Family Attempts To Save An Endangered Language, One Child At A Time

Resources: Yuchi Language Project

Native Language Immersion Study

Halay Turning Heart speaks only Yuchi to her three children in an effort to revitalize the language. 

AUDIO OF HALAY AND DAUGHTER TALKING IN YUCHI 

Yuchi is one of more than 3,000 endangered indigenous languages. The United Nations estimates every two weeks a language is lost. Many Native American tribes offer language classes to elementary school students, but linguists say the best way to learn is starting at birth. Halay and her husband have banned English from their home in an attempt to save Yuchi.

HALAY: 25 That's part of my role is as kind of a bridge because I, I had the gift of learning from our elders and I can be a bridge to our youngest generation, and try to fill that gap so that it will be continuous. We know our language was spoken for thousands of years, you know, passed from mother to child and here suddenly it's almost lost. And so this is our opportunity and our responsibility to continue that line. 

But that responsibility can be daunting as Halay faces critics, attackers, and obstacles along the way.

This is 2 Lives. I’m Laurel Morales.

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When Halay was growing up she learned to speak Yuchi from her father who was also learning it as a second language.

HALAY:  He would tell us, you know, don't forget that you're Yuchi and you’re Seminol...As a second language he would speak to me and my brother in the language as much as he could, as well as take us to visit elders from a young age.

And Halay loved learning Yuchi. With each new word, she says a whole world would open up.

Her dad would take her and her brother to camp at the Yuchi ceremonial grounds where all the remaining Yuchi speaking elders would gather.

HALAY: So that was a really beautiful feeling of community there where there's all these other camps around. And then everyone comes together for the dances and for the meals and ceremonies... You know, the kids just go camp to camp … There were these moments of realization that you assume there's always someone else out there.

But as she became a teenager Halay learned she was one of only a few who spoke her native tongue as she was called to lead naming ceremonies. At the time there were fewer than two dozen who spoke Yuchi as their first language and all of them were grandparents of non-speakers. 

Since Yuchi was not a written language and no formal classes were available, Halay with the help of her dad sought out elders in her community to expand her ability to speak the Yuchi language. Halay would visit with one elder Josephine Keith through a master-apprentice program for a couple hours every day. Together they formed a strong bond.

HALAY: She spoke super fast. And so it was a really strong immersion experience, no English, you know, for a couple of hours. 

Josephine taught Halay to sew in Yuchi or they’d cook a meal or organize her pantry all while speaking Yuchi.

HALAY: I would try to speak as much as I could, you know, making my own sentences and I would try things out and ask her, you know, kate dowa is this right? And if she couldn't understand me, I knew it wasn't right (laughs). 

She learned Yuchi is classified as an isolate, meaning it’s unrelated to any other language in the world. There’s no similar language to consult and there were very few written materials.

HALAY: One of the unique things that I really enjoy about learning Yuchi is that there's different pronouns for Yuchi people and everyone else. And so when you're talking about a Yuchi person, you use special pronouns…so that was another thing that just really sparked me that in even within our language being Yuchi is so special, it's I it's critical. It's important. You have your own identity and that's embedded in the language.

Halay felt a sense of belonging in her language where she could encode her history, culture, and traditions. Even though few people spoke Yuchi fluently, she felt connected to a larger web of Yuchi culture that extends milenia.

HALAY: And that's something that our elders always say, you know, (in Yuchi) the giver of breath, creator, God gave us our Yuchi language and it's up to us to carry it on that there's no other language like it. In our own language we're called (in Yuchi) children of the sun or people of the sun. And so they say when the sun rises, she looks for her children, her Yuchi people. And as long as she sees her children she'll keep rising. But if ever there's a day when she rises and her Yuchi people are no longer there she'll go back down and she won't rise again, that everything will turn to darkness. PAUSE

Even though she was set apart from kids her age and pop culture, Halay says she didn’t feel isolated. Her closest friends were Yuchi elders in their eighties and nineties. 

HALAY: They were the people I spent the most time with. So, you know, they're not gonna live forever…

In the 1800s the U.S. government sent the Yuchi from their eastern homeland to Oklahoma on what’s known as the Trail of Tears. Then the federal government forced hundreds of thousands of Native American children to attend boarding schools, where teachers punished them for speaking their language. Today the Yuchi Nation remains in Oklahoma as a tribe that is unrecognized by the federal government. 

Some Yuchi were able to hold onto their language but many stopped speaking it altogether or wouldn’t speak it to their own children. 

HALAY: Even my own great-grandmother who went to boarding school at age 14 she didn't forget the language, but she didn't pass it on. That's why my grandpa didn't really speak. He knew some things. And even though he heard the language, he didn't actually speak. And then his son, my father is the one who kind of had this realization that we need to learn.

Halay’s father Richard Grounds was in graduate school at Princeton when he went to the Firestone library to look up the Yuchi in a reference book of Native American Tribes.

RICHARD: I looked up the chapter on the Yuchi and it literally said we were an extinct nation. It was unbelievable…It was so overwhelming and bizarre to be sitting in one of the finest libraries in the world a place where human knowledge is collected and revered and they couldn’t get the facts of our indigenous nation's existence right.

He traced it all the way back to government reports from the 1830s that claimed the Yuchi people were extinct. 

RICHARD: It’s extremely frustrating it just gives you a feeling that you’re in a nightmare situation. Is this for real, is this what they’re really saying about us?...Here we are we have elders who still speak our language. We are still carrying our ceremonies. We know who we are. Of course this is all part of the colonial process of erasing indigenous communities, in other words the rights and claims of indigenous peoples to their own rights, their own lands, their own languages, their own ceremonial ways.  

So in 1996 Halay’s dad  started the Yuchi Language Project and opened the Yuchi House where people young and old could come to share the language everyday. 

RICHARD: Mos Cahwee our founding elder then began opening prayers the first thing he would say to the Creator, ‘we, Yuchi people, we are still here.’ And it was like he was addressing the Creator in the gift of the language and saying in the language ‘we’re still here.’

Some elders began to share what they knew, while younger generations absorbed what they could. Still many Yuchi didn’t see the point.

HALAY: Because our elders have grown up in a society that devalued the language that they were often made fun of or oppressed for the language, they were warning me. They were saying, go get your education, you know, do something. You can make money at. The language isn't gonna get you anywhere. 

Halay did go away to college. She studied linguistics, which only deepened her belief that language connected her to her history and identity. That’s also where she met Jiles Turning Heart, a Lakota, who wanted a partner committed to her culture. 

Early on in their relationship Halay told Jiles she wanted children and she wanted them to speak Yuchi.

JILES: That was something I always wanted in a partner I grew up traditionally, dancing, going to ceremonies. I wanted to be with someone who was also strong in their culture…Having the kids learn Yuchi as their first language is a gift something I wish I was given. Without that there’s such a search for your connection to the world to your culture. And you can spend years doing that later in life. But with your language you really know who you are and where you come from.

Jiles points out his tribe, the Lakota, are a matrilineal people.

JILES: Whenever we marry we go with the wife’s family and we will help them. I took that to heart…Because Halay spoke her language. I knew that was something very important to her identity if we took it to the next step that was something I wholeheartedly be 100% wanted to take part in. I didn’t want to be someone who support it from a distance where ‘I support you in your effort but that’s your effort.’  

HALAY:  That's been very important to me that my kids have that opportunity. And since I can give them that, it's like, why not? … I always felt like that's the ultimate revitalization is to have children who speak as the first language with the hope that they will grow up and continue that line and raise their own children in the language that it could grow on from there. 

While she was away at college, two elders died. Not long after she came home, Josephine Keith also passed. While her death was not sudden, it did come as a shock to Halay. She felt her passing deeply and it built Halay’s resolve to continue learning and carry on her legacy.

HALAY: With every funeral, of course you wished you had more time. As each elder passed, that responsibility grew and I felt more of a weight, more of an urgency to learn the language, to pass it on to, rather than counting down our speakers to add more to that list.

When she came home to Oklahoma, Halay attended the ribbon dance with hundreds of other Yuchi people but little Yuchi was spoken. Many Yuchi believe their prayers are much stronger when spoken in their language. So Halay was kept busy attending all kinds of ceremonies

HALAY: There just wasn't anybody else, that middle generation, to help fulfill that role. And so that's when I realized I've gotta learn as much as I can … it's like becoming an elder before your time with, you know, with all due respect and humility, but it really is, it can be a burden because there's no one else to call upon. 

In 2014 Jiles and Halay got married and two years later they had a son.  

HALAY: As a parent, I feel like it's such a gift I could give to my kids, uh, enabling them to have the Yuchi worldview from their very beginning in life that it gives them that identity and strength and confidence that wherever they go in the world, you know, whatever they do, they'll they'll have that foundation. If you know who you are, then you can do anything.  

In Yuchi, for example, there is no way to grammatically separate wildlife from humans. In that way humans are not superior to animals. Halay says the more we can connect with this ancient way of thinking, the more we can relate to and care for one another.

HALAY: Having that as their foundational worldview is so different than my experience, whereas I was already pretty much formed into English, um, thinking I can gift my kids the opportunity to actually see the world through a Yuchi lens.

As her son grew older Halay quickly realized she wasn’t enough to sustain his lifetime language development, that in order for this to work they needed a community of speakers. So in 2018, Halay started a Yuchi school, where about 20 children learn all their subjects in Yuchi.

CLASS RECITING IN YUCHI

Today they have three children under the age of six and all speak Yuchi at home. Sometimes Lakota. They also know English – it’s unavoidable – but they only speak it elsewhere. They try to avoid TV and media but if her now six year old wants to watch a show or play a game, Halay will switch the language on the iPad to Spanish. Halay says even though some might argue Spanish is also a colonial language, it's less pervasive than English. 

BRING IN AUDIO OF BABY SPEAKING YUCHI

The older kids take pride in teaching their baby sister Yuchi. 

THE YOUNGEST SPEAKING YUCHI 

HALAY: When we heard my youngest one starting to speak on her own, we all just kind of lit up. I remember, you know, my other kids there, they were proud. It's cute, like they're owners and, you know, helping her learn Yuchi too. So they were proud. Everyone's involved… she’ll say like t’AlA dEt@, I want more TOshE dEt@, I want milk.

The family faces many critics in Oklahoma, where state legislators passed a law making English the official language in 2010. When they go to the grocery or a restaurant, Halay feels people looking at them with curiosity and judgment. 

HALAY: I don’t think everyone understands or like, ‘why are you doing this?’ 

And other times her kids have to deal with the criticism.   

HALAY: They'll say to my kids, ‘oh, I can't understand you. You have to speak English here.’… you know sometimes just us against the world. 

Halay and her husband also face tension within their community. Other tribal members fear Yuchi kids might fall behind in an English-dominant world. But the couple continues to come back to the research that points to the cognitive benefits.

One of the trickiest things to navigate is attempting to enforce language rules with friends and family who don’t speak Yuchi. 

HALAY: I sometimes feel guilty because I don't maybe not always promote them, spending time with English speaking people. And that is kind of a sacrifice. … I've really been with my kids every day, all day, you know, for six years. …since I'm their main language source, I am with them and kind of overseeing the language dynamic. I try to balance obviously I want them to have relationships with other family members.

Sometimes Halay views these visits with relatives as informal English classes and allows the kids to interact in English on a temporary basis.  

HALAY:  Having to negotiate with this outside world in English and how to shield the kids from some of that, or what I tell them, you know, (in Yuchi), that we are Yuchi, we speak Yuchi to each other, but sometimes we, we have to speak English to other people. Um, but this is a boundary for us, you know, we're, we're Yuchi together. 

Still Halay says she tries not to be too prescriptive about her kids’ future.

HALAY: I of course hope that they will continue speaking and it's definitely a choice. Um, and eventually I won't be able to make that choice for them … There's always the fear of, uh, which I suppose every parent has some version of this, but that, you know, you're somehow ruining your kids and that, uh, your relationship with them will suffer somehow. There's always a fear that they would rebel or hate the language or resist. I think a certain level of resistance is probably normal for anything your family's committed to. There’s a stage when it’s not so appealing.

She says that’s where their community comes in so it’s not just their mom speaking in Yuchi but they have friends they can communicate with. Today her oldest who’s six is fluent and interacts with other children who will soon be fluent.

HALAY: My son, some days he's a huge advocate and he'll be correcting anybody who speaks English, he'll say (in Yuchi) you know, don't talk English. Cause he hears me doing that. You know, so he's picking up on it.… he's proud, you know, he's proud that he could speak because he's recognized a lot for that. … but he has had times when…he gets frustrated and he'll say something like (in Yuchi) ‘I don't speak Yuchi’ or something like that. He's pushing back at times out of frustration.

Today Halay helps run the Yuchi House and the Yuchi Language Project. She has helped return Yuchi to a living language but knows her work will never be done. 

HALAY: Even our own elders, I think wondered, will kids ever even speak the language? … when they saw my kids speak, you know the elders who did see them, um, I think that was a realization that yes, it is possible. It is happening. …so that's kind of what we are carrying on is their dreams, their hopes, their legacy that the language wouldn't end with them.

LAUREL: What's been the most fulfilling thing about this work?

HALAY: Being able to wake up every day and hear my kids speak to me back to me in the language, you know, for a lot of years we were talking, but people couldn't speak back. And that now seeing that, that full circle, that feedback is the best. I really haven't had those moments much of like wanting to give up, but there have been some real challenges. Um, you know, when I felt attacked and felt let down, even by our own people and...But to somehow overcome all of that and dig down and really grasp onto those bright spots, those bright sparks in life, where I've had, you know, just like the joy of discovering a word that would've been lost, you know, that was almost lost or a concept that's not in English, that can't be translated. It's just amazing how close we were to completely losing it. And you know, not that we are in a very, um, settled or complacent situation, we can never rest. That's the reality.

This is 2 Lives. I’m Laurel Morales.