsters are interested and we have teachers taking the course.”

He proudly tells how 17-year-old Plummer High School student Sara Carillo greeted him recently with a humorous quip in his native tongue.

She walked into the class and said to him in Coeur d’Alene, “Ahh, hello, are you still alive?”

Lifetime of work

Nicodemus has spent a lifetime working to save the language.

In the summer of 1927, Gladys Reichard, a young anthropology professor from New York City’s Columbia University, took a special assignment from her professor, renowned anthropologist Franz Boas. She was to spend a summer on the Coeur d’Alene Indian reservation to document one of 23 Salish languages.

The first summer she stayed with the sisters at the Catholic mission. But many of the tribal members had buried their native language after the federal government mandated English in the mission schools and shamed native speech in the classroom. That first summer, Reichard found no one to speak with.

So in the summer of 1928, she again took a train across the country to Spokane, where she bought a car. She drove to the reservation and rented a room at the Hotel Tekoa. She then met Nicodemus’ grandmother, Dorothy.

That summer, for six hours a day, Dorothy told Reichard stories while 17-year-old Nicodemus and his mother, Julia, translated. Nicodemus had a particular knack for language analysis because of his Greek and Latin training at the mission school.

Reichard also knew Greek and Latin. She gathered traditional stories, written texts, letters from Jesuits - anything she could - to augment her knowledge of the language.

Together, using the classics as their academic model, the young Indian man and determined anthropologist began breaking down the Coeur d’Alene language.

Impressed with Nicodemus’ language skills, Reichard brought him to New York in 1935, where the two labored for a year on the three elements Boas claimed were necessary for preserving language - a grammar, a dictionary and texts.

Grammar guide published

In 1938, Reichard published a grammar guide, and the following year, a limited dictionary. The two books have been the basis of every study of the Coeur d’Alene language since. But Reichard died in the mid ‘50s before any of the texts she collected could be published. This year, those texts are being used in class for the first time. Under Nicodemus’ watch, University of Chicago doctoral student Raymond Brinkman is using them as the basis for second-year advanced Coeur d’Alene.

Brinkman admits he’s a “short-timer” trying to put information into the hands of those who will stay on the reservation. He has tribal support.

“Even the people who wish it was being done a different way, with a council of elders or tribal leaders at the head of the classroom, they still support it,” Brinkman says.

With the help of money made from tribal gambling operations and a federal grant, the Coeur d’Alenes have set up a language center in Plummer where families can check out native instructional materials, or come for tutoring.

But the truly dedicated are taking the difficult twice-weekly college course.

Crackdown on the language

For inspiration, Brinkman reminds students how different their circumstances are from elderly tribal members. Marceline Seltice, granddaughter of the Coeur d’Alene chief, remembers being locked in the closet for speaking Coeur d’Alene.

“Do it for Marceline,” he urges. “Because to really sound like we are speaking the language, we really want to make the effort.”

Fewer male elders recall being punished for speaking Coeur d’Alene, Brinkman said. In fact, Nicodemus, a devout Catholic, recites the Lord’s Prayer in Coeur d’Alene at the end of every college class for students to repeat.

Many of the students hold prominent posts within the tribe. Tribal school teachers, Plummer High School’s language teacher and the chairwoman of North Idaho College’s board of trustees are also taking the course. And there are young faces, like Kim and Cajetan Matheson, who are expecting a baby any day.

“We adapted well into the new ways and now our language and culture is becoming extinct,” Matheson says. “Our children need to be able to know, rather than miss out on it and read about us in books.”

Of the U.S.’s 200-250 native languages, there are 56 in the Pacific Northwest reaching north to Alaska.

Tribal leaders don’t want to see Idaho go the way of California, where more than 20 native languages died this century.

The latest was in 1995 with the death of the lone speaker of Northern Pomo, a woman in her 80s.

When language is lost, so is culture, Brinkman explained.

More than a set of labels for things we see, language structures how we see things.

“For every language that is lost, we lose something about how we live on the planet, which we could never re-create.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 2 Photos (1 Color)

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: About the language Coeur d’Alene and Spokane are distinct Salish languages, not dialects of the same language. The Coeur d’Alene language uses 42 consonants and five vowels, as well as sounds called pharyngeals, which originate far in the back of the throat. Only a handful of languages in the world use pharyngeals, including Colville, Spokane, Nootka and Arabic. The Coeur d’Alene language frequently features words with several consonants in a row, such as “snqwqw’lups,” which means “blue jeans.” Only about five native speakers of Coeur d’Alene are living, compared with 50 native Spokane speakers, and 200 native Colville speakers.