Among the stalls of Indigenous artwork and a storytelling booth at the Rappahannock Tribe Pow Wow, Kayla Locklear and her seven-year-old daughter Hanna sit under a canopy at a table with boxes of crayons and a stack of illustrations for kids to take and color. There is an ear of corn, a cucumber, a stream and a bird. But there’s something under the illustrations that catch the eye and your phone.
“QR codes so that they can listen to the words in our Powhatan Algonquian language,” Locklear points out.
While parents struggle to get kids off their phones and into tribal activities, the QR codes are a way to redirect kids to learn about their cultures and their language.
“That's the good thing about it,” Locklear says. “The parents can get involved. So, they take these sheets with them and then they can listen to it and practice and get more familiar.”
Locklear is a citizen of the Chickahominy Tribe and their language program manager. Her Tribe is part of a group of eight state and federally-recognized Tribes in Virginia slowly recovering the Algonquian language their ancestors once spoke. And the program has an Algonquian name.
“Omisun, which means the awakening. One of the things that we really try to get across to our communities is that our language is not dead but it's just sleeping and we are awakening it.”
How was the language lost?
“As some of our community members from Nansemond said, we are where the boat landed. So, our tribes took a direct hit for Indian country really,” Locklear explains. “To survive, we assimilated. So one of those things was learning English and a loss of a lot of our language. But that's one of the things that we had to do, to try to survive and keep our people here. That was part of the fight.”
Hearing their language spoken again can be difficult on tribal elders who grew up during the 43 years of the 1924 Racial Integrity Act. That law made it illegal to be Indian in Virginia.
“My grandmother, for example, reliving those traumas that she faced as American Indian, in her time, and just to hear those words in our language that triggers those things and it makes you think about all those times when being American Indian wasn't enough and or it wasn't valid or you weren’t real.”
The Tribes work with linguists to build on the words they know. Algonquian is an oral language that was translated into writing by colonists. And that’s part of the Tribes’ next hurdle.
“How will we use English letters to spell these words, because there's a lot of words that English just doesn't have those letters. For example we say, ‘wingapo,’ which means hello. Some of our communities say ‘winkapo,’ so they say it with a K. But as our linguists have told us, our Algonquian language has a sound between a G and a K but there's no English letter for that. So they're both correct, we can say it either way.”
Locklear calls it a healing journey.
“We're finding out so much about our people and our ancestors through this process,” she says. “It gives us this sense, this new sense of pride, like wow, we really did these things. They’re like ‘we're so proud of our people. And what they accomplished and what they've been through and how they were still able to persevere.’”
Participating Tribes are the Mattaponi, Pamunkey, Upper Mattaponi, Patawomeck, Rappahannock, Chickahominy, Eastern Chickahominy and Nansemond. Other languages being slowly reclaimed by Tribes in Virginia include subgroups of Iroquoian and Siouan, which include the Monacan, Nottaway and Cheroenhaka Nottoway.
This report, provided by Virginia Public Radio, was made possible with support from the Virginia Education Association.
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