The Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project, based in Mashpee, plans to co-launch a language immersion preschool next fall, a major milestone in its efforts to revive the language.

Jessie Little Doe Baird was having a bad week. On Sept. 13 she went to a ceremony to ask for cleansing, to ask for help and to give thanks for the good and the bad in her life.

“We need both of those things, unfortunately. We do,” she said in an interview at her home in Aquinnah, built by her husband, the medicine man of the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah), Jason Baird.

For more than a century on Martha’s Vineyard and Cape Cod, the words of the Wampanoag were not their own.

“It was prophesied that language would go away from here for a time,” Jessie Little Doe Baird intones at the opening of filmmaker Anne Makepeace’s documentary We Still Live Here. “When the appointed time came, if the people here decided that they wanted to welcome language home then there would be a way made for that to happen.”