Born in the Blood: On Native American Translation

8. In the Words of Powhatan: Translation across Space and Time for The New World

In the Words of Powhatan Translation across Space and Time for The New World Blair A. Rudes Introduction Among the numerous screen and stage events staged to celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of the founding of the first permanent English colony in the Americas at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607, perhaps the most ambitious and widely seen was the film The New World (New Line Cinema 2005). The film’s screenwriter and director, Terrence Malick, used the legendary romance of Pocahontas and John Smith to depict the impact that the settlement of Jamestown had on both the English and the native Virginia Algonquian people. Despite the questions that surround the authenticity of the Pocahontas story, Malick wanted to provide as accurate as possible a portrayal of life at the time. To achieve that aim, he and executive producer Sarah Green identified a cadre of recognized experts in colonial English and Virginia Algonquian architecture, crafts, language, music, subsistence, wardrobe, and warfare whom they hired as consultants to the production. Achieving authenticity with respect to the languages spoken by the English colonists and the Virginia Algonquian people in the film presented Malick and Green with one of the greater production challenges. Recognizing that the English language spoken in North America had changed substantially over the past four centuries, Malick decided not to cast actors for speaking roles as English colonists who had American or Canadian accents. As a result, the final cast of English colonists included actors from Australia, England, Ireland, and South Africa, but no 189 Americans or Canadians. In addition, the producers hired a British dialect coach, Catherine Chartlon, whose job it was to research the provenance in Great Britain of the original Jamestown colonists, to identify the distinctive pronunciations of English as spoken in the colonists’ place of origin in the early seventeenth century, and to train the actors to use those pronunciations in delivering their lines. The task of achieving authenticity with respect to language spoken by the native peoples of the Jamestown area proved to be even more demanding than it was for the colonists. When English explorers and colonists first arrived at the location that would become Jamestown Colony, they were welcomed by citizens of the Powhatan Confederacy—an empire named for its leader, who reigned over a region that covered most of present-day southeastern Virginia—encompassing the Chesapeake Bay area from the southern shores of the Potomac River to the border with North Carolina. The vast majority of the citizens of the confederacy spoke dialects of Virginia Algonquian, also known as the Powhatan language. The production staff soon discovered that no one had spoken more than a word or two of the Virginia Algonquian language since sometime in the first half of the nineteenth century (see Goddard 1978:74). As a fallback position, the staff considered using a still spoken Algonquian language ; however, none of the speakers capable of teaching these languages was available to work on the film. Instead, they suggested that the production staff speak with Ives Goddard, linguistic curator at the Smithsonian Institution and the foremost authority on the Algonquian languages of eastern North America, about the feasibility of reviving the Virginia Algonquian language for the film. The very idea of reviving a moribund American Indian language for a film was novel. By the 1970s, filmmakers began moving away from using nonsense words such as “ugh” and “how” to mimic American Indian speech and having actors in American Indian roles either speak in English or in whatever American Indian language they happened to know. It was not until the Kevin Costner film Dances with Wolves (Tig Productions 1990) that filmmakers began to make a serious effort to have actors speak the language actually spoken by members of the tribe from which their characters came. In that film, the actors portraying individuals from the Lakhota tribe learned to speak their lines in the Lakhota language.1 The difference between what was done for Dances with Wolves and what was proposed for The New World was that Lakhota is a living language, 190 Rudes and native speakers were available to translate the dialogue and train the actors to speak it. As I try to illustrate here, reviving the moribund Virginia Algonquian language posed a whole set of additional problems. Goddard’s work schedule precluded his participation on the film, so he referred the production staff to David Costa and me. Costa had...