Papers of the Fortieth Algonquian Conference: Actes du Congrès des Algonquinistes

Language Keepers: A Documentary Film Process for Stimulating Passamaquoddy-Maliseet Language Documentation and Revival

Language Keepers: A Documentary Film Process for Stimulating Passamaquoddy-Maliseet Language Documentation and Revival Ben Levine and RoBeRt M. Leavitt Documentary Filmmaker and University of New Brunswick This paper describes a National Science Foundation Endangered Language Initiative entitled “Language Keepers: Audio Visual Documentation of Passamaquoddy-Maliseet Group Discourse Centered on Historic Places as a Data Source for Dictionary Expansion, Linguistic Analysis, and Teaching Resources.” The authors are the co-principal investigators of this project. They have worked mainly with speakers in the eastern Maine Passamaquoddy communities of Pleasant Point and Indian Township, with a few sessions in the Maliseet community at Tobique, New Brunswick. Because almost all the filming has been done in the Maine communities, the language will be called Passamaquoddy hereinafter. Begun in August 2006, Language Keepers employs an unusual multidisciplinary approach to address an increasingly common problem in endangered language documentation and reclamation: Passamaquoddy is no longer spoken in public. There has been no formal assessment of Passamaquoddy-English language shift in the last three decades, but anecdotal reports on language use are highly consistent in suggesting rapid decline of Passamaquoddy as the language that (at least in public) life is lived in. When David Francis, co-author of the Passamaquoddy dictionary, was asked when was the last time he had a Passamaquoddy conversation outside the home, he could not recall. “On a trip once a few years ago, we tried to have a conversation only in Passamaquoddy, and we kept going into English. English is so powerful!” Linguist Philip LeSourd of Indiana University, original developer of the Passamaquoddy dictionary, has remarked that when he began the dictionary in the 1970s everyone in the community spoke Passamaquoddy all the time. When he returned after an absence, he was “astonished” at how few people were willing or able to use the language. Allen Sockabasin (2007), writer and teacher and former tribal governor, notes that many people cannot 210 211 Language KeepeRs continue a conversation after the opening exchanges. In spite of a schoolbased bilingual education program, which began in 1971, there have been few if any new speakers since 1960. While a complete examination of the reasons for language shift is not within the scope of this paper, it is important to note that the Passamaquoddy communities experienced a doubling of their population after the 1980 land claim settlement. Many of those who returned had lived and worked outside the community for twenty or more years, had married non-natives, and now spoke English almost exclusively. They had had little contact with traditional culture. These factors, together with increased mobility, higher education, and a broad range of new services, accelerated language shift within the communities themselves. Thus, in the span of a few decades, the language of the communities changed. FiLMing puBLic discouRse For the purposes of our work, “public discourse” is any use of the language outside the family circle, including in other people’s homes. It ranges from friends having brief conversations in the supermarket parking lot or gossiping, to a group playing cards or picking berries in a field, to thoughtful discussions about social change. Clearly, the loss of public discourse in Passamaquoddy is a symptom of the language’s decline. It deprives Nativelanguage teachers and learners of a necessary resource and interrupts the normal intergenerational transmission critical to language stabilization. Documenting public discourse poses challenges different from those encountered in ethnographic documentation, interviewing, and elicitation as methods of linguistic research. In unelicited discourse, there is ongoing spontaneous production of language for the researcher to record from whatever observational distance is deemed appropriate. In elicitation, it is the linguist who sets situations for the recording of one-on-one conversation. A high level of precise description is facilitated by questioning subjects as they speak or immediately after recording their utterances. Since public discourse is not currently available to the Passamaquoddy, an investigator must convene group discourse for documentation in a way that is deemed natural by the participants and that will also yield significant data. As a filmmaking approach, we employ a “direct cinema” documentary style that is an outgrowth of cinéma vérité. This means that we do not try to achieve the significant social distance between the camera and the 212 Ben Levine and RoBeRt M. Leavitt subject that would avoid influencing the interaction. It is just the opposite. We are in overt collaboration with the group from the beginning...