Seated around tables in
Prescott, Ariz., Yavapai elders swap stories, learn who’s
related to whom, and gossip in their fluid tongue.
Ladies
with a lifetime of experience etched on their faces converse in
“Yavaglish” when the right word just isn’t available in
Yavapai. Elders from the Prescott, Camp Verde and Fort McDowell
reservations compare notes on pronunciation, terms and location
names, rapidly switching between Yavapai and English. But
there’s more to this gathering than simply giving people a
place to chat and exchange information: This meeting of minds seeks
to keep their 10,000-year-old language and culture alive.
Saving the Yavapai language or any Native American language from
extinction involves more than just writing down words and working
out sentence structure. Keeping the West’s first languages
vibrant and alive seems to require nothing less than preserving or
— in some cases — renewing an entire culture.
That’s what the three surviving bands of Yavapai, who once
roamed 20,000 square miles of central Arizona, are discovering as
they develop a program to preserve their language. The group is
composed of Yavapai speakers with varying levels of fluency —
elders, tribal leaders and young people. They come together to
learn more about or strengthen their understanding of one of
humankind’s oldest surviving tongues.
The meetings
rotate among the three reservations. Participants complete
questionnaires indicating their band, language fluency and cultural
expertise. They also describe what they are willing to do to pass
on what they know.
Ted Vaughn, a member of the Yavapai
Prescott Indian Tribe and one of the leading proponents of Yavapai
preservation, helps lead the discussions. Vaughn has developed an
interactive language program that allows people to see and hear a
word simultaneously. He feels keenly the urgency to save his
ancestral tongue, and the U.S. Census Bureau agrees: It reports
that fewer than 100 fluent Yavapai speakers remain.
Freida Ann Eswonia, who lives at the Yavapai-Apache Nation’s
community near Camp Verde, points out one big challenge. Yavapai
fluency skipped a generation because of Indian boarding schools,
forced adoptions and attempts at cultural assimilation. Although
Yavapai language classes are held at the three reservations,
Eswonia says that one child wistfully asked her, “When we learn
Yavapai, who are we going to talk to?”
The challenge to
introduce Yavapai youth to their ancestral language doesn’t
stop with just learning Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation’s
national anthem. Cultural activities like basket weaving, gathering
of traditional foodstuffs and learning the old songs all play a
role in keeping a language alive.
Keeping Native
languages vital also has implications off the reservation, says
Greg Glassco, cultural resources director of the Prescott tribe.
If a tribe retains its original language, he says, that
will help it make claims under the Native American Graves
Protection and Repatriation Act for cultural items held by museums
or other institutions, Glassco says. Language can also moderate the
explosive development that’s taking place throughout Arizona
on what was once the Yavapai homeland.
“There is also a
provision that a discovery of a burial requires halting
construction until the tribe determines disposition of the
remains,” Glassco says. The Yavapai Prescott Indian Tribe is moving
forward with a project to identity all Yavapai settlements as well
as sacred and burial sites across traditional Yavapai country.
But central Arizona’s first residents possess
possibly the greatest gift for Arizona’s expanding
population: the ancient knowledge of how to deal with climate
change. The Yavapais have lived in the deserts, mountains and pine
forests for centuries. They have endured fire, flood and extended
drought, and their knowledge of this region of extremes is
unmatched. The Yavapai language encodes this intimate, exhaustive
knowledge of the land, animals and plants, as well as knowing how
to survive the worst that Mother Nature can throw at us.
In my own tongue, for example, we have no less than nine different
words for acorn, depending on the species, size and time of year
acorns are harvested. This is one of the world’s most perfect
food sources – just what you need for when the going gets
tough. It’s useful to know things like that, and to have the
words to say it.
Debra Utacia Krol is a
contributor to Writers on the Range, (hcn.org). She is a member of
the Xolon Salinan Tribe in California and is the reporter for the
Fort McDowell Yavapai News in Fountain Hills,
Arizona.
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