Language Awakening: Erasure & Shinnecock Resurgence of Long Island Algonquian

Members of the Algonquian Revitalization Project shared the latest on their efforts during a recent Indigenous art exhibit, Weaving Words, Weaving Worlds, at the Zuccaire Art Gallery.

“A lot has been written about revitalization,” said New York State Justice Lizbeth Gonzalez, who serves on the Appellate Division, First Department, leads the Algonquian Language Revitalization Program and helped organize the exhibit. “What it really means has everything to do with standing up for your people, and fighting back against assimilation.”

Assimilation — for the better part of American history, Indigenous children were yanked from their homes and plopped into Indian boarding schools, where students were beaten when caught speaking their mother tongue, denied food, placed in solitary confinement and accused of Satanism. Lye soap was thrust into their mouths to cleanse them of the devil. The kids would come home, once or twice a year, to the reservations. They were quieter, almost strangers, and that’s how Long Island Algonquian faded away, experts say.

“What we’re doing,” Lizbeth continued, “is challenging as there are no fluent speakers. There’s a race to record the wisdom of elders before they pass away so that the language’s wonderful words and sayings and funny stories don’t get lost.”

Lizbeth takes issue with Algonquian being described as a dead language family. It’s dormant, she insisted — asleep, not dead.

Long Island is home to two indigenous tribes that have state recognition: The Shinnecock, who are also federally recognized and whose territory is in Southampton, and the Unkechaug, who reside on the Poospatuck reservation in Mastic. A third, the Montaukett were denied it. Montaukett recognition legislation has been vetoed six times in the past decade, most recently in December, by Gov. Kathy Hochul. All three speak an Algonquian dialect

Back at the art gallery, four Native Americans came to discuss their work on display at the gallery.

“I want to start,” said the discussion leader, a member of the Shinnecock Nation and a Stony Brook alum, “by acknowledging that we’re on the traditional lands of the Setalcott People, who still maintain a descendant community just a five minute drive from Stony Brook University.”

The man to his right wore a felt ranger hat from which two jet black braids hung. His skin was caramel and a seashell necklace, handmade, dangled on his chest.

“Hello everyone, my name is Tecumseh,” he said. “I’m Unkechaug, I’m Turkey Clan and I’m a wampum carver and cultural consultant.”

He’s also a former student of the Revitalization Program.

“There’s this intentional disconnect,” he said, “that colonialism pushes with our connection to our land, our connection to our food, our connection to our animal relatives…”

Tecumseh paused, pondered for a moment. His contribution to the gallery hung beside him. Titled Water Connects Us All, a water droplet’s silhouette was filled with dozens of indigenous words for water: Nebi, Nupi, Nipi…

“We use the word ku-nahakahki — everyone’s — to understand our relationship to Mother Earth,” he continued. “We never use the word nu-nahakahki, which means mine and not yours. That’s not how we think of it.”

He explained that attitudes exist in language systems, and that to quell a language is to suffocate a worldview. He gave an example:

“The word we use often to greet is aquy (uh-kway). It’s often thought of as hello, but what it really means is I see the light in you. We don’t just say aquy to humans. We say aquy to the animals, to the trees, because all of those are living beings, and that speaks to how we view all of creation as our relatives.”

Revitalization, he believes, can succeed only if the many Algonquian dialect speakers — across Long Island, across America — come together. Their words denoting water, after all, are strikingly similar.

Leighton Delgado is one of the founders of the Algonquian Revitalization project at Stony Brook. He’s also the linguist tasked with assembling the latest Long Island Algonquian dictionary, his project of several years.

“I call it language reclamation,” he said in an interview, “because a lot of these Algonquian words translated by English people are completely wrong.”

As Leighton and company have begun to reclaim the language, they’ve repurposed the very thing that first took Algonquian from the Americas centuries ago: John Eliot’s Indian Bible, which was the first published in Algonquian when it was printed in 1663.

Eliot’s Bible provides a blueprint — hazy but essential — for what the dormant language once had been. A translation of the King James Bible, it contains more than 10,000 unique words in Algonquian. By placing the Indian Bible beside its source material and comparing each word, linguists have rediscovered the language’s bones.

Of course, the text’s syntax, being a word-for-word translation of old English scripture, lacks the rhythms and construction of spoken Algonquian. To learn the proper speech patterns, Leighton and company had to consult other sources.

“The most important source we used,” said Leighton, “was the diary of a Mohegan named Fidelia Fielding.”

Fidelia Fielding, for much of her life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, was the only living speaker of Algonquian’s Mohegan dialect.

“She didn’t have anybody to speak to, but she didn’t want to lose her language. So she created a diary, and every single day she would write what she did. What that gave us was ‘Oh, so that’s how you speak Algonquian’, not ‘Moses said to this disciple blah-blah-blah-blah-blah.’”

In 2006, Stephanie Fielding, a linguist and descendent of Fidelia’s, published A Modern Mohegan Dictionary, a book that standardized an Algonquian alphabet composed of 18 Latin letters. She consulted her ancestor’s diaries for reference, and dedicated the dictionary to her memory.

Leighton uses the text to teach his students in Stony Brook’s Revitalization program. The classes have been held on Zoom since the pandemic, and the students are a mix of Indigenous folk — young and old — and Stony Brookers. Each session begins with reciting a Four Directions prayer in Long Island Algonquian. Then, together, they tell stories in the language. Every student contributes a sentence.

At times they get stuck. The Eliot Bible and other reference texts don’t always contain the words they need. Together, the students and Leighton create words. A ‘supermarket’ is a big food place; ‘car’, mysterious wagon. And waterfall: Nupipánshák — water that it falls.

The project is done a few dozen miles north of The Shinnecock Indian Nation territory, which sits on a 1.3-square-mile plot in Southampton. More than half its inhabitants live below the poverty line.

“I always tell people you’re not going to undo four or 500 years of colonialism in the next year,” Tecumseh had told me once, “or in 10 years or even in 20.”

The arc of progress is long; the work, ongoing.

At the Shinnecock Nation’s Wuneechanuk Shinnecock Pre-school, teachers have begun to speak bits of Long Island Algonquian to the children, who range from six weeks old to the age of four. Paulette Brown, the school’s assistant director, is in one of the advanced classes that Leighton teaches. She’s learned the language since 2018 and brings her knowledge into the Pre-K. She teaches her students to count. She teaches them color.

“We have some toddlers here who I’ve had the pleasure of teaching since they were very young,” Paulette told me once. “I can speak to them in simple Algonquian sentences and they’ll understand it well because for them, it’s just like speaking English.”

The kids bring packets home. On them, Paulette and her colleagues have printed several phrases in Algonquian, along with their English translations. They come home, the children, and teach Algonquian to their parents.