In Her Own Tongue

In Her Own Tongue

The dream started more than a decade ago. Cape Cod, Mass., resident Jessie Little Doe Fermino saw faces that seemed familiar, faces that looked like they belonged to her own tribe, the Mashpee Indians. But the words they spoke had no meaning for the then-37-year-old social worker. When the dream returned again and again, she began to suspect it was a vision and that something was being asked of her.

“One day as I was driving to Woods Hole, I saw a sign for Sippewisset,” she recalls. “That’s when I realized the words I was hearing had to be Wampanoag.”

Her vision began to take the form of a question: Would today’s tribal members welcome back their native language, a tongue that had languished for more than 150 years? She posed the question to the two area Wampanoag tribes, the Mashpee of Cape Cod and the Aquinnah of Martha’s Vineyard, not convinced that she would get the unanimous support she was seeking.

Amazingly, not a single tribe member was opposed. Some felt the vision hinted of an ancient prophecy that predicted the tribes would abandon their language but it would later return to them.

As she began research, Fermino discovered that Wampanoag was one of 33 Algonquian languages, and it had two distinct dialects—island and mainland. Fortunately, much of the Algonquian language had been preserved in Colonial documents. “We were the first North American nation to have an alphabetic writing system,” Fermino says.

Then, in another stroke of luck, she was able to find in Boston one of the 12 remaining King James bibles translated into Wampanoag in 1655 by missionary John Elliott.

But soon things began to get more complicated, starting with spelling. “People spelled words however they felt like spelling and so the Wampanoags did the same thing when they started writing,” Fermino says. And when Fermino began looking at linguistic analyses of her ancestral tongue, she realized she was in over her head. “I had no background in linguistics, so I couldn’t understand it,” she says.

Undeterred, she applied for a one-year fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to study with world-renowned linguist, the late Kenneth Hale. It was a productive partnership that would blossom into friendship. “He was my professor, my mentor, and my best friend,” she says.

But by year’s end, Fermino had only begun to grasp the Algonquian language. Her goal of compiling a dictionary, she realized, would require graduate studies. So for another three years she juggled family, work, and studies, while also beginning to teach what she knew to tribal members.

Today, Fermino has developed a language curriculum for her students, who range in age from 12 to 78. Some even come to class with infants in tow. Her dictionary-in-progress has grown to 6,800 words. Two of her advanced students have begun teaching, freeing her up for research. And on a personal level, Fermino converses with her children in Wampanoag, although, she quips, “they keep asking how to tell me to shut up.”

Fermino’s quest is hardly unique. Similar efforts to revive indigenous languages have blossomed across the country in the last few decades. In 1978, the American Indian Language Development Institute was launched in San Diego with the goal of training potential teachers for the Yuman language group, which includes the southwestern Hualapai, Havasupai, and Mohave tongues. Today, more than 20 language groups are represented, says Professor Akira Yamamoto of the University of Kansas, one of the institute’s founders.

At the time of European contact, some 600 native languages were spoken across North America, Yamamoto says. Today, only about 210 survive.

For Fermino, bringing the Wampanoag language back to her tribe has solidified her own sense of what it is to be an American Indian. “It feels like I’m living my life in a good Indian way,” she says.

Gayle Goddard-Taylor is a frequent contributor to American Profile.

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