Using Contemporary and Historical Resources to Document Three Indigenous Languages of Oregon: Hanis, Milluk and Siuslaw

Confederated Tribes Of Coos, Lower Umpqua, & Siuslaw Indians, Coos Bay OR

Investigators

Abstract

The Native American Languages Act, passed by the U.S. Congress in 1990, enacted into policy the recognition of the unique status and importance of Native American languages. All Native American languages are endangered, and a number of these are known as 'sleeping' languages, when there are no or perhaps only a few remaining fluent first language speakers. Many Native American communities are seeking to re-awaken these languages, using linguistic documentation and tapping into the knowledge of elders who grew up in homes where use of Native American languages was rapidly shifting to English. Where Native languages are under-documented and existing documentation is difficult to access, language learning efforts and scientific research are hampered. This project will focus on three Native American languages that are culturally related, but which have unclear genetic relationships. This project will conduct the first fieldwork on these languages in approximately fifty years, with interviews of tribal elders designed to elicit words, phrases, places, context, stories and songs from these three languages. Investigators will create intergenerational opportunities that will encourage youth to be present during the interviews. Broader impacts include empowering young tribal members as Native American citizen scientists and as heritage language learners, the development of indigenous language curriculum from these archival and new documentation efforts, and the resulting publicly accessible documentation, of value to linguists, historians, geographers and the general public. Hanis, Milluk and Siuslaw are three indigenous languages of Southwest Oregon coast and among the ancestral languages of the Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw Indians and the Coquille Indian Tribe. This will shed new light on the languages and their genetic relationships to each other and to other Oregon Coast indigenous languages, highly important given the linguistic diversity of the Pacific Northwest. Virtually the only ongoing linguistic investigations into these three languages occur in these two communities, by a team of tribal members with linguistic training and linguists. This will enable a better scholarly understanding of the connection between reclamation activities and scientific engagement with archival language resources. This increased scientific engagement will enhance discoverability of the field notes, texts and recordings, as well as the analysis of the content of those materials. The project will also record ethnographic interviews of elders from the two tribal nations, focusing on topics to elicit latent memories of the indigenous languages, places, context, stories and songs. Novel approaches for working with elders in communities with sleeping languages will be valuable to other communities and linguists working in similar contexts. This project will also build capacity within the community by sending the team to key language institutes, such as CoLang 2018 (the Institute on Collaborative Language Research) at the University of Florida, and the University of Oregon's Northwest Indian Language Institute (NILI). Products include a searchable digital database for making language data accessible for the three languages, newly digitized archival data, and recordings and transcriptions of the interviews with elders.