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The subject just came up over at the “Other Blackfoot” section of what resources are there for learning our ancestors’ language. I reported that things are up in the air for learning Tutelo, the version of Eastern Siouan language that’s been recorded. (The language has been labelled extinct for about a hundred years. There are no truly fluent speakers of it, a few are re-learning it, though the efforts are scattered and marred by political divisions.)
Any of us whose Ancestors spent some generations in Appalachia, though, likely spoke Appalachian Iroquois. When our people lived in Pennsylvania they were known to have been in close association with the Seneca administering the tribes aligned with the League in that region. This family, later known by the name of Logan, moved into the mountains as this confederation fell apart.
Also, there’s good evidence that this would have been a prominent Native langauge spoken by these Mountain Indians and their descendants. It was still spoken in the 1950’s. Some speakers still are living.
At any rate, there is a wonderful resource for learning this language, and I expect, studying this will be helpful in tackling Tutelo when the teaching of it becomes better organized. I’m on the Mingo e-list, love the conversations and am doing my “Daily Mingo” lesson faithfully.
The “informant” for the Mingo site is from the town of Elkins, WV. He says that in a nearby town (Parsons??) virtually everyone there is a Blackfoot descendant. I should ask him if they were Mingo speakers. I suspect they were in the old days.
The link is: http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/egads/mingo/
Look for the link towards the end of the first page that will allow you to join the e-list.
BTW, this has been a labor of love, no grants, no subsidies. The people who put this together deserve all the appreciation and support they can get.
Another benefit, this language appears to be a dialect of Seneca, very similar to Cayuga, also — at least the first few basic words that most of us retain from learning a new language, so you are likely to get a chance to actually use some of it.
Let me add that the political/philosophical bent of the mountain Indians on the Mingo e-list is some of the best thinking on the ‘net and right up our alley.
There’s a tendency to look at “Smidgen Injuns” or non-status NDN’s as the descendants of “sell-outs” who took the easy way out and assimilated. What you find in these people, though, is the knowledge that they came from die-hard renegades who refused to “sell-out” and put themselves on some “white man’s list,” or sign any treaty.
So it didn’t work out that way too good for most families . . . at least when it comes to maintaining their identity. Most were inundated by the tidal waves of Americans overwhelming the cultural landscape. (Though when it comes to survival, they’ve generally thrived.)
It’s great though, to be around people who KNOW their families did start out with that motivation and were able to withstand the onslaught with relative success. I’ve found them to be the best people to give me a sense of what motivations were going on in my own family, and the echoes of it that remain.
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