How the Chitimacha Tribe Saved Their Native Language

Is there a great record, like a written record, of all of the origin stories like you were talking to me about and all of the various languages? I mean is all this documented to make sure that we don't lose this? Some better than others and a lot of that is done. There's no big text that I can give you and share with you that here's all what you ever needed to know about Indians. That doesn't exist. I think... Probably should, huh? No. I think that's up to the tribal nation to decide whether they want to share that and how to best educate people about who they are. And that's what you know so many other people have told our stories and have taken down those histories and all those people are telling the stories from a Western perspective and not from not having the cultural competency and having lived and implemented that way of life. So it's really dependent on the tribes to determine for themselves how they want to put that forward. There are many tribes that actually have research protocols that if you want to do, you want to study, you want to research, you have to get authority from the tribal nation to do that. And they have to have a say in whether it was done appropriately. So again, it's back to us telling our own stories, us being part of our own narratives and us being part of the decision-making that affects us. I respect and appreciate that 100%. What I meant was inside the tribe, is there a documented version of all these stories and of the language so they can be passed down. The real concern seems to be when you're talking about these incredibly impoverished communities, the real concern is that some of these stories may be lost or some of the language may even be lost. I think it varies. Like I said, there's 574 federally recognized tribes and 300 other tribal groups. Let me tell you the story about the Chitimacha who are in Louisiana, like just surrounded by marshes right there in the Gulf of Mexico. Their last language speaker died in the 1940s and even though they had you know language speakers around them, none of those languages were related to theirs. Their language was more closely connected with peoples in Mesoamerica. So obviously there was a trade, there was a relationship between who the Chitimacha are and were with people from Mesoamerica in South America. Yeah, I mean there's there's amazing histories and stories out there but what happened with their languages is in the 80s and 90s the Smithsonian had all these wax cylinders of tribal languages and songs and dances and they started repatriating those back to different tribal nations. So when the Chitimacha got these wax cylinders they're like, oh we have a responsibility here, we have to do something with this. And so they pulled their community together and everyone you know got their grandmas and their aunties and everyone to pull together words that they knew, stories that they knew, different cultural practices and building and crafting and all of those things. Pulled all that together with the wax cylinders, they got some money from Rosetta Stone and recreated their language that had been lost. And today in their schools, in their tribally run schools, they speak their language. Those children are speaking their language from kindergarten up. So an incredible success story and that they were able to do that because they had gaming revenue to help support that. And when you go to the school and when you hear the story about how that happened, it's incredible. So there are stories like that among all tribes of how they've been able to recover from what was lost. And so it's a long process to correct what has happened. But there are warriors all over Indian country and that's what they're doing every day is trying to recover what was lost. Well that's a great success story and it's beautiful to hear. I just hope that that can continue with all the different stories. It's just when you read books about Native American culture and you just get sort of like the most surface taste of what it must have been like, it seems like there's this incredibly rich history that could be lost in time. And that would be a horrible, horrible shame. It's right here in front of us and it's here right now. And the fact that someone like you works so hard to get this message out here and to let people know what is actually happening and the plight of these American Indians and the tribes and what they're still going through today. And this is not a battle that happened in the 1800s. This is a battle that's happening today. Right. Every day. Every day.