A film by Anne Makepeace
At the P.E.A.C.E. retreat in June, we previewed the video We Still Live Here As Nutayunean opens in a new tab, a film by Anne Makepeace. It is from 2010 but still very much relevant today.
The film is about Jessie Little Doe Baird, a Wampanoag woman and mother who receives a dream and vision about her ancestors, asking her to revive the Wampanoag language list for a couple of generations. It is the story of a people reclaiming their language and passing it onto their children.
The Wampanoag are the People of the First Light residing in present day Massachusetts Cape Cod, Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard and New Bedford who have been there on this land time immemorial. It is the Wampanoag that saved the Pilgrim religious cult from starving the first winter and beyond. It was the Wampanoag that pushed back against colonial expansion of the Pilgrims and other Puritan colonial land grabs and settlements that resulted in one of the first Indigenous wars on the continent, the so-called King Philip’s War.
Two years later, the Wampanoag land was forcibly taken and claimed – warriors and their families put into slavery in the Bermuda and Caribbean islands or forced north to Canada or west to Ohio. Many, however, stayed or returned to live quietly and marginalized and gradually losing their cultural ways and their language.
After Jessie Little Doe Baird received her vision, she started researching her lost language and found it surprisingly well preserved in Christian bibles, translated into the Wampanoag language – correctly called Wôpanâak. She got into a linguistic program at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology and received a MacArthur Fellowship “Genius Award” to fund her work. At that point she taught tribal members, with the help of elders and her own daughter, how to be the first speakers of Wôpanâak in several generations.
Today, the language has been taught in a Montessori preschool at the tribal headquarters in Mashpee, a program at the Mashpee public schools and with the Aquinnah on Martha’s Vineyard, Many adult programs are increasing throughout southeastern Massachusetts. The Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project opens in a new tab oversees the spread of the language to tribal members scattered from Boston to Plymouth, New Bedford, out to Provincetown on Cape Cod.
Early educators can learn how important home language is to the children we teach and must be supported in every classroom. It plays a major role in the NAEYC accreditation but is often passed over in classrooms of young children.
This film should be shown to teachers of young children and other educators. You can learn more about the making of the film and view a trailer at Makepeace Productions opens in a new tab. Filmmaker Anne Makepeace has also helped produce Our Mother Tongues opens in a new tab, a website that presents the stories of speakers of fourteen Native languages across the U.S. in their own voices.
Craig Simpson, Dorchester, MA
