The Arrow Was Shot

Crossposted from moheganlanguage.net then tweaked for this page

It’s taken quite a many conversations with people who know way more than I do, a lot of soul searching, and overall a lot of reading but my new direction is mostly set. I’m taking the most positive direction I can. This post will explain the focus of this blog and why it is as it is… a little.

During my time with my Mohegan Language Project1, I often would scour for new words to add to my very tiny dictionary. My focus were what the lexicons called “Brotherton” words. They definitely weren’t Mohegan. They weren’t anything I recognized. One day I accidentally figured it out. The Brotherton words are Stockbridge-Munsee words.

This makes a heckuva lot of sense. The Brotherton Indian Nation and the Stockbridge-Munsee Nation shared geographic space for a long period of time to the point that many families intertwined. You have people with more Brotherton family background than Munsee with Munsee tribal membership and vice versa today, as a matter of fact. The Brotherton, being comprised of multiple tribes, arrived speaking mostly English more than the other tongues. Pepper in a little (or a lot) of cultural exchange, and you get a people that had learned to speak with their neighbors. Which resulted in children who naturally spoke the language.

I’d been suspecting it. Tonight while looking at the Lenape languages with Munsee in particular, I came across the MEW website2: Multilingualism and Education in Wisconsin. There, in large letters, the Lenape language page reads:

These languages fall under the Algonquian family, and are/were spoken by the Stockbridge-Munsee as well as the Brothertown Indians (a non-officially-recognized tribe).

Is this true? I believe it is so. I know that this webpage is hardly an authority on the matter, but I’ve had my feelings semi-confirmed more than once through conversations with knowledgeable people. I guess I’ll take that as a sign.

Because of this I believe that my people’s native language wasn’t Mohegan in the end, at a time when the tribe was finally coalesced after three or so generations in Wisconsin. It was Munsee. Our language had become Munsee in the natural order of things. The Brotherton and the Mohegan Nations are working together to bring Mohegan to both tribes (as best of my knowledge), but Mohegan and the associated Southern New England tribal languages are probably barking up the wrong tree.

I have already decided with the advice of some of the old guard in linguistics that I should learn Munsee. That’s why I was looking at it. I will give my reasons under the firm understanding that these are my opinion. What you choose to do with your language studies should have nothing to do with them.

  1. Munsee is the language my people were already speaking naturally to the point that in Frank Speck’s research, he noted that at least one of the Mohegans he met made a firm distinction between their words and the “Brotherton words” they knew. Munsee *is* my people’s language as far as I’m concerned.
  2. I have a very large number of Stockbridge-Munsee ancestors, so learning it would be a drama-free way to learn to speak my rightful language. Double-whammy.
  3. Modern Mohegan is a language that had “weakened”, to put it in the official vernacular. My way of saying it would be that it was very Anglicized — colonized if you must — which was fine when I was only concentrating on Mohegan. However, I have been encouraged to start pouring some of my efforts into the Old Pequot language, which is the language my ancestor Uncas would have spoken. Modern Mohegan’s grammatical rules lack compared to Old Pequot and the other languages; it had changed that much. Learning Munsee will give me a good grasp of Alqonquin grammar, thus making my studies a helluva a lot easier in the end.
  4. Modern Mohegan is being revived, but the language was not completely recorded. Gaps have to be filled in using linguistic techniques. It’s not true Mohegan in the strict sense of the words. Munsee, on the other hand, is well documented and listed as “critically endangered” as opposed to “dead (or sleeping)”. I have a better chance at becoming fluent enough to pass it to the younger generation, which is part of the point.

For those of you who have no idea who I have been over the years, I’ll go ahead and tell you. I’m an university graduate with a BA in anthropology and a history minor. I was a field archaeologist briefly. I’ve also self published a book or two. Put out an album. Acted in a couple of films. I publish a comic book sporadically; even have some fans. Have been someone who has bent a lot of knowledgeable ears with my ideas on how to encourage people to not just practice the words but to actually use them without thinking. I can’t remember what else I’ve done without a lot of hard thinking.3 I inherited this sense of no time from my father, and it gets in the way.

That being said, with the Mohegan project I was only using 1/3 or so of my potential. Far less than. Life wouldn’t let me do more. With this new path, I have to ramp it up. It’s do or die now. I had always hoped for the right people to work with, but I’m not going to hope for that anymore. It’s not going to happen.

I’ve already got a mountain high collection of books to read, things to write about, and a hard-won education to dust the years off of.

Making content? A fan of mine just paid for a new computer that will let me do it so long as it lasts. (I wear them out.)

I can no longer mince words on sensitive subjects like pretendians and malicious treatment of fellow tribal members if I see the true need to speak up. My new focus regarding this important aspect of my life is primarily directed towards saving the legacy my father left behind as the last one who practices it4. If I get lucky and someone leaves a baby on my doorstep, so help me that child will speak our language.

I wish all of you success.

I dearly hope should we finally meet I can speak to you in our grandfather’s proper tongue, and that I can do it without mangling the meaning too much.

Spears don’t roar. But they do shake pretty well. Listen. My spear has rattles on it, like a Medicine spear. I am the Spearcarrier. Listen at me rattle.5

  1. Not to be confused with the one lead by the Mohegan Nation ↩︎
  2. https://www.teachlangwisconsin.com/mohegan/munsee/lenape ↩︎
  3. This means, by the way, that each time someone wanted to discourage me by suggesting I didn’t know what I was doing, I probably did. I’m not as experienced as some, but that doesn’t matter with what I was doing. Aside from linguistics, just about everything I’ve set out to do over the years were things I knew how to do. Linguistics is just another set of skills I need to work on. ↩︎
  4. My older brother became a full-fledged member of the Cherokee of Georgia and told me he doesn’t remember dick. My little brother, sadly, never learned much. It’s just me and my best friend who has been dragged along for the ride by error of standing too closely. ↩︎
  5. And cough. And wheeze. ↩︎

Leave a Reply