The Sixty-Year Sleep

Update: The Tunica-Biloxi Tribal Council recently announced that the Tribe has been awarded a $748,200 grant from the Administration for Native Americans, a division of the Department of Health and Human Services. These funds will be dispensed over a three-year period and will support the Language and Culture Revitalization Program in training language apprentices to become fluent speakers and instructors of the Tunica language.

On December 6, 1948, with the death of Sesostrie Youchigant, the Tunica language lost its last fluent speaker, “dying” according to older terminology and “becoming dormant” in the modern, more optimistic jargon. Tunica was another casualty of a massive shift away from indigenous languages; you couldn’t bank in Lakota or go to college in Chippewa, and maybe your kids got made fun of for speaking Bella Coola, and so over the generations, most Native Americans (and other indigenous people around the world) switched to languages like English, French, or Spanish that granted them better opportunities. Youchigant’s neighbors and countrymen in the Tunica tribe remembered some songs, a few words, but he was the last person to really know it—and even he, though he listened to his mother in Tunica, answered her in French. For sixty years, the language slept, remembered in pieces but unspoken, until it gained a champion in Donna Pierite.

Pierite, a member of the Tunica nation, grew up in a multi-lingual household in New Orleans, speaking English, French, and Spanish, peppered with words from the Mobilian trade language. Her great-grandmother used “one word that could have meant ‘skunk’ in Tunica or ‘buzzard’ in Mobilian or Choctaw, we don’t know,” remembered Pierite. Building on this early linguistic advantage, Pierite became a language teacher, teaching French and Spanish along with English to Vietnamese students—from whom she learned some Vietnamese. From the late ‘80s, Pierite had been active in efforts to revive and encourage Tunica traditions, and so when, in the mid-‘90s, she inherited a tribal copy of a Tunica dictionary, grammar, and collection of cultural texts compiled by linguist Mary Haas, she was enthusiastic about bringing the language back into use. “By the time I began the project, Mary Haas had either passed away or was ill, so I never met her, but I felt like this care for the language had been passed to me,” said Pierite. 

Donna Pierite wasn’t a trained linguist, but as a teacher with a gift for language, she was more than up to the task of getting Tunica on the road to recovery, helped along by archival materials and a handful of recordings made by “rememberers” of stories, songs, and Tunica language phrases. Through classes, camps, newsletters, and a regular feature in the tribal newspaper, Pierite, aided by family members including Elisabeth, son Jean-Luc, husband Michael, brother Steven Madere, sister Stephanie Escude, and nephew Christopher Escude, brought Tunica before the eyes of its speakers’ descendants. After some fourteen years of work, the tribe reached out to Tulane linguist Judith Maxwell in 2010 for help constructing a more complete and formal curriculum. They had their work cut out for them.

[Read about maintenance of Native foodways in Choctaw-Apache Cooking]

“We don’t even know how they said ‘please’ and ‘thank you,’” noted Maxwell. When faced with gaps like this, Maxwell and the rest of the Tunica language group work to produce an acceptable alternative out of words and roots they do know: for example, the word for computer includes roots for “thought” and “lightning.” “Please” and “thank you” have been built out of roots meaning, respectively, “It would be a small thing” (implying hope that the favor asked is not an inconvenience) and “It would be a big thing,” to communicate gratitude; the same process has finally allowed the Tunica to welcome people to their reservation with a Tunica word for “welcome.”

These reconstructions can be difficult because Tunica is a language isolate, meaning that it has no discoverable relationship to other languages, the way the Romance languages form a tight sisterhood or English-ish words pop up in German or Dutch. Isolate status isn’t always easy to prove, since languages often pass vocabulary and even grammatical features back and forth—think about all the French words in English, and how some of them follow French rules: a man is a blond fiancé, a woman is a blonde fiancée (if you’re lucky). These processes also mean that Tunica shares certain traits with other, neighboring Southeastern indigenous languages, the result of long contact. To prove relationships between languages, linguists look at a base core of words that are seldom borrowed or changed through language contact: basic foods, family relationships, parts of the body, natural phenomena, and so forth. In effect, these are words essentially every language has and that people learn early, seldom needing to reach for a “foreign” term to describe what they mean. And in Tunica—as is also the case for its neighbors Chitimacha and Natchez as well as other world languages like Korean and the Basque language of the Pyrenees—these words are unique. Haas and others tried to construct a Gulf family including Tunica, Natchez, Chitimacha, and some other poorly documented native languages, but the most widely accepted theory is that these languages stand alone, unique among all human tongues.

Tunica may be a near-unique example of a language in which the feminine is the default gender.

Language isolates like Tunica are more difficult to revive and reconstruct than those with surviving relatives because there are no examples to follow. Languages often change according to identifiable patterns, so a linguist working on a language belonging to one of the larger, comparatively well-documented Native American families could identify source vocabulary from these relatives. For example, Coushatta, or Koasati, is a Muskogean language, with living relatives in Alabama, Creek, Seminole, Choctaw, and Chickasaw. With Tunica, linguists and tribespeople are left only with what has been written down, and while the quality of the documentation for Tunica is better than for many languages (there are apparently no surviving words of Opelousa except, maybe, “Opelousa”), it’s not complete.

The Tunica language survived because of the efforts of outside linguists who took an interest in the language. In the 1880s, Albert Gatschet, a Swiss linguist who had moved to the United States especially to study Native American languages, worked with the Tunica to record their language; while he accumulated a respectable haul of information, he tended to write in “French” spellings that only imperfectly captured the sounds of Tunica—the vowels were especially anarchic. Gatschet was followed several years later by John Swanton, who himself was followed a generation or so later by Mary Haas, who worked with Youchigant to record stories and sayings in his language. 

Haas had great strengths and odd weaknesses. A trained linguist, she used the International Phonetic Alphabet to record the sounds of Tunica more exactly and also knew to ask questions that led to “paradigms,” full examples of the forms of a word—those “je vais, tu vas, il va” litanies students learn by rote in school. Her writings record some of the beautiful and beloved stories of the Tunica culture and record an invaluable amount of vocabulary… so it’s odd that it didn’t occur to her to record many of the words common in basic interactions, the pleases and thank-yous that make up the bulk of casual conversation. She did think to record Tunica, but the old-fashioned wax cylinders that survive are too staticky to draw a significant amount of information from. In a letter to her then-husband, linguist Morris Swadesh (who, among other exploits, did for Chitimacha more or less what his wife did for Tunica), she crows that she’s sending him recordings of Tunica on tin discs, which presumably still exist, tin being more resilient than wax. Unfortunately, no one knows into what subsequent Swadesh’s attic or archival black hole they’ve fallen, though Pierite’s daughter Elisabeth Pierite-Mora continues to find more traces and examples of Tunica language and documentation in repositories and archives across the country. 

The case for Tunica

As the ancestral and heritage language of a group of people still strongly connected to their identity, Tunica deserves to be revived. In addition to its inherent importance as a cultural marker, though, it’s also flat-out fascinating—“A really cool language,” said Maxwell, who would know. Though this cannot be confirmed without historical records, Tunica may be a near-unique example of a language in which the feminine is the default gender. Instead of the singular/plural system English and most European languages use, Tunica uses singular/dual (groups of two)/plural (groups of three or more) number markings. For anything non-human, the default singular and dual are masculine—you can say “two female buffalo,” but you’re emphasizing by doing so that they are female—but the default plural is feminine. (Imagine referring to Cate Blanchett, Brad Pitt, and George Clooney as “the actresses.”)

[French influence still survives in the speech of some Louisiana Cowboys]

Tunica also identified the sun as female, a relative rarity in world cultures. The moon is a woman, too; men are represented in the Tunica celestial sphere by Thunder Boy. This leads to one of the most fascinating aspects of Tunica. In English, we say “it” rained—well, what rained? The sky, the clouds, the great ancestral storm god Thor? For English-speakers, it doesn’t matter. We need a dummy subject to describe natural or abstract processes: “it” is about as neutral as it gets (see?), and not every conversation about the weather has to involve Thor. In Tunica, verb conjugations reflect gender, though, so to describe the weather a speaker must know whether Sun Woman or Thunder Boy is doing the weather at the moment. He brings the clouds, she disperses them. 

The curriculum developed by Maxwell and the tribe uses Tunica concepts to teach grammar. Go back to the abstract “it” for a moment: in Tunica, the implied subject is often feminine. We say that fruit ripens or a wound heals, but in Tunica, “she” ripens the fruit and “she” heals the wound. “She,” for the purposes of the curriculum, is Tishlina, the Stone Witch, a powerful and complex figure who sometimes cares for lost children but also may eat people she dislikes. Similarly, another class of verbs can describe either main or “in-passing” actions: you can walk, or you can be walking as you sing, which requires a different verb form to show this continuing “background action.” These are the lupirani verbs, named for nature’s most context-dependent animal: the chameleon.

A Tunica-language YouTube channel offers bite-size instruction, as well as “Tarukani Hipu,” a re-dub of “Monster Mash” featuring cameos by figures from Tunica stories.

The cultural and language instruction reinforce each other. If a child is hearing the story of the Stone Witch, it makes sense to add examples of her verbs: “It’s she who makes the fruit ripe.” If a child is learning weather terms, it’s similarly practical to explain the celestial beings who bring it all to pass, as Youchigant did for Haas. 

The language revival efforts have coordinated with other cultural revivals, and the Tunica can now use their own language when talking about traditional crafts, like the beadwork and basketry still practiced by members of the community, including the Pierites; Donna is especially proud of her daughter’s beadwork. Shouts of Tunica are sometimes heard as young members of the tribe play stickball, an energetic lacrosse-like game played with two sticks of different lengths; John Barbry, director of development and programming at the Education Program Language & Culture Revitalization Program for the Tunica-Biloxi Tribe of Louisiana, has arranged for the Tunica to play in clinics and scrimmages with other tribal stickball teams in the Southeast. In the meantime, regular webinars offer local tribal members and those living in other communities a chance to begin learning Tunica; a Tunica dictionary app is available at tunica.webonary.org, connecting the rising number of Tunica speakers with the words they need from moment to moment. A Tunica-language YouTube channel offers bite-size instruction, as well as “Tarukani Hipu,” a re-dub of “Monster Mash” featuring cameos by figures from Tunica stories. There’s a long road ahead of it, but Tunica has two major factors in its favor: children are learning the language, and an active and engaged group of language learners is keeping it from falling into disuse. The next great milestone is for children to learn it naturally, natively, from their parents: to this end, Barbry has also applied for a grant to pay a number of tribal members to learn Tunica full-time, so that they can become fluent enough to teach it to their peers and children.

The story of Tunica has analogues, with variations, in any number of other languages and groups. The Chitimacha worked with language-learning software company Rosetta Stone to produce a curriculum for their tribe, while the Coushatta have worked with a larger surviving core of speakers to encourage the language. On the Northshore, Grayhawk Perkins sings the blues in Mobilian, an old Gulf trade language used for commerce among native groups. The Houma language is largely lost, but the Houma people are working to maintain the particular French they’ve used for centuries in the face of ever-expanding English. There are more languages in need of help than there are trained linguists available to compile and transcribe; Maxwell ruefully described having to turn down requests for help because she simply doesn’t have the resources. (“Resources,” here, is largely measured in graduate students.) But thanks to the long hours the Pierites put in around their kitchen table, though it may still be hard to bank in Lakota, people are once again making, playing, and laughing in Tunica. 

The author would like to thank the following for their gracious help with this story: John Barbry, Donna Pierite, Elisabeth Pierite-Mora, Andrew Abdalian, Judith Maxwell, and Dominique Ellis.

This article originally appeared in our June 2018 issue. Subscribe to our print magazine today.