By Jane Valencia
Editor’s Note: Participating in Island life, we hear Land Acknowledgments at events, from organizations, and see them posted at businesses or on websites. Each year, we welcome the Blue Heron canoe family to our shores at the Low Tide Festival at Point Robinson. Up and down the Island, colorful yard signs in both English and the indigenous language of the Puget Sound region, Lushootseed, announce the “Land of the Swift Water People.”
Many Islanders care about the First Peoples of this Island and region and want to learn and do more in support. Language can be a door to that wish. Please enjoy this conversation with David Turnipseed, a language teacher with the Puyallup Tribal Language Program.
David is a Puyallup tribal member on his father’s side, with Scottish, Irish, and English ancestry and his red hair from his mom. Lushootseed has always been part of David’s family. It was something that came up frequently in his family, that he should learn their language. But it wasn’t until 2018 that David had that opportunity.
“The Puyallup Tribal Language program was putting on these Saturday community classes, leading up to us hosting the Canoe Journey ‘Power Paddle to Puyallup 2018.’ They were helping the community with some basic vocabulary, and how to welcome the canoes in, and stuff like that, and it was finally my opportunity to be able to take a language class.”
At the time David, was pursuing a Master’s in teaching, and planned to teach English as a second language, perhaps traveling around to do so, or teaching at a local university.
“But when I did my first language class here at the Puyallup tribe, I was like, oh my goodness, forget about all that. I want to come home, and I want to learn and teach my language.”
Program director Amber Hayward recommended that David start learning – and teaching – at the tribe’s early learning center with the three-year-olds, the idea being that, if he taught as he was learning, he’d be one step ahead of the children.
“I absolutely fell in love with working at Grandview Early Learning Center and working with little kids. It’s such a joy; it’s such a treat.”
From there, David moved to the central Language department of the tribe. He now teaches all ages, with classes online and in person, and with different tribe departments.
In David’s family, the last speaker of Lushootseed as a first language was his great Grandma Hattie Cross. “Back in the 70s, my family was wise enough to go over to Hattie’s house once a week. They would sit down and record conversations with her, asking, ‘Hey, Grandma, how do you say, Who’s going to make the coffee? How do you say, I’m going to the mountains to pick berries? How do you say this? How do you say that? And there are about 11 hours of those recordings. If you were to hand me a suitcase with a million dollars, or those recordings, I would take the recordings every time. Such a priceless treasure from my family.”
Lushootseed was spoken as a first language up until the 80s and 90s.
“Hattie was part of that last generation of first-language speakers,” David says, “Then the last first-language speakers started to pass away. Somewhere around 2010, the status of Lushootseed in the wider Puget Sound community was at an all-time low.” The number of people speaking Lushootseed in daily communication was almost zero.
“That being said,” David points out, “it’s not that the language was ever extinct or dormant. People still had words and phrases, memorized speeches and prayers that they had in classes. But as far as using Lushootseed as a language of daily communication in the home, with your kids, with your family, with your friends – unfortunately, almost no one was doing that, as far as we know.”
“Around 2014, our language consultant Zalmai ʔəswəli Zahir (Zeke), along with Amber Hayward, Chris Duenas, and others, started using a methodology here at the Puyallup Tribe called language nesting. The idea is that you choose a place within your home – typically, people start with their bathroom – and you say, ‘In this space I will not speak English. I’m creating a nest for the language, and I’m breathing life into the language in this space.’”
“So, it can be as simple as posting up a sign that says, xʷiʔ ləpastəducid. “No English.” In that space, you make a commitment that you will only speak the target language – in this case, Twulshootseed. Then we do a thing called reclaiming domains.
“You reclaim areas of your life for the language; you say, ‘All right, I’m going to self-narrate out loud in Lushootseed every time I wash my hands.’ And you print out and post up these pieces of paper that have English on one side, the txʷəlšucid translations on the other. And word by word, sentence by sentence, you start reclaiming these areas of your life for the language.”
Taking a shower, getting ready for the day, doing laundry or the dishes – these are all opportunities to reclaim domains and self-narrate aloud in Lushootseed. From there, learners connect with a conversation project where they meet in groups, asking each other, “What did you do today?” They then describe in great detail what they did throughout the day.
The result? The past ten years have seen an exponential growth of speakers within the Puyallup Tribal Community and other Lushootseed-speaking communities in the area.
David continues, “Right now, we are doing some research with the University of Oregon, and with social network analysis of our language community: Who’s talking to whom and how much? We estimate that there’s something like 500 plus people who use the language an hour or more per day.Going from almost zero 10 years ago to now 500 plus, if not more, is a huge, huge victory for the language and for us here at the Puyallup Tribe.”
To be continued.
View a video where David teaches how to say Swift Water People in Twulshootseed: https://youtu.be/Iwof31-4YxA
For more information, and to begin learning Twulshootseed, please visit: https://www.puyalluptriballanguage.org
What Is Lushootseed?
Excerpt from https://www.puyalluptriballanguage.org. See “What Is Twulshootseed” page for more in-depth information.
13 different tribes in the Puget Sound region in Washington state speak Lushootseed. The predominant dialects are Northern and Southern. The Puyallup tribe speaks Southern Lushootseed, and in that dialect they call Lushootseed – txʷəlšucid.
Linguist Thom Hess coined the term Lushootseed, which was easier for non-Lushootseed speakers to say. According to the Puyallup Tribal Language Program, the term Lushootseed “References all of our language. Each tribe calls our language something different. Some call our language xʷəlšucid, dxʷlušucid and txʷəlšucid. Some call it their tribal language, suq́ʷabšucid – Suquamish language. And some of our elders called it speaking Indian.”
All of the above terms are correct to use.
