Lamenting Language Loss at the Modern Language Association

I

In 1915, at the Fort Totten, North Dakota, Indian School, my uncles and aunt were prohibited from speaking Dakota by successors to missionaries who had learned the language in order to convert my great-grandparents' generation of Dakota people. My mother never knew Dakota because in 1916, when she was four, she left the reservation with her parents and seven siblings after her older brother was sexually abused by a white teacher in the mission school. I was born and raised a thousand miles from the Spirit Lake Dakota Nation and began learning my tribal language only in 2003, from a frayed Dakota Bible.¹ My first Dakota poem was addressed to the missionaries who in 1834 created a written version of the language in order to le:

Wowapi Wakaŋ Waoŋspeiciciyapi
Caŋ yapasusuze k'a yumdapi owihaŋkewaŋica yakaġe,
qa wíŋahtagye toksupi kiŋ eŋ he yapehaŋ,
qa wowapi wakaŋ ŋitawapi duieskapi qa
iapi caŋ se
caŋicipawega waŋ Wakaŋtaŋka oyakatanpi iyeceŋ.
Iye Marie qa tokaŋ he hduhpapi nunwe.
Iapi de kakiza kiŋ awaŋmdake kte
qa odowaŋ iapi he sdawakiya kta,
uŋmaŋŋa wakaŋ k'ais tehiŋdapi sŋi,
ŋiyawage haŋhiŋ spaya, sŋi,
ŋakuŋ mii wipazaza ahŋa yuzazapi sni.
Wicoie dena woyaco aŋpetu suŋktaŋka,
ma wa nuŋ kta, ake.

Dakota Bible Study
You pulped our timber into an endless page,
rolled it in the carriage of a typewriter,
and translated the Bible
into a Dakota as wooden
as the cross upon which you hammered God.
Let Mary and the others take Him down.
I will take down this tortured language
and anoint it poetry,
neither sacred nor taboo,
my breath not yet wet with it,
but neither has my mouth been washed out with soap.
These words, horses of the apocalypse,
I will steal them back.

In addition to the Bible, missionaries translated the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, Catholic Catechism, and John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (after the Bible, the book most frequently translated into American Indian languages and into many other non-Western languages that nineteenth-century missionaries learned in order to convert people around the world). I bought the missionaries' still standard Dakota-English and English-Dakota dictionaries and the still-in-print Dakota Episcopal Book of Common Prayer.² I examined and xeroxed portions from the Dakota Bible in the reading room of the Library of Congress, and in the rare book room did the same with a Dakota translation of Pilgrim's Progress that had a penciled note on the title page saying that this particular copy had been recovered from the flames of the 1862 Dakota War by a white soldier. All these became my Dakota textbooks. Studying them everyday led me to the title of my second Dakota poem:

Toked Christ Tawokeye Hemaca O'wakihe hwo?
Miye, ca wowiŋape uŋ wati, wowapi ska akaŋ,
Iyuyeskapi topa dena—
Wowapi Wakaŋ kiŋ,
Wocekiye Ikceka Wowapi kiŋ,
Maġhpiya oicimaŋi yapi kiŋ,
Siŋa Sapa wowiŋwaŋge—
icipahyapi okataŋpi waŋ wicohaŋ yapi,
iapi kiŋ ŋipi, wotaŋiŋ waste deŋa kapi.
Wowapi woyakapi, toked wakiye sni,
k.ais, wa wi haŋgyapi sica , caġze uŋ ecoŋ pi,
Miye ca, wicoie ed otokahe ekta wicoie heca,
Waŋ iye qa iyohi wicoie waste.

How Could I Be Christian?
To me, living in exile on this white page,
these four translations—
the Dakota Bible,
Book of Common Prayer,
Pilgrim's Progress,
and Catholic catechism—
once the cross of Dakota culture's crucifixion,
have become the gospel of the resurrected Dakota language.
I don't care what these books say or mean,
or what atrocities are still committed in their name.
To me, in the beginning was the word,
and the word,
each and every Dakota word,
was good.

The missionary Dakota I wrote these poems in, indeed writing itself...