Preserving Pawnee and Arikara for posterity

Ra-Ruh- Wah-Kuh, (John Lowwalk), Medicine Man, Pawnee Nation, Okla., 1913.

Preserving Pawnee and Arikara for posterity

Does language become extinct with the death of the last speaker?

By Rose McIlveen

When the last speakers of Pawnee and Arikara have died, will those languages be lost forever? Not if Douglas Parks can help it.

The professor of anthropology at IUB and associate director of the American Indian Studies Research Institute believes that when a language has fewer than a couple hundred speakers, it's about to die out.

Parks "If it's down to six -- even a dozen speakers -- the chances of its surviving much more than a decade or two are pretty poor," said Parks.

Parks, who has been trying to save the Pawnee and Arikara languages for posterity, works with two elderly fluent speakers. There is a Pawnee woman who is 87 years old and an Arikara who speaks his language fluently at 84. Parks explained that there are others in both tribes who can speak the respective languages to some extent, but not as well.

The professor pointed out that originally the Pawnee and Arikara Indians were a single tribe, but time and distance brought so many changes that the languages no longer sound alike. Members of the respective tribes cannot understand each other. Parks proved that to himself back in the 1970s when he took an elderly Arikara woman for a short visit to Pawnee, Okla.

"The oldest Pawnee speakers said they could not understand the Arikara woman," said Parks.

Geographically speaking, the Pawnees are in Oklahoma in a county of the same name. The Arikara are in west central North Dakota on the Fort Berthold Reservation.

Parks believes strongly about what he is doing.

"It's part of the history of the New World, of our continent. They were the original inhabitants. You know, it's interesting nobody gives a second thought to the need to document plants and animals in our natural environment, but the issue of documenting the languages and cultures of the native inhabitants for some reason isn't taken quite as seriously by the public at large or even by academics," said Parks.

Is Parks the first to document the two languages? The answer is that some preliminary work on the Pawnee language was done in the 1930s. He is the first scholar to work on the Arikara language.

How does a person grow up to be the conservator of a dying language?

Sitting Bear, Arikara Nation, Fort Belknap, Mont., 1913
Photos courtesy of the Wanamaker Collection, William Hammond Mathers Museum

"I was a romantic when I was a kid. I just liked Indians. To be quite honest, when I played with the other kids, I was the Indian and the others were the cowboys or the cavalry. Actually, those anthropologists and linguists who are most interested in and dedicated to American Indian studies were the same when they were children. You start out as a romantic, and you channel that into a profession."

Parks' work is not just a matter of amassing as many Pawnee and Arikara words as possible for a diction-ary and devising a grammar.

Julia Kushner, who has a doctoral degree in cognitive psychology and is multimedia curriculum designer at the institute, specializes in how languages are learned. She is designing Arikara lessons and interface for computers.

"High school students at the White Shield School (in North Dakota) -- and probably some junior high students -- also will use the program," Kushner explained.

The idea is for students to hear the language spoken by native speakers. The students can then work on their own pronunciation.

"There are a number of linguists in the United States and around the world who are involved in the documentation of endangered languages. I think where our work stands out above that of most of the others is that we are developing a dictionary database program that's multimedia. And so what we're trying to do is take the documentary product beyond just a printed dictionary and present that dictionary as a database with sound as well as illustrations," said Kushner.

"You'll look up an entry, let's say for 'sundance,' and you'll click on a button and you can hear a native speaker pronounce the word. And then you can click on another and possibly see on the screen a photograph of the sundance."

Students can record themselves and play the recording back, comparing their pronunciation to that of the original speakers.

Is it conceivable that the students at Fort Berthold will be studying Arikara as a foreign language?

"Yes, except that it's not foreign. It's usually treated as a foreign language in the school system. That rankles Indians to no end, that their language could be considered foreign when actually they were here first and it's their language," explained Parks.

The research is being funded by the National Science Foundation, which is, according to Parks, "the steadiest supporter of language documentary work."

Editor's note: For a fascinating story about the "sacred Pawnee bundle," travel to this site: