CHAPTER 8
In the keynote address I gave to the American Indian Language Development Convention in Tucson in mid-June of 2007 I decided to look into the future to see what languages people here will speak five hundred years from now, and I realized everyone in the Southwest will speak Nahuatl, not Chinese, although Chinese will be the dominant language of finance and commerce world-wide, and everyone’s second language. I won’t go into the details of the decline of the English language here for lack of space.
The resurgence of Nahuatl will arise out of the sheer numbers of speakers especially in Mexico City, with the largest population of Nahua speakers in the world. Of course a great many of the indigenous tribal languages of the Americas are related to Nahuatl so I include them as well.
But before I could write about five hundred years in the future, I had to go back to the past, my own past. Writing about why I don’t speak the Laguna language was much more complicated than I imagined. My parents sent me to kindergarten at the Bureau of Indian Affairs day school near our house. The first day of kindergarten I learned about invisible lines: the old cattle guard full of sand at the entrance to the day school property had an invisible line down the middle. We children were warned: once we crossed this invisible line onto the school grounds talking Indian was forbidden. If we disobeyed we’d be sent to the principal’s office for punishment. That was the first thing the teachers taught us children on the first day of kindergarten.
I paid close attention to the rules because my father was very strict about the behavior of my sisters and me. I was afraid to get sent to the principal’s office for any reason because I feared my father’s temper.
Mr. Trujillo was our principal and his wife was my kindergarten and first grade teacher. They both were Pueblo people: she was from Isleta Pueblo and he was from Laguna. They spoke the Pueblo languages, but they had attended BIA schools when they were children. They were taught to believe in the goal of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the 1950s which was to break us children from talking Indian so we’d learn English and one day relocate off the reservation.
In kindergarten class, Mrs. Trujillo taught the five year olds to speak English. I was happy to be with children of my age but after a week she sent me to the first grade because I already spoke English. I felt uncomfortable because all the other children knew I was treated differently because I spoke English. Afterward some of my classmates teased me with Laguna words about being a show-off so I ran to the teacher to get them in trouble. My mother cautioned me not to be a tattle-tale and I stopped.
I learned how to get along. I picked up the Laguna expressions and phrases my classmates used: my grandpa Hank taught me to count to ten and passed on handy phrases to use at the store like how to say “there’s no more”: “zah-zee hadti.” I might have learned more Laguna from my grandpa Hank if he had lived longer and if I hadn’t been such a tomboy always outdoors exploring at the river or off in the hills on my horse.
Grandpa Hank worked in the store twelve hours a day, six and a half days a week. He was a quiet man. After work around seven, he and Grandma Lillie ate supper and then he rested in his armchair. Grandma told us kids not to bother him because he was tired. He read science and car magazines, and later when TV came he watched until he fell asleep in the chair.
But when Grandma Lillie went on vacation to see her sister in California, I used to cook for Grandpa Hank. He talked more then, and told me stories he’d heard as a child. This is the one Grandpa told me one day at lunchtime: there was a young Laguna hunter who always brought back game because he could travel farther. The young hunter’s secret was that he carried with him a magical lunch in a small cloth sack. No matter how much the young hunter ate there was always more food in the sack.
My great grandma A’mooh and my grandpa Hank and all our extended family around us spoke Laguna. At the store, most of the people who shopped there spoke Laguna. Only my father could not speak Laguna. I was aware of this oddity before I went to school, and I asked more than once why he didn’t know how to talk Indian. He said it was because the other children made fun of his accent when he spoke Laguna so he refused to learn to talk Indian; he only spoke a little as a courtesy to the old folks who spoke no English.
Now I wonder if it was more than just his schoolmates who gave him a bad time about speaking Laguna. I have the sense there was an adult family member, maybe one of Grandma Lillie’s brothers, one of my father’s uncles, who teased him about talking Indian. Somebody filled my father’s head with a strange idea: if we learned to speak Laguna, we would speak English with a Laguna accent. Of course that notion was completely ridiculous.
My great grandfather Robert Gunn Marmon and his brother, Walter Gunn Marmon, came to Laguna from Kenton, Ohio to work as Government school teachers and surveyors. Walter arrived in 1868 and Robert followed in 1875. They both learned to speak the Laguna language and married Laguna women.
My grandpa Hank was fluent in Laguna and knew the older dialect that was disappearing. He also spoke some Hopi, some Zuni, and some of the Dine language as well as Spanish. At that time among the tribes of the Southwest, people routinely spoke three or four languages.
My great grandma A’mooh and my great aunts Alice Marmon Little and Susie Reyes Marmon grew up speaking the Laguna language, and all learned to speak English with that unmistakable “proper” accent which was taught at the Carlisle Indian School in the latter nineteenth century. Years later in Alaska I met a Haida elder who had attended Carlisle as a child and she spoke English with the same Carlisle accent — maybe it was more of a cadence — it’s difficult to describe — it was an American accent but with a hint of Scotland, not England.
Why do people choose not to teach their children their mother tongues — something unthinkable under normal circumstances?
“Because the occupying powers have outlawed the indigenous language, to speak it is to be placed at a socio-economic disadvantage” (Marwan Hassan, Velocities of Zero). That’s the short answer. The longer more complex answer for me begins like this:
I spent a great deal of time with my great grandmother A’mooh when I was a baby and small child. Very early I understood what she said to me in Indian. My name for her, A’mooh, came from the exclamation she made in Laguna each time she saw me. “A’mooh” is a term of endearment for a girl. She spoke Laguna to me when I was a baby and small child, but after I started kindergarten, she spoke only English to me.
I didn’t recall this until I started preparing the keynote address and got to thinking about who might have taught me Laguna. Why did she stop talking Indian to me? She was the family matriarch, so I know nobody dared tell her to stop talking Indian to me, she made the decision herself. My great grandmother was a great believer in education and she must have been concerned about us children speaking English at school.
But there must have been something else at work too. My great grandmother was a staunch convert to the Presbyterian Church. She used to read to my sisters and me — Bible stories, and Brownie the Bear. She told us a great deal of local history and family history, but she would not tell us the hummah-hah stories, the traditional Laguna stories, because the hummah-hah stories reveal the Laguna spiritual outlook toward animals, plants and spirit beings, one which was at odds with the Presbyterian view of the world.