Wampanoags Regain Their Voice

Eighteen years ago Jessie “Little Doe” Baird was a Wampanoag social worker living in Mashpee. By day, she worked in human services; by night, she was enfolded into dreams where her elders spoke to her in a language she could not understand.

The dreams persisted, and over time began to affect her waking hours. She felt a tug as she passed a Sippewissett sign on her daily drive to work.

Finally, it hit her. Baird’s elders were speaking to her in Wampanoag—her language, but one that had ceased to be spoken than a century before. Religious conversion, mainstream education and laws against the use of the language had all but obliterated it; no one had fluently spoken the language for more than 150 years.

She single-handedly began the process of re-learning and reintroducing the lost language to the Wampanoag people in Mashpee and Aquinnah.

On Sunday, the story of Baird’s ongoing mission to re-learn the Wampanoag language was portrayed in the documentary “We Still Live Here” that screened at the 11th Annual Martha’s Vineyard Film Festival.

Her awe-inspiring journey, captured by director Anne Makepeace, has taken her from the cliffs of Aquinnah, where her husband lives, to the halls of MIT, where she earned a master’s degree in linguistics in 2000.

To say the Wampanoag people are reclaiming just a language is limiting. The process of re-learning a language involves more than enduring tedious hours of complex sentence structuring and learning new pronunciations—although the language is incredibly hard to learn. Baird has forged a new Rosetta Stone that can reveal a culture of buried history and secrets.  

Through her work with the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project, begun in 1993, Baird has overseen the development of a dictionary with more than 11,000 words and the creation of Wampanoag language curriculums and the establishment of the only Wampanoag inter-tribal cooperative.

The task is so daunting that even famed linguist Noam Chomsky had deemed it “impossible.”

“This means death is not permanent,” said the MIT linguist in the film. “[At least] for languages, they can come back."

Following the Sunday screening of "We Still Live Here," Makepeace and two of the film’s subjects, Aquinnah Wampanoag tribal administrator Tobias Vanderhoop and Aquinnah resident Wenonah Madison, led an hour-long discussion with the audience.

Among other questions, one person asked how the Native Americans were applying the language to their daily lives. "Well, you just have to when Jessie's teaching," said Madison, of the Wampanoag immersion classes held in Aquinnah. "She won't speak any English to you, so you just make it work."

“With some children, we only speak Wampanoag," said Vanderhoop. “Their parents are immersing them that way."

Incredibly, Baird’s six-year-old daughter, Mae Alice, will be the language’s first native speaker in seven generations. "She's the only one born speaking it, but the children are learning it," said Madison. 

In the future, said Madison, "We would like a charter school. And there is a great possibility that that might happen." At that, the audience began to clap. 

"We are leaving our children with options," Madison said. "Now, my kids don't ask, 'Do we have a language?' They ask, 'How do you say that in our language?'"

Near the end of the discussion, one woman from the audience raised her hand. "I imagine this must be like finding a treasure that just continues to give," she said. Vanderhoop and Madison nodded. "Yes," said Madison, "It's a lot like that."