And yet, I think, more will be lost than simply a bouquet of discrete understandings -- about bears or namesakes. If the language dies, we will lose something personal, a degree of understanding that resides, for most fluent speakers, on some unconscious level. We will lose our sense of ourselves and our culture. There are many aspects of culture that are extralingual -- that is, they exist outside or in spite of language: kinship, legal systems, governance, history, personal identity. But there is very little that is "extralingual" about story, about language itself. I think what I am trying to say is that we will lose beauty -- the beauty of the particular, the beauty of the past and the intricacies of a language tailored for our space in the world.
A language too beautiful to lose
Yes, that's it: We will lose beauty.
My older brother Anton and I, among many others, have been trying to do something about that. For the last year, we have been working on a grant to record, transcribe and translate Ojibwe speech in order to compile what will be the first (and only) practical Ojibwe language grammar. Since December, we have traveled once, sometimes twice, a week, from our homes on the western edge of our Minnesota reservation to the east, to small communities named Inger, Onigum, Bena and Ball Club, where we record Ojibwe speakers. We've also taken longer trips to Red Lake Reservation (to the north) and south to Mille Lacs.
--
RECORDING Ojibwe speech in Minnesota, where the average age of fluent Ojibwe speakers is 55, means recording old people. My brother, at 38, is very good at this, much better than I am. For starters, he is much more fluent. And he looks like a handsome version of Tonto: lean, medium height, clear eyes and smooth face, very black shiny braids and very white shiny teeth. This helps. He has made this kind of activity his life's work; it is what he does.
Right after college, he apprenticed himself to Archie Mosay, at that time the oldest and most influential Ojibwe spiritual leader, who grew up in the hills of the St. Croix River Valley in Wisconsin and did not have an English name until he was 12 and a white farmer he worked for gave him a pocket knife and the name "Archie." He kept the knife and the name for another 82 years. Archie and my brother were friends. Deep affection and respect and tenderness ran in both directions.
