Speaking the language of the land

Story by Jon Christensen

As the sun rose over Lake Tahoe, a line of children held hands and prayed to the lake in their native tongue, Washoe. The sunlight glowed on the water and splashed bright color on their faces where they stood looking out over the water.

"Lake Tahoe is Washoe land - da'aw'aga wa-siw 'itde' semu. The fish run at Tahoe, and they are the people's food. Medicine, food, and ornaments are found here. We would like to return to Tahoe and live and feel good in the future - da'aw'aga'a cigabut lanali dihamo'anaw 'us gabigi."

Photo by Kit Miller

When the prayer was over, the children bent down and scooped water from the waves lapping quietly at the shore to wash their faces. Some got their shoes wet and laughed. The respectful, serious scene quickly dissolved in the happy chaos of children at the beach.

Herman Holbrook, 73, the eldest of the elders present at this ceremony, stood on the deck of the Meeks Bay Resort. He looked down at the children with a bemused smile.

Last summer, the Washoe Indian Tribe was granted the U.S. Forest Service concession for the Meeks Bay Resort, a complex of motel rooms and a small marina on a sheltered crescent of white sand beach on the west side of the lake. Taking over Meeks Bay was a historic first step bringing the tribe back to Lake Tahoe, the spiritual center of their world and the home of their language. Washoes traditionally spent summers at Tahoe and winters in the lower valleys to the east.

Before the resort opened for tourists this summer, half a dozen adults and a dozen children from a new Washoe language immersion school came up from the tribe's Carson Valley reservation to spend a week at Meeks Bay reviving their ties to the lake and their language.

The Washoe tribe now numbers around 1,500 members. But fewer than 50 of them learned to speak Washoe as infants, and most of those who did are over 60 years old now. After watching a couple generations of young people go from understanding the language when elders spoke to them but replying in English, to no longer being able to speak or understand more than a handful of words, the elders and tribal leaders decided to do something.

Herman and another elder started volunteering in the tribe's Head Start program teaching Washoe to preschoolers. His nephew's wife, Laura Fillmore, took on the job of coordinating the program as the kids grew and wanted to continue learning in Washoe. Other elders volunteered. They set up classes in a building that was originally built to house a convenience store on the reservation. Last year, it became a full-time school for kindergarten through sixth, and this year seventh grade. "The house where Washoe is spoken," they called it, "Washiw Wagayaya Mangal."

This is a time of great challenges for the Washoe tribe. Their hopes and dreams are tested every day by reality. The school has struggled to raise money. The Washoe language itself is being cobbled back together by elders, like Herman, who are in fact the children of the last generation to really know the language. They represent the last link to the past.

While the children played on the beach and waited for a visiting botanist to lead a hike in nearby Meeks meadow, the elders sat in the shade and forced memories from their tongues. They discussed and debated the names of places around the lake, trying to reconnect their language and the land.

When the botanist, Gail Durham, arrived the children introduced themselves in Washoe: Arrow, Grizzly Bear, White Owl, Spider, Morning Star, Willow, Blue Jay. The children had picked their names. The elders gave them the Washoe words. The names fit surprisingly well. Alex Box, 7, is "Maduk c'ay c'ay," Blue Jay, a scruffy, inquisitive, abrasive child, distracting and easily distracted.

She immediately attached herself to the visiting botanist and asked about plants that the elders had dried and pressed. She fingered each of them and said their Washoe and English names.

"What is this called?" asked Alex.

"Spring parsley," said Gail.

"This is called death camas," said Alex. Her cousins had once picked the pretty flower and ate the bulb, thinking it was a wild onion, she said. They got very sick.

"You have to know your plants before you eat them," said Gail. "Do you know this one?"

"We call it caterpillar brush," said Alex.

"Yes, it gets lots of caterpillars," said Gail. "It's also called bitter brush. It's an ice cream plant for deer."

On the hike Blue Jay chattered along. "I think I might become an archaeologist or a scientist," she said. "I like the plants. I like rivers, lakes, to swim, hike. I like to look at pretty trees."

Alex had just finished her first year in the Washoe immersion school. She was in second grade. Although she had picked up the language quickly, she had a hard time fitting in. She fought a lot with the other kids who still did not accept her. Alex comes from a broken mixed home. Her mother is Washoe; her father is white. She lives with her grandmother and uncle on the tribe's beautiful but hardscrabble reservation in Carson Valley.

Unemployment on the reservation runs over 40 percent according to the tribe. Most families live in poverty. The test scores of Indian children tend to drop every year as they get closer to high school graduation and the dropout rate is high. Last night, one of the children woke up screaming. "You're all drunk!" It was a bad dream.

Language doesn't protect you from bad dreams, but it can help heal the pain of life. For Blue Jay, Washoe is an anchor in a rough life. She is a bright student and has been doing better in school. She immerses herself in reading Washoe. The world presses in on her world, but she has carved out a little space for Washoe dreams.

Alan Wallace, 49, followed a path through Meeks meadow, talking with Gail Durham and Laura Fillmore about plants and bringing kids to the lake and their language.

"Having Washoes up here speaking Washoe is critical," said Alan, as the kids goofed off along the trail. "It's our home. It's where we're supposed to be. You can't get enough of it and you can't go wrong with it."

Alan is the brother of tribal chairman Brian Wallace. He works in the tribe's environmental program managing Meeks meadow under an agreement with the Forest Service. "Our goal is restoration not just preservation," he said. "The idea is to make this into something living again, with people using it and not just looking at it like a zoo."

He talked with Gail and Laura about how the plants around Lake Tahoe were traditionally used: manzanita for snowshoes, yarrow for toothaches, the roots of bracken ferns to make black die for baskets, alder for bows, and willow bark for headaches. Alan looks back wistfully to that time he never knew, when people knew how to survive on the land.

When he was a young man, just out of the military, Alan got involved with the movement for Indian land rights and sovereignty. Those visions faded for many years as he worked to make a living as an artist. But now those dreams have a chance to be made real here at Lake Tahoe. And it is his generation that has the most to prove.

Photo by Kit Miller

The Washoe immersion program is making a connection between the elders and the children, the past and the future. But it is in the eyes of Alan's generation - the generation in between, the generation that almost lost the connection - that hope burns brightest. Alan only understands a few words of Washoe. But he has heard stories of the magical tie between language and land. And he believes.

"When the land speaks it'll speak in a native tongue," he said. "So if you want to understand the land you have to speak the language. And if you speak your language to the land it will understand."

That afternoon the kids played games with Eugene Hattori, an archaeologist with the Nevada State Historic Preservation Office, who showed them a 10,000-year-old spear point that could be Washoe. He showed them how to flake an arrowhead from obsidian and how to use a hand drill to make a hole in stone or shell. "Cool" and "awesome," said the kids. They followed him to the beach and learned how to throw an atl atl to hunt antelope and mountain sheep.

Herman Holbrook watched them play as Tony Smokey peppered him with questions about the old days and some of the other elders listened in. The tribe's environmental program is conducting interviews with all of the tribal elders to learn as much as possible about how things used to be so they can figure out what they want to get back.

As a boy, Herman spent summers up at Lake Tahoe. He worked in a sawmill near Meyers as a teenager in the 1930's. In between puffs on a cigarette, he answered Tony's questions with a deadpan grin.

"Did you visit Cave Rock?" asked Tony.

"No," said Herman.

"Did you look for plants?"

"I wasn't looking for plants," he said, with a twinkle in his eye.

"He was looking for girls," said one of the other old men with a laugh. "They didn't plant them."

"Did you notice any difference in the color of the lake?" asked Tony. v "Never paid attention to it," said Herman.

Although Herman wasn't much interested in the lake he had learned something valuable, his mother tongue. He spoke Washoe every morning with his mother until he was 14. Then he went to the Stewart Indian School. He spoke Washoe there too, he said. Students weren't punished for speaking their native tongues in those days, like they had been before. It was good there was a school like Stewart where Indians could learn trades, such as carpentry, plumbing, and electricity, he said. "At least you get three squares a day if you've got a trade."

At 17, Herman enlisted in the Navy. He was in 10th grade. He served in the Pacific during World War II. After six years he got out. He found a job driving trucks all over Nevada.

He had seen the world and he was glad he had and glad too that he grew up bilingual.

"I get along no matter where I go," he said.

He squinted at Blue Jay and the other kids, with a smile both wary and wry. Right now this school seemed more like a camping trip with an extended family and all of their troublesome children. The chaos was barely contained.

"That's life," he said. "But what a great life it is right here like this."

"Maduk c'ay c'ay," said Herman, calling Blue Jay's Washoe name. "What's that?" He pointed at a bird on the water.

"Dilek," said Alex. "Duck."

"There was hardly no Washoe speakers for a while," said Herman. "But we're going to have a lot of them pretty soon. As long as we got kids growing up with it, the language won't die off."

That evening after dinner the children played outside beside the water, wrestling on the sand, leaping from rock to rock, until the sky turned orange and pink and finally deep dark blue. The elders sat inside and talked about Washoe words for the land.

There are some 6,000 languages spoken in the world today. But many of those languages are spoken by so few people that they are expected to die out, leaving only a few hundred languages by the end of the next century. Washoe is among the 200 Native American languages on the endangered list in the United States. Close to 80 percent of those languages are no longer being learned by children. They are moribund languages headed for extinction.

But Washoe refuses to die. Washoe is a living language, not a dead language.

The elders discussed the names for Fallen Leaf Lake and Emerald Bay. They debated pronunciations and spelling. Eleanore Smokey closed her eyes to recall her mother's pronunciation. She said the words slowly and clearly.

Laura Fillmore spelled it out.

"Is this final?" asked Eleanore.

"Nothing is ever final," said Laura. "We're making history."

They talked about the future of the school. They just got $100,000 for school, but that's only a third of their basic budget, not to mention their dreams. They would like to reclaim buildings at Stewart Indian School in Carson City, start a charter school under the tribal government, hire two full-time teachers, and obtain per capita student funding from the state and federal government.

The elders called the children in to tell them the names around the lake and have them color in maps of the lake for themselves. As the sun went down, the children gathered in the room around two long tables. They listened and wrote the names on their own maps, and colored Lake Tahoe blue, connecting three generations and a place together, and weaving a new world for the Washoe.

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