Annotated Field Documentation of Northern Cheyenne Sacred Language [ISO 639 chy]

Suny Empire State College, Saratoga Springs NY

Investigators

Abstract

Sacred language is a specialized component of many indigenous languages, transferred from adult to adult and used within the context of philosophical discourse, prayer, and ceremony. With the decline of Native languages, many North American tribes' sacred language is no longer in use and has never been documented. The Northern Cheyenne sacred language is still vital and used by a shrinking number of fluent speakers, but it has not been documented. Today, the reality of rapid language loss with perceived calamitous social ramifications overrides these concerns and the Northern Cheyenne sacred language speaker community is eager to document this specialized use of the language. In a pilot, one-year project, Dr. Karyl Eaglefeathers (SUNY Empire State College) will use the support of the National Science Foundation to begin audio and video documentation of sacred language in the context of ceremonies. This is a rare opportunity for fieldwork in full collaboration with an elite group of fluent ceremonial men and women. This small but prominent speaker community, numbering about 20, has been instructed throughout their adult lifetimes by their ceremonial elders who, in turn, learned from their ceremonial instructors. Both the knowledge embedded in those ceremonies and the potential for distinctive linguistic forms make this speech genre of great interest to students of the culture and the language. Fluency in Cheyenne is the platform for learning the sacred language, and the fact that all fluent speakers of the everyday Cheyenne language are above the age of fifty means that this moribund language will likely be gone in a generation. The audio and video recordings with accompanying field notes will be deposited in the Archives of Traditional Music, Indiana University, where all but about 10% of the collection, the most sensitive cultural information, will be available for educational use.