watched this absolutely fascinating pbs documentary last night. “In 1993, Jessie Little Doe Baird had dreams in a language that her Wampanoag people stopped using more than 100 years ago. The new PBS film We Still Live Here shows how they brought their language back to life.”
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i was struck by so many things in this wonderful film: how our bodies and spirits r deeply connected to our ancestors, how language articulates our culture and identity and is our link to the past and future, and therefore, how the loss of one’s language can mean a loss of one’s narrative, one’s history.
it is ironic that translations of the bible into wampanoag (the purpose was to replace one culture/belief system with another) were instrumental in reviving the wampanoag language, which had been dead for over a century.
i was surprised by the large number of legal documents that were submitted by the wampanoag people, in their own language, to boston courts, asking for justice and a stop to the theft of their land. the wampanoag did not have horses or carriages and so their feet were literally rooted to the land. in wampanoag the expression for losing one’s land can only be translated in english as “falling away” such that there is no ground under one’s feet.
talking about land theft, the point was made that the white settlers developed an incredibly complex legal system which made it possible to proceed with the pilfering thru legal justification and window dressing. that’s not so different today. western laws can justify and obfuscate anything – torture, preemptive solitary confinement, profiling, entrapment, sanctions, war, occupation and sundry drone attacks. if it sounds marginally legal, it’s ok.
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more here.