Thinking in Subversion

Sometime in 2001 I received an invitation to participate in a group poetry reading and panel on multilingual poets at a regional Modern Language Association conference. Being a member of the Onondaga Nation, raised on the Tuscarora Reservation, I am sure I looked attractive to the selection committee, but I immediately replied that I had no poems in either Onondaga or Tuscarora, beyond occasional words or phrases in the middle of poems composed otherwise entirely in English. I did, however, offer that it sounded like an interesting possibility and that I was willing to give it a try.

Beginning to work on the piece, I realized that a poem composed primarily within a lexicon of animal and plant names, numbers, vulgarity, and meteorological conditions was not likely to be very interesting, but that was what I had at my disposal. It was a frustrating realization, remembering that at one point in my earlier life, I had been relatively fluent in the Tuscarora language; but as with so many elements of our lives for which we have no common application, like the complicated rules of long-dormant childhood games, the ability to use Tuscarora had fallen into some sort of appendix in my brain, atrophied to the point of sound memory. I had lost the ability to think in the language, beyond the occasional useful idiom.

Currently, on the reservation, there are five people who can be readily identified as having the ability to speak the language fluently. That had of course not always been true, but as is often the case, I had not taken full advantage of the opportunities offered by those who could have kept this pattern of thought alive and active, flying through my synapses as easily as any other piece of information I had gathered in my time on this earth. Now, those opportunities slip by me in nearly every passing moment.

A few years before I began kindergarten, a woman from my reservation decided that steps had to be taken to preserve the Tuscarora language. Oddly enough, she was from one of the two Onondaga families living among the Tuscaroras. I am from the other. Mrs. Printup, it is my understanding, did not get a full bachelor's degree, but she did college-level coursework in the pedagogy of language. She spoke Tuscarora fluently, but she needed training in the ways to convey this knowledge to the children who would learn from her. Most of us knew words for basic elements of our everyday worlds, and naturally we also had learned the words for bodily parts and functions we were not supposed to speak of. Our slightly older relatives had taken care of that training. Mrs. Printup needed a way, though, to give us access to the language and a way of committing it to paper, as well. These methods she acquired with the certificate program she completed.

My interest in the classes she taught was sparked at the age of four, a year before I was to start school. My brother Weet, a few years older than me, was in the fourth grade the year Mrs. Printup began the language recovery program at the Tuscarora school. The local television news station covered the story, and Mrs. Printup had chosen Weet as the example student to speak a sentence in the language for all of western New York to hear. It was strange seeing him on our television at home, his hair slicked to the side as it was every morning when we sent him off on the bus, his white shirt buttoned to the collar; for that moment, my brother was a TV star.

I suspect Mrs. Printup chose him not for his facility with language but because he was the oldest Onondaga child attending the school that year. At the age of four I did not know Mrs. Printup was Onondaga, nor did I know that she might have a slightly shadowy agenda. By showcasing Onondagas orchestrating language reconstruction...