Saving a Language

A rare book in MIT's archives helps linguists revive a long-unused Native American language.

In 1992, Jessie Little Doe Baird, SM '00, began having a series of puzzling visions. A citizen of the Mashpee tribe of the Wampanoag Nation, she saw people who appeared to be her ancestors, speaking a language she couldn't understand. Then one day, she passed a Cape Cod road sign for the village of Sippewisset. Seeing the traditional Wampanoag writing on it, she suddenly realized that her visions were about Wôpanâak, the language that her ancestors had spoken when they encountered the Pilgrims at Plimoth Plantation. According to an old prophecy, Wôpanâak--which the Wampanoags consider a living and animate thing--was destined to go away and then come back. Little more than two centuries after the Mayflower's arrival, it was, indeed, disappearing; 1833 marks the last documented reference to Wôpanâak's being spoken. But the prophecy also promised that the language would return when it could be welcomed back. And it predicted that the descendants of those who had broken the circle--the common language linking the Wampanoags to their ancestors--would have a hand in closing it again. In her visions, Baird was asked to go see if the people wanted the language to return.

The two editions of the Eliot Indian Bible were the first Bibles published in America. MIT owns a copy of the 1685 edition; a 1663 edition is shown here. Credit: Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Associate professor Norvin Richards, PhD ’97, on how linguists revive a long-unspoken language.

At her urging, the Mashpee and Aquinnah tribes launched the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project in 1993. The project would lead Baird to MIT, where the stories of a Puritan minister and an eminent linguist would be united across three centuries by a rare book in the Institute's archives. And that book, which had contributed to the decline of Baird's ancestral language, would play a key role in the quest to bring it back.

The first story begins more than 300 years ago, when John Eliot, who'd likely taken orders in the Church of England, realized that his Puritan leanings meant he'd never find a pulpit in England. In 1631 the 27-year-old minister immigrated to the Massachusetts Bay Colony; within a year, he'd become the first permanent minister of Roxbury and decided to devote his life to evangelizing Native Americans. He was the first Englishman to make a serious effort to learn Massachusett, the language spoken by local tribes.

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Puritans placed a high value on reading the word of God directly, so Eliot decided to translate the King James Bible into Massachusett and teach Native Americans to read. To help him with the nearly 10-year task of translation, he enlisted several Native Americans, including John Sassamon, an orphan raised in Dorchester by an English ­family who probably converted him to Christianity. Eliot's teaching method mirrored his own phonetic approach to learning Massachusett. He wrote, "When I taught our Indians first to lay out a word into syllables, and then according to the sound of every syllable to make it up with the right letters ... They quickly apprehended ... this Epitomie of the art of spelling, and could soon learn to read."

Eliot regularly reported the progress of his translation to the Socie­ty for the Propa­gation of the Gospel in New England, which had been founded in England in 1649. In 1658, the society sent Marmaduke Johnson, a professional printer, to the colony. Johnson­'s busy wooden press creaked and groaned in Harvard's Indian College, which from 1655 to 1665 housed and taught five students from New England tribes alongside the sons of English colonists. Aided by Samuel Green and a local Native American (known to history only as James Printer), Johnson printed 1,000 copies of the Indian Bible by 1663. It was the first Bible published in Ameri­ca, its title page reading "Mamusse Wunneetupanatamwe up-Biblum God naneeswe Nukkone Testament kah wonk Wusku Testament"--"Entire Holy his-Bible God both Old Testament and also New Testament."