OCR Text |
Show ‘TheSait Lake Tribune NATION Sunday, March 31,1996 _ A28 _ Was Hethe Last Speaker of the Now-Dead Catawba Language? By Jon Marcus THE ASSOCIATED PRESS BOSTON — When a man who called himself Red Thunder Cloud died in Massachusetts in January at age 76, he was eulogized as the last known speaker of a language called Catawba The world had lost forever a link with centuries-old expressions of love and conflict, of happiness and tragedy. It was another sorry milestone in the decline of native North American dialect and culture Sorry, but not entirely true. ‘Let meput it very diplomatically,” said Barbara Heinemann, who is preparing a Catawbadic- howhe cameto knowit, He lived his life the wayhe lived his life, and to him he was a Catawba Indian.” Linguist Frank Siebert was working on the Catawba reserva- tion in Rock Hill in 1941 when he heard about Red Thunder Cloud froma Mormon missionary teach- er Thunder Cloud had written to seeking information about the tribe. Thunder Cloud stepped off the elevator wrapped in a blanket with a feather in his hair when Siebert met him at a YMCA in NewYork City on May 10, 1941. He spoke some phrases in Cataw- ba and described the way his an- cestors had carpeted the paths of enemies with strawdippedin rat- tlesnake venom, a story widely available from published sources. “He didn't have the words right, and I don't know where he got them from,” remembersSiebert, who nowis retired andlives in Maine. “He kept pumping me for information and I judged from his questions that he was trying to find out, if he went down there, if the Catawba would ac- cept him.” Thunder Cloud eventually tray- eled to the reservation and was accepted bythe tribe in 1942, but was subsequently asked to leave because of a personal dispute. He returned to New England; where he met a Massachusetts Int stitute of Technology linguist) Hugh Matthews, at a Massachusetts powwow. Now retired in Montana, whereheis translating the New Testamentinto the Crow Indian dialect, Matthews said he is convinced that Thunder Cloud could speak Catawba. “T have a good argument based upon comparing his Catawba with that which appears in Frank Speck,” Matthews said. “There are some differences between the two, and they're consistent differpore. thattell me he didn’t pickit ip from Speck.’ | Before he died in 1950, Speck wrote that he was sure of Bhuner Cloud’s commandof the Gatawbadialect. ‘Thunder Cloud was said to have | Recorded the Catawba words he * knew at MIT in the 1940s, but uni- versity officials can't find the recordings and Matthews now says none were made. What is clear is that Thunder Cloud collected reams of notes and journals on the Catawba. His sister retrieved 19 boxes of papers, books and photos from his home in Northbridge, Mass.. when he died after suffering a stroke Jan. 8. Someof the Catawba have asked for them in an attemptto resurrectthedialect. “That was his wholelife’s work e and — preserving this the history of the eastern Indians,” said Williams. ‘Thunder Cloud was invited to the Catawbareservation in Rock Hill for Thanksgiving in 1994. He delivered the opening prayer of the tribe's annualculturalfestival in what he said was Catawba, a languageno oneelse there would have understood. Yet it had lasting impact. tionary: “He did speak things that he learned from written accounts, from (a linguist he met], from var- ious sources, and that wasthe ex- tent of his knowledge.” In fact, tribal historians agree, the Catawba language died way back in 1954 when a chief named Robert Lee Harris went to his grave. Thunder Cloud was only a belated reminder of a lost lanage. “If something is dying out. fo sPu down the paper. Grab your purse. And hurry in. Your latest Clinique ‘And. Clinique,Skin carethat works, Makeup that matters. J onae . sometimestoo late people want to saveit,” Heinemannsaid @ dies is.) Tribal History: The Catawba Indians alone spoke more than a jdozen languages when they were encountered in the 1500s by a Spanish explorer. But, like other native societies, the tribe was hard-hitin the late 16th and 17th centuries by epidemics and by European economic expansion — es- BONUS. pecially after 1670, when a trade ‘in Indian slaves began in whatis nowSouth Carolina. The 50 Catawba who remained in South Carolina by the late 1800s gave up their property in exchange for land away from white settlements. Today, 2,500 people make their homes on the Catawbareservation in Rock Hill, S.C. Another 500 live in the Pueblo, Colo., area, where their ancestors migrated in the 1880s. There are about 200) in Oklahoma, the’ descendants of a group that léft South Carolina in about 1900. | Their language lives On in the namesof the Peedee and Santee rivers and other Southern landmarks — there's a Catawba College in Catawba County, N.C., and .a Catawba grape — but no one speaks it fully and fluently. “The battle of the Wild West was transferred to the classroom,” said Michael Krauss, director of the Alaska Native Language Center at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks. ‘Teachers punished Native American children for speaking their ianguages,all in the nameof bettering their conditions and to make them more American.” ~ AROMATIC: ___EUXIR ‘Big Gaps’: Heinemann and a team oflinguists in South Caroli- na are compiling a Catawba dictionary. She said she is convinced it will be possible to recreate the language, but acknowledges there are “big, big gaps and holes because we are nolongerableto talk to the people” whospokeit. In Catawba, nouns are neither singular nor plural and words that seem almost identical have different meanings based ontheir pronunciation. “Ya” is the verb meaning “to dig,” i and “ya-re” means “he ion “Is » hesuk” dig- is — literally, “night sun.” “All native languages have fully developed vocabularies,” said Bruce Pearson, a linguistic anthropologist at the University of South Carolina who is studying Catawba and three other extinct or endangered languages: Dela, ware, Shawnee and Wyandotte, which has not been spoken for a generation. “They're not systems , of grunts. Theyare as fully developed as English or any otherlanguage _ Red Thunder Cloud told ; friends he learned to speak Catawbaas a boy in the 1920s at the knee of a grandfather named Strong Eagle, a story tribal historians dismiss. The historians, in* cluding Tom Blumer,an editor at the Library of Congress, believe he picked up some vocabulary from a 1934 book on the Catawba dialect by an anthropologist by Speck. Born Carlos Westez in New- port, R.L, Red Thunder Cloud was part Puerto Rican andhis relatives say they don't know if he had any native blood. Butafter atas a youth, he the tiny Shinnecoc! Island. Later, he lived for a time on a Shinnecock reservation Westez began to call himself Red Thunder Cloud, was married for a while to a Blackfoot woman and made his living teaching American Indian dance and occasionally performing, and by sellrds. mail-order herbs ME Ail | know is that he studied ~ the , Nandy Williams. “y his niece, don't know Shop Monday-Saturday 10-8 ang Sunday 12-6 at ail Ditiera's locations. We weicome your Ditard's Cregt Card. The American Express” Card, Diners Siub intemal jhonal. Mastercard Vie” and The rscover Card |