Trip of the Tongue (6 page)

It's a strange place, the Little Bighorn Battlefield. Administered now by the National Park Service, the monument's outlying buildings have the generic sensibilities of most workaday federal construction, showcasing all the aesthetic grace you expect from a bureaucracy. As such, the buildings feel resolutely 1950s, inspiring chilly thoughts of Dwight D. Eisenhower, nuclear fallout, and linoleum.

The rest of the park and monument, on the other hand, is spare and mournful. Even on a bright summer day, you can't help but fall into a reflective mood. I was particularly susceptible to this, being the sort of person whose entire day can be ruined by even the most glancing reminder of my own mortality. I remember seeing a single, sad cloud in one far corner of the sky, which was enough to send me spiraling off into melancholy. Searching for some semblance of profundity, my brain skittered about the first few words of a much-loathed Wordsworth poem I'd been forced to learn in high school, and as I approached the monument, I felt with a sudden, horrible certainty that someone was going to start playing taps. With no small amount of dread, I slowly made my way to the memorial.

There are two sets of gravestones at the battlefield. The first form the almost comfortingly regular columns and rows of the memorial cemetery. The others are on Last Stand Hill. Most of the bodies of the U.S. cavalrymen who died here were, grotesquely, left in the open for five years until 1881, when they were gathered into a mass grave. So though there are to this day still a great many unanswered questions about what exactly happened over the course of the battle, the final resting place of each combatant is not in doubt. The gravestones here, unsettlingly weathered and lopsided, mark the exact spots where the men fell.

Custer's gravestone is straighter, bolder, and marked with a small American flag, but it is otherwise no different from the unnamed markers of his brethren. The only text is his rank, his name, the date, and the words “fell here.”

Scattered throughout the hill are other, newer stones, polished granite with crisp white engraving. These mark the deaths of Indian warriors. Until very recently, a visitor to the battlefield would not have seen even these small reminders of Custer's opponents. As a matter of fact, until 1991 the monument itself was actually known as the Custer Battlefield National Monument. It wasn't until the appointment of Barbara Sutter, the site's first Native American superintendent, that the name change was enacted and progress began to be made with regard to a greater acknowledgment of Native involvement. The markers were first placed in 1999, and in 2003 the Indian Memorial—a sculpture based on the drawings of a Cheyenne warrior—was dedicated.

For roughly 132 years, then, the only sign of what is arguably the greatest military victory a Native group has ever achieved against the U.S. Army was a solitary wooden marker the National Park Service reluctantly erected in the 1950s. How must that have felt, I wondered, for the descendants of the Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho men who fought there? How did that affect the perceptions of the schoolchildren and tourists who visited? How much has our understanding of Native peoples been guided, purposely or not, by the administrators of government bureaucracy?

Without a doubt, the fate of the Crow language—of any language—rests in large part on matters of education, economic opportunity, and technology. But my time in Montana led me to consider the influence of a more nebulous set of variables: namely, the popular portrayal and understanding of language, culture, and history. The vitality of a language cannot be unrelated to the nature of its representation among its speakers and non-speakers alike. At each stop along my journey, I continued to discover the many ways in which this is true.

Chapter Two

Arizona: Navajo

Later that summer, I found myself on a remote stretch of Highway 160 just south of the Utah-Arizona border, speeding toward a town whose name I didn't even know how to pronounce. I was heading off to investigate another Native language, one I thought might help answer some of the questions I'd come up against in Montana. The Crow reservation had given me a broad sense of the challenges faced by indigenous languages in the United States. I was hoping Navajo Nation might help me fill in some of the details.

Part of the vast Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit language family, the Navajo language has linguistic relatives both near and far, from Chiricahua and Mescalero in the Southwest to Gwich'in, Tanacross, and nine other languages in Alaska. The vast majority of these languages are severely endangered or extinct. A few—notably North and South Slavey, Dogrib, and Dene Suline in northern Canada—have speaker populations in the low four figures. Navajo, on the other hand, has more than 150,000 speakers and is spoken not only by more people than any other Native language in the United States, but by more people than all the other Native U.S. languages combined.

I wanted to know what it would be like to visit such a strong and vibrant Native language community. Would it feel like walking into another country? Would English be abruptly replaced with a panoply of new and unfamiliar sounds? Or would it feel like one of the immigrant neighborhoods of New York City, where outsiders are greeted in English but discussed sotto voce in a different tongue? Navajo Nation, I knew, was my best opportunity to experience a Native language not yet on the verge of extinction. So I drove to Arizona, turning northwest at Flagstaff and heading up toward Tuba City and, ultimately, a town called Chinle.

If you're interested in tackling an indigenous American language on your own, Navajo is in many ways your best bet. The sheer size of the Navajo-speaking population has helped Navajo become one of the more abundantly studied and documented Native languages, and there are plenty of language materials to be found even if you're not fond of specialty stores or the dustier corners of libraries. That being said, it isn't exactly what I would call the most accessible of languages.

Given how monstrously subjective such an assessment is, I generally try to avoid labeling languages as “difficult” or “easy.” One man's Chinese, after all, is another man's Pig Latin. But I feel comfortable saying that the vast majority of us would consider Navajo to be something of a challenge. I certainly know that when I'm reading about Navajo, I frequently feel like my brain is on sabbatical. Just now, for instance, I was going through a paper suggesting that Navajo transitive verbs encapsulate a sort of relativistic frame of reference. I really wanted to figure out what was going on. I was all set to quote Einstein and work into these pages some pointed commentary about translation and cross-cultural difference and maybe even the twin paradox. But try as I might, I couldn't make sense of it.

Fortunately, however, Navajo is such a fascinating language that even the easier stuff is really interesting. Take Navajo verbs, for instance. In English, we encode information about subject and aspect and tense in our verbs with inflection, and with some exceptions these inflections usually take the form of verb endings. The most obvious difference between the English and Navajo verb is that Navajo—and most other Athabaskan languages—primarily uses verbal
prefixes
to add or change information communicated by the verb.

And it's not just a matter of slapping on an
-ed
(or, in this case, an
ed-
) to let people know that things happened in the past. Navajo verb stems can take a number of different prefixes at once, prefixes that indicate not only subject, aspect, and mode but also object, type of object, and various adverbial functions. Linguists call this kind of morphology a slot-and-filler template, which basically means that you can treat Navajo verbs a bit like a row in a game of Connect Four: first you drop a verb stem in on the far right, and then you slide various prefixes into their respective columns until you have a complete verb.

To give you a better idea of how this works in practice, here's a standard Navajo verb template, as compiled by the linguists Robert Young and William Morgan:

Now, every verb doesn't take every prefix, so this is something of an impossibly worst-case scenario. It is nevertheless still intimidatingly different from the verb tables we're used to seeing in our French, Spanish, or even Latin textbooks. But once you familiarize yourself with the ins and outs of each prefix, it's really not so bad.

The verb stem, as you can see, is slotted in on the right. Most stems are one syllable—the stem for “cry,” for instance, is -
cha
. Information about the subject of the verb is found in positions III, V, and VIII. For the most basic subjects, you only have to worry about this last position—take the second-person subject pronoun
ni
, slot it in with “cry,” and you get
nicha
, “you're crying.”
^j

After that things get more interesting. Position V can be used for the so-called fourth-person prefix
ji-
. This indicates, broadly, a subject other than the speaker or the hearer—you could potentially use this to distinguish between two characters in a story. (This serves a similar function to that of Crow's switch-reference markers.) Position III, meanwhile, is allotted for what's known as a distributive plural, used to indicate that the subject or direct object of the verb numbers three or more.

To complicate matters further, Navajo verbs don't really use what English-speakers think of as “tense.” This isn't to say that Navajo verbs don't communicate similar information; they just go about it a bit differently. So if you look at position VII, you'll find information about the temporal flow of the action (for example, whether it's ongoing, habitual, or completed), but positions I, II, and VI can make even finer distinctions. The prefix
hi-
(position VIc) can be used, for instance, when three or more subjects act in succession as opposed to in a larger group—the difference between “the chickens flew the coop one by one” and “the chickens flew the coop all at once.” The prefix
náá-
(position I) indicates repeated action of a very specific kind. Called a “semeliterative prefix,”
náá-
can be translated as “another one” or “one more time.”

My favorite feature of Navajo verbs deals not with prefixes but rather with stems. While many verbs—such as
cha
—have only one stem, some transitive verbs require a different stem based on the physical properties of the object they're acting upon. A rock, paper, and scissors, for example, could each require the use of a different verb stem. Young and Morgan (names you'll grow extremely familiar with if you have even the most cursory interest in the Navajo language) identified twelve categories of verb stem—known as “classificatory verb stems”—each loosely grouped around certain common physical qualities. There are groups of “solid roundish objects” such as apples, eggs, and balls; “mushy matter” such as lard, dough, and scrambled eggs; and “slender flexible objects,” which include not only strings of beads and pieces of rope but constellations and the words in a language.

Of course, it's all fun and games until you actually have to learn to speak the language. The existence of classificatory verb stems in Navajo is surely cause for no small amount of angst for students of the language. And it's probably no less vexing for instructors. I know it has at the very least presented some interesting challenges for Rosetta Stone's Endangered Language Program, which was asked by Navajo Nation to assist in the creation of language-learning software. Danny Hieber, a content editor for Rosetta Stone, blogged about the difficulties involved with teaching the Navajo verb “to be sitting there” through pictures. Because the verb stem changes depending on the physical properties of the object in question—it is different for a man; it is different for a computer; it is different again for a newspaper—programmers were forced to include many more examples than they would have had to for a language such as English. Although I can't imagine that I would be able to figure out the rules of Navajo grammar under such conditions, I can freely admit that it's more accessible than flipping through a book by Young and Morgan.

Luckily for me, I don't have to worry about midterms or final grades, so instead of being bogged down by complexity I'm free to find in Navajo verb structure an intriguing emphasis on clarity and specificity. To be sure, an English-speaker can get across the same information communicated by a single Navajo verb thanks to our fine stock of adverbs. I can't help but wonder, though, if maybe precision is somehow more central to the Navajo language and if that's ultimately why I find the language so intimidating. Maybe I'm just more comfortable with ambiguity.

I thought about this frequently during my time with the Navajo, because as I learned more about the Navajo language and Navajo history, I began to draw some very unambiguous conclusions and then, almost immediately, to pull back from them. I like to think my skepticism with regard to simple explanations is born of common sense, but the truth is that vacillation is a convenient crutch for an insecure mind. It took a trip to Navajo Nation for me to realize that it would be a disservice to everyone involved to shy away from the straightforward—indeed, even obvious—analyses.

And so it was in Navajo Nation that for the first time I began to form some genuinely strong opinions about the state of language in America.

Extending into four states and spanning an area that, at over 27,000 square miles, is approximately the size of West Virginia, Navajo Nation is the country's largest expanse of Native-controlled land and home to nearly 170,000 of the tribe's 300,000-plus members. My home base on Navajo Nation was a town called Chinle, one of five agencies on the reservation. I stayed there for largely practical reasons: it's relatively centrally located, it's near a gas station, and it's home to the only Holiday Inn on Navajo land.
^k
But I also came to Chinle because I wanted to take a tour of the town's lone attraction, Canyon de Chelly.

Inhabited for nearly 5,000 years, Canyon de Chelly—whose name comes from the Navajo word for canyon (
tséyi
) and does not rhyme with
jelly
but instead is pronounced more like the French
chez
—is home to the longest continuous human settlement anywhere on the Colorado Plateau. Today about eighty or so families still live in the canyon.

Most of the tourists who visit come to gawk not at the canyon's present inhabitants but at its past dwellings: the ruins of Anasazi settlements in the canyon date back nearly a thousand years. These pueblo dwellings were constructed along the walls of the canyon and, at times, seemingly into the walls of the canyon. The most famous are the White House ruins, a structure believed to have been built around 1060 CE and abandoned just over 200 years later. These ruins, two levels of tumbling adobe brick that were once covered with the white plaster that gave the ruins their name, probably once housed about twelve Anasazi families.

The White House ruins are located in the only part of the canyon that is open to the public. To see the rest of the canyon, as I did, you have to enlist the services of a Navajo guide. My guide, an easygoing Cowboys fan named Oscar, took me down to the canyon in a Jeep. As we drove over the canyon floor, he detailed the history of the canyon and the Anasazi and Navajo settlements in the area, pointing out ruins and petroglyphs by reflecting the sunlight with his rear-view mirror. Every so often we would spot in the distance one of the group tours run by another local hotel and would watch as red-faced tourists rumbled by in monstrous open-air buses that reminded me of nothing so much as a southwestern duck boat. Every time we saw one, Oscar chuckled to himself. He told me he called those tours “shake and bake.”

Midway through the morning we stopped at the White House ruins and picked up some cold drinks. Sipping a Diet Coke, I soon lost myself in a dreamy contemplation of the polychromatic canyon walls and rock formations. And then I heard the words “Canyon del Muerto.”

“What did you just say?” I asked Oscar, no longer feeling quite so dreamy or contemplative.

“The Canyon del Muerto. It's just over there,” he said, pointing. “That's where you find Massacre Cave.”

My stomach dropped. I had a feeling I was no longer going to be able to spend my time stupidly admiring the view.

The Canyon del Muerto, I learned, was not nearly as grim as its moniker. It was named in 1882 when a Smithsonian expedition found a number of burial grounds in the area. For a moment I felt a stab of hope. Maybe for once I'd get through the day without stumbling across a profoundly depressing bit of history. Unfortunately, the story of Massacre Cave was not so benign. Worse, it turned out to be an ominous prologue to what is surely the darkest chapter in Navajo history.