Mohegan linguist saving her native language

UNCASVILLE — No one is fluent in the Mohegan language anymore, but Stephanie Fielding, a member of the tribe, speaks it better than most and is working to restore as much of the language as she can.

Fielding, who spent the last academic year as a presidential visiting fellow at Yale University teaching a course that compared the Mohegan language with the Delaware tongue, is working on a dictionary and grammar of her ancestors’ language, hoping to re-create as much of it as possible before it is lost like so many American Indian languages. The

Mohegan language a member of the Algonquian family of languages.

“Nobody speaks fluent Mohegan,” Fielding said. “The last fluent speaker died in 1908. So I’m trying to bring it back from nothing. There are lots of sister languages that are up and down the (East) Coast that we can mine our language from.”

Fielding is a full-blooded Mohegan who lives on the tribe’s reservation in the town of Montville and who has served on the nation’s Council of Elders. She’s related to Fidelia Fielding, the last fluent Mohegan speaker, by marriage. Fidelia Fielding was her great-great-grandfather’s aunt. Her one-year tenure at Yale was part of the university’s.

Officially, Fielding’s tribe’s name is the Mohegan Indians of Connecticut. On the question of how to refer to the people whom the Europeans encountered when they landed in North America, Fielding said, “We are Native Americans, we are indigenous people and we are Indians. Just don’t call us late to dinner.”

Fielding said it’s not just the tribe that benefits by keeping their language alive.

“It’s important that languages don’t die because, every time one dies, huge parts of our collective world knowledge die, because every group of people in the world have something to add to a world civilization, and to make it the best it can be we need everybody’s contribution. (I) don’t want anything left out,” she said.

It’s also valuable to know ancient languages in order to understand the culture from which they arose.

Fielding said not every member of the tribe is interested in learning Mohegan, but many are. Chief Lynn Malerba “is just thrilled and I’m thrilled when I hear her get in front of a group and say a prayer in Mohegan and she is just a big supporter of the language,” she said.

Cultural connections

Language represents more than the words people speak. “There are lots of things included in language,” Fielding said. “If you don’t know about a culture, you don’t know what those things in the language mean, and if you don’t know what they mean you’re likely to lose them altogether.”

As an example, she said, “When a Mohegan would build a house, a wigwam, they would call it ‘planting their house’ because they would have to … chop down a tree and stick … a lot of poles into the ground, then they would bend them” and tie them together, she said. The image is of “a growing thing, like they’re still growing.

The outside of the domeshaped structure would be covered in bark and mats would be hung inside, forming a natural insulation. “There are witnesses of this among the early settlers and they would say the wigwam would be warmer than the regular house would be,” Fielding said.

“So all of these different parts are included in the language and I’ve seen wigwams that don’t have all of the particulars. … You can go into a wigwam we have on the reservation and you’d freeze your butt off in the winter.”

Her research reveals connections with other tribes, such as the Brothertown Indian Nation of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, which traces its roots to six Christianized tribes, including the Mohegans. Its native name is Eeyamquittoowauconnuck.

“They’re mostly Mohegans but they’re also Narragansett and also Wampanoag and a couple of (other) Eastern tribes,” Fielding said. “They’re also in a position of wanting to learn their language and I’ve been helping them.”

Preserving the ancient Mohegan language requires an ability to find words in other native languages that have similar sounds as those in Mohegan, then applying the parallel sounds to other words to re-create the word in Mohegan. What makes the task more complex is that not all the letters in Indian languages have sounds.

“There’s a whole set of letters that are called stops, and we use as our primary set of letters the ones that are voiceless,” Fielding said. For example, “The P is unvoiced and the B is voiced. If you put your hand on your throat and you say ‘B,’ it’ll vibrate, and if you say ‘P’ it won’t.”

Partly for that reason, and because few people know any Mohegan, Fielding does most of her work from texts.

“There’s a Bible called the Eliot Bible, and it was translated back in the 1600s by the missionary John Eliot and his native friends. He did a full translation of it,” Fielding said.

Eliot was a 17th-century English Puritan missionary whose translation of the Bible into Algonquian, the family that includes Mohegan, was the first Bible printed in Americas, according to the Yale Indian Papers Project.

“I can access that Bible and find words there,” Fielding said. “I find a word that I want and I’ll look in the Bible — I have a huge concordance that weighs about 20 pounds — and I’ll go and look for that word in the concordance and it will tell me where it is in the Bible and I’ll look for that word in the Bible. And if I do, I can translate that … word into Mohegan.

“If I wanted to say one thing and it’s slightly different, it might be that this is the root, and I know all of the prefixes and suffixes to make it a different word. I know the grammar and the grammar includes suffixes and the prefixes to make it different parts of speech.”

Native American languages differ from European languages in other, unexpected ways. “We have a very verb-heavy language,” she said. “It’s interesting in that all of what we in English would call adjectives in Mohegan are verbs. … In Mohegan, ‘green’ is a verb because it’s a state of being, and that’s what makes it a verb. They’re not all action verbs.” In fact, Mohegan has four types of verbs, she said.

Another difference is in language gender. “If you have a language with genders, it’s usually male and female, but all of the pronouns are the same for male and female” in the Mohegan tongue, Fielding said. “There’s no male or female distinction. You can say, ‘He’s a man’ or ‘He’s a woman.’ The pronoun is the same for male or female but you can distinguish them by the other word in the sentence.”

She has worked with David Costa, program director of the Language Research Office at the Myaamia Center, based at Miami University in Ohio. “He’s one of the best Algonquists in the world, and he did the research on our grammar,” Fielding said.

With the help of Costa’s grammar charts, Fielding has written a dictionary, which lists the root word, the part of speech and up to 10 inflections for that word (“I hunt,” “you hunt,” “you and I hunt” would be inflections of one root word). Each entry has at least one sample sentence, many from the Eliot Bible.

In an email, Costa wrote of Fielding, “Stephanie has worked tirelessly on Mohegan language revitalization for over 15 years, and her work has been a model for people working within communities on tribal languages, purely out of personal dedication. The Mohegan community has an exemplary language program, and it is entirely due to Stephanie's efforts.”

Fielding’s research has turned up surprising connections too. The Cree people live mostly in Canada and in parts of the northern United States, including Montana. Fielding found that the word for “cold” is the same in both Cree and Mohegan. “It’s one of those old, old words that usually doesn’t change,” she said. “This Cree woman said, ‘We have the same word for ‘cold’ as you do.’ … We’re related through our languages.”

She’s also been helping the Unkechaug people who live on Long Island reclaim their language, which is “almost identical to Mohegan. … The only difference is, some of the places where we have an I, they have an R. … So there’s one letter that changes and it’s a normal sound change as people move away from each other.

“It seems to me that it might be something in the water. I’ve noticed that English-speaking people in Connecticut … change their L’s into Y’s.” She heard someone say “Sullivan” and it sounded more like “Suh-yuh-van.” “That’s the same sound change that the Indians have here,” Fielding said.

“These changes are all over in the Algonquian territory, Some linguists have made a proto-Algonquian dictionary,” she said. “You can take the words from the proto-Algonquian dictionary and apply certain rules to them and come up with every different Algonquian language.” Each language has its own set of rules to apply. The Algonquian Indian territory covers much of Canada, the U.S. East Coast from Maine to the Chesapeake Bay and parts of the Midwest, including Michigan and Illinois.

Stephanie Fielding