Among Oklahoma’s 2,636-member Wichita tribe, octogenarian Doris McLemore is the sole person who fluently speaks the native language.
And Terri Parton, president of Wichita and Affiliated Tribes, says that makes her both a treasure and an imperiled, cultural linchpin.
“We are trying currently to get as much information out of her as we can. Once she’s gone …” says Parton, also the tribes’ liaison to the Breath of Life Institute, an offshoot of the quasi-federal Endangered Language Fund.
“If we lose languages, especially at the rate we are losing them now … we lose the definition of what it means to be human,” says Dr. Mary Linn, a University of Oklahoma linguist who is co-coordinator of the Oklahoma Breath of Life workshops and archival efforts aimed at nine tribes, including the Wichita.
“Every single language is a huge library,” she added. “And once that disappears, we cannot really get it back.”
Developing a coterie of community-based American Indians who are restoring, recording and inputting tribal languages into a publicly accessible online database is a broad aim of the project focusing on Oklahoma, which has 39 officially recognized tribes. In addition to Wichita, the participants include the Alabama, Apache, Shawnee and Natchez Indians. As another example, six of the 10,000 Natchez in Oklahoma are fluent in their tribal language.
The aimed-for language revival in Oklahoma, which is funded by the National Science Foundation and National Geographic’s Enduring Voices Project, also draws recordings and other documents collected by linguists, beginning roughly in the mid-20th Century. For some of the Oklahoma languages, however, no documentation whatsoever has been discovered.
