Little Doe’s Big Mac

It began with a dream while Jessie Little Doe Baird slept, in which people spoke to her in a tongue she could not understand. The last person to sound those words had breathed his last some hundred and seventy years earlier. But it became Mrs. Baird’s own dream to revive Wôpanâak, the language her Wampanoag ancestors spoke to express their ideas, emotions, knowledge, memories and values.

Never mind that she was no linguist, that there were no handy study guides, no Rosetta Stone tapes; she just began what must have seemed an impossible task, and for some seventeen years she has stayed at it.

Mrs. Baird founded the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project, an intertribal effort to return fluency to the Wampanoag Nation. She did earn her linguistics degree, working closely with the late Ken Hale at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who believed that letting a language become extinct was like “dropping a bomb on a museum.” Using archival documents — including, from 1663, the first Bible published in America, its title page reading “Mamusse Wunneetupanatamwe up-Biblum God naneeswe Nukkone Testament kah wonk Wusku Testament,” or, In Entire Holy his-Bible God both Old Testament and also New Testament — she began to piece together the Algonquian language of her ancestors.

The revelation of the language has illuminated Wampanoag spirituality, quite apart from the King James Bible. For instance, in Wôpanâak, suffixes indicate whether something is alienable or inalienable — that is, separate or spiritually connected to the person. Land, for example, was considered by the Wampanoags as part of the people, so the word for land has an inalienable ending.

Years ago Mrs. Baird explained to the Gazette that “In English, you can say about someone, ‘He’s a father or he’s a friend,’ but you can’t say that in Wôpanâak because no person in the circle stands by themselves . . . Every kinship term depends on someone else in the circle.”

The Wôpanâak-English dictionary Mrs. Baird began as a student now has more than ten thousand words and counting. She has written storybooks, phrase books, workbooks and prayer books. A few hundred Wampanoag people have taken aWôpanâak class, and several are fluent. Mrs. Baird is raising her youngest child to be bilingual; her daughter will be the first native speaker ofWôpanâak for seven generations. Mrs. Baird has compared teaching her people to speak and readWôpanâak to “taking care of your family.”

Half of the six-thousand-seven-hundred languages spoken in the world today are in danger of disappearing. When they die out, so does an intangible heritage; a people’s connection to their family’s culture is simply erased. It may not be economically useful to learn Wôpanâak now, as it once was to learn English. Yet these are the words that were spoken in greeting, sung in celebration, whispered in prayer and consolation among the grasses and shores of Martha’s Vineyard. Too much has already been lost here. Other Wampanoag people now deal in the world of lawyers and lobbyists, casting their culture onto casino tables. Little Doe chose to listen instead to voices that offered no free travel or photo opportunities, echoes that just urged painstaking work.

Her success has been breathtaking. And what began with voices in her dreams has been rewarded with a dream grant: this week she was one of twenty-three people worldwide recognized with a so-called genius grant from the MacArthur Foundation, a half a million dollars over five years with no strings attached except an expectation to achieve what might otherwise not be possible.

We offer Little Doe our congratulations and wish her success with the opportunities her Big Mac may provide her to forge precious links to a past we all now share.