Trip of the Tongue (8 page)

St. Michael could only do so much, however. Years later the community was still faced with high dropout rates and levels of illiteracy and was still struggling to find an education system that would work with and not against its culture. At this point there were three kinds of schools in Navajo country. There was the Washingdoon Bi'ólta' (“Washington's school”—a BIA school administered by the federal government) and there was the Beligaana Bi'ólta' (“little white man's school”—a public school administered by the local school district). Then there was the Eeneishoodi Bi'ólta' (“the school of those who drag their clothes”—a missionary school). Eventually the Navajo decided they needed a fourth kind of school: a Diné Bi'ólta'—a Navajo school.

The first of these schools was established in 1966 in Rough Rock, Arizona, an isolated town about thirty miles from Chinle. Rough Rock Demonstration School was the first BIA school in the country to be operated by American Indians, and it utilized both Navajo and English for classroom instruction. It was a revolutionary idea. More important, it was the start of a trend.

Today Navajo Nation is a leader in educational innovation among Native communities. It is home to schools such as Tséhootsooí Diné Bi'ólta', a unified Window Rock immersion program where students in grades K–8 receive at least half of their instruction in Navajo. Navajo Head Start, meanwhile, provides Navajo-language instruction for low-income preschoolers. And Diné College, with an impressive main campus at Tsaile and seven additional sites throughout the reservation, is the largest—not to mention the oldest—tribal college in the country.

In Canyon de Chelly I had seen where the Navajo had been relieved of the power to control their own destiny. But in St. Michaels I saw where they began to take it back.

The next day, feeling a bit weary of language politics, I decided to play tourist. I tossed my grammars and papers in a corner of my hotel room and headed north, unencumbered, toward Kayenta, the Utah border, and Monument Valley, the most popular attraction in Navajo Nation.

The Navajo call Monument Valley Tsé Bii' Ndzisgaii, “Valley of the Rocks”—which is an incredibly accurate yet astoundingly insufficient name for a 90,000-acre expanse of buttes, mesas, and cinematic vistas. Though the tribe has recently finished construction on a new hotel and visitor center, the park itself is refreshingly free of tourist claptrap. The only way you can identify the road down into the valley is by the fact that the rocks on the road are slightly smaller than the rocks not on the road.

From what I could tell, most visitors opt to take a guided tour through the valley. This, frankly, seems sensible. It's rough going down in the valley, and not everyone is as devil-may-care with their cars as I am—and even I thought twice about it. As I looked down into the valley and considered just how much of a difference there is between all-wheel drive and four-wheel drive, I began to have visions of
Into the Wild
. I mean, the way down was like 75 percent boulders on a 50 percent grade. There was, I realized, a very real chance that my trustworthy little Subaru might go in and never be able to get out.

That's when I saw that a caravan of tumbledown RVs had decided to brave the trail in front of me. I'd noticed throughout my time in the Southwest that an extremely popular mode of transportation was the rental RV, easily identifiable by its giant 1800-RV4RENT logo and the shambling incompetence with which it was driven. As I watched the RVs descend into the valley, it became rapidly clear to me that under no circumstances should an RV be driven in Monument Valley. The handling, the size, the questionable structural integrity—on all counts it is singularly unsuited to the terrain. You might as well try to climb a mountain in five-inch heels that are five sizes too big.

But no one had stopped them from going in. And as I watched, astonished, nothing was able to stop them from coming out. It wasn't pretty, but they managed, one after the other, to grind their way up out of the valley. I felt a little ashamed I'd questioned my own car's ability to do the same. So I put my Subaru into gear and started—gingerly—down the trail.

Images of Monument Valley have been featured in dozens of TV shows and movies, from
Stagecoach
to
Forrest Gump
to
MacGyver
, so even my first visit to the valley inspired more than a slight sense of déjà vu. The most iconic formations are a pair of majestic sandstone buttes that have been weathered down in mirror image to resemble a pair of mittens. But everywhere I looked—every sweep of reddened stone, variegated and luminous in the desert sun—felt familiar. In Monument Valley it was as if I'd just fulfilled a wish I didn't even know I'd had.

I immediately went to work filling my camera's memory card. For a shitty photographer with delusions of grandeur, Monument Valley is a dream—you can point and shoot at anything and get something that looks like a postcard. But even in the presence of such astonishing natural beauty, a large part of my mind was still back in Chinle.

I was enjoying my time in Navajo Nation, but I didn't particularly take to Chinle, and it wasn't until I went to Monument Valley that I realized why. Though Canyon de Chelly manages, at times, to approach the sort of natural incandescence of Monument Valley, the rest of Chinle feels like it might as well be in another world, a world made up of an unprepossessing accumulation of hotels, gas stations, and fast-food restaurants. Chinle is almost wholly lacking in what I would call small-town charm; even its non-commercial structures have a decidedly institutional feel. If some towns have a hum of activity, Chinle has a muted rattle of despair.

I'm sure you could argue that my perceptions were colored by my research, that my opinions of Chinle are just a reflection of my growing awareness of the role the U.S. government played in the diminution of Native-language populations. But I didn't feel this way anywhere else in Navajo Nation—my glorious day in Monument Valley reminded me of that. On the contrary, many of my expeditions to towns and sites across the area underscored for me the resilience of the Navajo people. The Navajo have, after all, fought for over a century against government restrictions and inequity, and they have done so as successfully as any other Native group in the country. Their culture hasn't faded into the background; there are Navajo newspapers, Navajo radio stations, Navajo museums, and Navajo schools. The Navajo are emphatically not a people who have been given, either now or in the past, to resignation or capitulation.

When you visit Navajo Nation, then, it's difficult to believe that its language could be in peril. As in nearly every part of the country, you encounter very few non-English-speakers here—the only one I met was the old woman at the St. Michaels museum. Nevertheless, the Navajo language has a very public presence, whether you're taking a tour of Navajo schools or just taking in the usual sights. You would be forgiven for thinking the Navajo language is secure. Though the Crow language made itself known to me only when I went in search of it, here in Navajo Nation the language practically leapt up to beg my attention. I heard Navajo at gas stations and in restaurants; I saw it on signs, T-shirts, and newspapers. KTTN 660, the only radio station I was able to pick up with any reliability, broadcast in both English and Navajo. And everyone I met spoke at least a little Navajo and was happy to try to teach me a few words. They were typically even gracious enough to try to keep a straight face when confronted with my hopeless pronunciation.

But Chinle—grim, down-on-its-luck Chinle—is the kind of place that can wear down even the most determined optimist. As I am typically able to manage only the most mild optimism even on my best days, I found myself wondering if all the good intentions and cultural pride in the world would be enough to overcome the lingering damage of government policies and the not-inconsequential challenges of reservation life. Would language really be a priority for people who were struggling to make ends meet? Even more, was it possible to invest a language with new vitality and significance after decades of oppression and disdain? It seemed to me a monumental task even under the best of circumstances.

As it turns out, my fears were not unfounded. The Navajo are, in fact, currently in the midst of a rapid and massive language shift. A 1990 study found that fully half of Head Start children were monolingual English-speakers—this just twenty years after 90 percent of Navajo children were reporting no preschool experience with English. A survey by the Window Rock school district found that the proportion of kindergartners fluent in Navajo dropped from 89 percent in 1979 to 3 percent in 1989. Deborah House, an instructor at Diné College and the author of
Language Shift Among the Navajos: Identity Politics and Cultural Continuity
, reports that at the college “the use of the Navajo language is otherwise not particularly marked. It is much more common among the staff members—janitors, maintenance and cafeteria workers, and secretaries. Navajo-speaking faculty and administrators rarely use the language of school unless they wish to signal solidarity or to mark an event as Navajo; English is by far the norm.”

Language instruction must be considered partially to blame for this, though not necessarily in the ways you might think. While the curriculum at the early Indian boarding schools was ultimately designed to eradicate Native languages, they were anything but immediately effective. For one thing, many Navajo were kept out of school. For another, the schools were understaffed and underfunded, surely one of the few instances in history when substandard schools might actually have had some side benefits. The boarding schools did, however, inflict extensive psychological trauma, trauma that led many Navajo to associate their native language with punishment, humiliation, and disgrace. Many of these students have elected not to teach their children the language in order to spare them a similar fate.

The current generation has a new set of psychological challenges. In a series of interviews with Navajo teenagers, sociologist Tiffany Lee found that the source of language-related shame has shifted. “Interestingly, absent from the students' counter-narratives were direct expressions of shame for their heritage language,” she writes. “Instead, students revealed expressions of embarrassment of their own limited Native-language ability, not necessarily embarrassment or shame with the language itself.” This nevertheless reinforces the cycle of language deterioration as younger Navajo avoid using their language just as previous generations did, albeit for a different reason.

Meanwhile, the high visibility of Navajo-language instruction in schools and the extensive publicity surrounding language efforts conspires to convince parents that they needn't bear the burden of passing the language on at home. The schools are there to shoulder the instruction; public rhetoric implies the problem is well in hand.

Though the Navajo have an impressive array of language programs in place in their schools, despite their best efforts only 10 percent of Navajo pupils are currently receiving language instruction, and then largely in supplemental programs. Even standout programs have not been able to guarantee long-term and widespread success. In spite of its early achievements, Rough Rock faced heavy criticism and significant challenges both inside and outside the community, and its model has not been widely replicated.

But even if the Navajo had 100 percent enrollment in programs like Rough Rock, it's not clear to me that their language would be invulnerable. It can't be ignored that the deterioration of the Navajo-speaking population is due in no small part to the economic advantages afforded by speaking English, advantages that intensified when government policies incapacitated the Navajo economy.
^q
English is, as House notes, “the language associated with access to power, status, respect, prestige, and economic benefits in both professional and private life.” Though the government may no longer pursue an active policy of assimilation through education, today it has an even more powerful tool at its disposal. By contributing to the economic hardships that exist today on Navajo and other reservations, the government can ensure that for Native men and women throughout the country, English isn't a choice—it's an obligation.

Chapter Three

Washington: Lushootseed, Quileute, Makah

Now that I've told you about Native languages that are living, it's only natural, I think, to tell you something about Native languages that are dying.

When I first became interested in the subject of American languages, I knew that many of the languages I would eventually investigate would be in decline. This was a reasonable assumption given that I was interested first and foremost in understanding the mechanism of that decline. But I was initially so focused on the genesis of language loss that I neglected to consider the consequences. It didn't occur to me that there might be a difference between the loss of a dispersed population and the loss of the core population. If an American community of French-speakers switches over to English, there are still 110 million or so French-speakers worldwide. When indigenous American languages lose their last American speakers, however, they cease to exist as mother tongues.

It is this latter type of language loss—which I should call, more accurately, language death—that brought me to the Pacific Northwest.

I chose to travel to Washington because with twenty-nine federally recognized Indian tribes and confederations, the state is home to an extremely wide variety of Native peoples and is generally a smart pick for anyone interested in learning more about Native culture. But even more important, it is still home to a handful of Native languages. And all of them are poised on the very brink of extinction.

Washington is a place of impressive natural splendor no matter when you go or how you get there. But if you go at the right time and come from the right direction, if you pick the perfect environmental and geographic context, the Pacific Northwest isn't just a treat for the eyes—it's practically a balm for the soul.

I approached from the southeast—driving out of Nevada into Idaho, up through Oregon and west toward Puget Sound—on a day that started out so hot and dry I could feel the liquid leaching from my lungs. Had I been willing to backtrack, I could have stuck to interstate travel, but I was tired of seeing the same truck stops and travel plazas, so I decided to take a more direct route up through the Independence Mountains along a series of two-lane state highways.

This took me through the Duck Valley Indian Reservation, which straddles the border between Idaho and Nevada. A fair amount of the land on this reservation serves as an open cattle range, and the road is thoroughly marked to make sure motorists are aware of this fact. Outside of Yellowstone and a few deer-clogged parts of Missouri, I'd never driven through an area where animals strayed with any regularity onto the road, so I took these warnings with a grain of salt. I figured “Caution: Open Range” was more of a suggestion, like
So maybe keep an eye out just in case, but honestly, this is a really big place. And it's not like there's much grass for the cows to eat on the highway. So you probably don't have to worry. Anyway, they're just cows, right?

I reconsidered my stance soon enough. As the car came around a curve, I slammed on my brakes, my front bumper coming to a stop about eighteen inches from the masticating jaw of a prodigious steer. I blanched; I like to imagine he sneered. Over the next thirty minutes I navigated around dozens of cattle, most of whom serenely positioned themselves in such a way as to cause maximum inconvenience. It was their road, they seemed to be saying. I was just passing through—very, very slowly.

Then, just as my initial adrenaline spike began to level off, I came to the bugs.

From a distance it looked like a thin layer of ochre had been scattered across the highway. As I got closer, though, I noticed the dust was moving. And then I was hit with the smell. Though I may be able to identify all manner of cockroaches, water bugs, and bedbugs, outside New York I'm at a bit of an entomological loss. So I can't tell you if they were locusts or cicadas or grasshoppers or what. All I know is this: they swarmed, they jumped, and they smelled like an unholy mixture of vomit, fecal matter, and monosodium glutamate.

At first it wasn't too bad, but as I drove through bug slick after bug slick, rolling with a molten crunch over thousands of insects, the stench crept in and took up residence inside my ventilation system. I shut off the air-conditioning and closed the vents, a last resort on a 90-plus-degree day, but the heat made things worse. I found a bottle of Febreze and desperately sprayed it everywhere I could. When that had no effect, I sprayed it again at my shirt, my hair, and my face. But in the end, all I could do was get through the area as quickly as possible. Then I pulled over to the side of the road and threw up.

I washed the car three times in Boise, but it would be weeks before the smell completely disappeared. As I made my way north, however, as ragged hills yielded to rolling fields and then, at last, to an almost otherworldly viridescence, I found that I minded the smell less and less.

It probably also didn't hurt that I was finally able to open my windows.

Regardless, I was happy to be heading to Washington. At that point I'd been on the road for more than a month straight, and I was sick of it. I was sick of the long hours, the lumpy beds, and the greasy food. The cattle and the bugs had been the questionably flavored icing on the really smelly cake. I wanted nothing more than a cool breeze, a bit of rain, and the hospitality of my yoga-loving, healthy-eating friends in Tacoma. Only then, I decided, would I even start to think about language again.

As it turned out, though, I started thinking about language even before I arrived in Tacoma.

The first time I visited the Pacific Northwest I was five years old. My parents had been invited to some sort of mysterious economists' gathering in China, and I was on my way to Vancouver to spend the summer with family. My uncle Gary drove down and picked me up in Washington state, and a few minutes into the trip I chirped, “Mount Rainier!”

Gary looked around in confusion. As far as he could tell, I couldn't see Mount Rainier from where I was sitting. But, he noticed, we had just passed a sign that
read
Mount Rainier.
No,
he thought,
she's too little to be reading. Jim probably just thought it would be funny if he taught his daughter a few local names and had her play a little joke on Uncle Gary.
He drove on.

As I continued to call out names—“Sunnydale!” “Pacific Highway!” “Kingdome!”—my uncle was increasingly impressed. Not because he thought I was figuring any of it out on my own, but because with each new passing recitation, what he was sure was a prank became a more elaborate one. (In all fairness, this does sound like something my father would have done.)

But then I said something that convinced him otherwise: “Puyallup!” And that's how my uncle realized that I could read.

Or so the story goes. I have absolutely no memory of this, of course. I can confirm that I was obnoxious and precocious, and to this day I retain a moderately irritating habit of reading road signs and billboards aloud. So I don't doubt that some version of these events occurred. But there's no way I sounded out Puyallup. I know this because twenty-three years later I had to be taught how to pronounce it.

Puyallup, a city of about 35,000, is located ten miles or so southeast of Tacoma. By the time I started seeing signs for Puyallup, I'd been on the road for far too many hours, and my brain was laboring under the strain of not one but two separate stops at McDonald's. Unsurprisingly, I initially supposed what must be the worst of all possible pronunciations: “poo-yall-UP,” a vague threat, certainly digestive, possibly southern, and decidedly unpleasant. In my defense, however, that's kind of how it's spelled.

That night my friends in Tacoma were in the process of telling me about their new neighbors when all of a sudden I heard a few unintelligible syllables.

“What did you just say?” I asked.

“Pyoo-AL-up?” my friend said.

“Yes … that.”

“It's a city not too far from here,” she told me. “Took me weeks to figure out how to pronounce it. I didn't quite feel like a local until I could.”

“So it's like the Houston Street of the Pacific Northwest?”

“Something like that, yes.”

I paused, considering. “Can you say it again? And slowly.”

No matter how you say it, Puyallup is something of an enigma. In a 1921 issue of the
Washington Historical Quarterly
, Edmond S. Meany, as part of a series on Washington place names, cites two possible translations of the word
Puyallup
. The first—“shadow from the dense shade of the forest”—dates back to an 1880 address by Elwood Evans, an early Washington politician and historian.

The second translation first appeared on June 30, 1916, when the
Tacoma News
published the interpretation of Henry Sicade, a prominent member of the Puyallup Indian Council, the grandnephew of a chief of the Nisqually, and the grandson of a chief of the Puyallup. (Or, as the paper put it, an “educated Indian.”) He suggested that the word Puyallup came from
pough
, meaning “generous,” and
allup,
meaning “people.”

I found evidence of a third translation in, oddly enough, the
Chicago Daily Tribune
. On December 18, 1955, the paper ran an article—“Indians Named Puyallup, and This Is Why!”—that related the following: “Local wits enjoy telling gullible strangers about the city's name. They say it came from the Indians who put raw oysters on the back of their tongues and then said the word, ‘Puyallup.' This guaranteed the oyster going down on the first try.” I am to this day unclear as to how that qualifies as wit.

As you might expect, the only translation to gain popular traction is the second: “generous people.” This is, at least, the translation I found scattered throughout travel guides, newspaper articles, and the Internet, where it is often asserted with such confidence that I almost overlooked the near-complete absence of supporting evidence.

The study of language is a particularly messy endeavor, even for a social science. The discipline is on one level intensely abstruse and on another almost universally approachable. Which is to say that you don't have to be an expert in linguistics to be an expert in language—even if it's only one language. There are, then, a great many people who feel perfectly justified in passing along their own language-related trivia and opinion as if it were hard, scientific fact.
^r

Consequently, I think a great many of us have a hard time separating linguistic fact and fiction, so overwhelmed is any legitimate information by grammatical flimflam and etymological sham. I know for my part I've been taken in over the years by more than one tall tale. I was three years into my study of Chinese before I realized that the word for “crisis” did not, in fact, also mean “opportunity.” Only recently did I discover that my reflexive urge to correct “10 items or less” is not at all borne out by historical usage. And I'm sure that in the years to come I'll find a legion of other ways in which I've allowed myself to be swindled.

I've tried my best, however, to develop a reliable method for snoping out what's what, and as I've done so I've begun to better understand the conditions that allow for the widespread dissemination of linguistic fraud. The obscurity of a language is the first of these conditions; it's hard to disprove a claim in the absence of actual fact. But just as important is what I like to think of as the cocktail party quotient: the more likely a story is to serve as entertaining small talk, the more likely it will be repeated, regardless of its accuracy. Over the years, these two factors have ensured that the languages of Native America have been particularly fertile grounds for an astonishing amount of made-up shit.

The Puyallup originally spoke a dialect of language called Lushootseed (known variously as Puget Salish, Whulshootseed Salish, or Skagit-Nisqually), which is part of the larger Salishan language family. Although Salishan languages were at one point spoken throughout the Pacific Northwest—in Washington, Oregon, British Columbia, Idaho, and even parts of Montana—the population of Salishan-speakers is today precariously low, and most Salishan languages in the United States and Canada are nearing extinction. Most estimates of the Lushootseed-speaking population are given not in triple digits or even in double digits, but rather in handfuls.

The number of people looking to learn Salishan languages is similarly small, which means the demand for language-learning materials is comparatively low. And since most materials tend to be produced not for a general audience but for an academic one, if you're not a professional linguist or dedicated amateur, Salishan language resources are few and far between—not to mention largely incomprehensible. You certainly can't turn to Google Translate in a pinch.

After some digging, however, I was able to get my hands on some basic Lushootseed reference materials, including a dictionary and a collection of educational newsletters published by the Puyallup Tribal Language Program. I was less than surprised to discover that despite its overwhelming and persistent popularity, “generous people” might not be the only correct translation of
Puyallup
. Or even
a
correct translation.

I got lucky with the newsletters. Written to encourage interest in the language among schoolchildren, each month's edition typically consists of a few basic phrases, a short article of some local interest, and a word search. A few issues, however, also parse important vocabulary, providing information on each of the word's constituent parts. It was here that I found a decidedly mundane translation of
Puyallup
.