by Alice Gregory
When I first met Carol Dana, in the spring of 2018, she told me that she was thinking of getting a parrot. Dana, a member of the Penobscot Nation, one of five hundred and seventy-four Native American tribes recognized by the United States federal government, was attending a small ceremony at the University of Maine’s anthropology museum. She wore her silver hair pulled back from her face, and introduced herself to me as the tribe’s language master, a title, she added, that she wasn’t fully comfortable with. The idea of mastery seemed an imprecise way to describe the fraught relationship she had with the Penobscot words inside her head. Though not fluent, Dana has a better grasp of the language than anyone else on Indian Island, where six hundred of the world’s estimated twenty-four hundred members of the Penobscot tribe live. She admitted to being linguistically lonely. “I’ve been talking to myself in Penobscot for years,” she said. “You need to say it out loud, so your own ears can hear it.” Though she knew that a bird wouldn’t be able to carry on a conversation, she thought that simply hearing Penobscot words spoken at home by another living creature would be better than nothing.
Dana, who is sixty-eight, learned most of what she knows of Penobscot not from her tribal elders but from Frank Siebert, a self-taught linguist who hired her, in 1982, as a research assistant. He was seventy; Dana was thirty. Siebert had grown up in Philadelphia and had been passionate about Native Americans for as long as he could remember—as a child, he had slept with a toy tomahawk in his bed. He, Dana, and a few other assistants worked in a bare office on Indian Island, a mile-wide shallot-shaped island in the middle of the Penobscot River. Dana, who was brought up there, had as a child been forbidden to go to the mainland, and she’d spent her school-age days picking blueberries and mayflowers, building lean-tos, and impaling apples on sticks, throwing them like javelins. In the summer, she and her friends swam in the river; in the fall, they wrestled in the leaves. Siebert, who had moved to Maine permanently about fifteen years before Dana joined him in his work, had no such memories, but together they muttered and scribbled in a language that only a handful of people still spoke.
I first heard about Frank Siebert a year before I met Dana, from Jane Anderson, a legal scholar at N.Y.U. I was interested in the ways in which indigenous knowledge, passed down through many generations and often collectively held, is considered essentially authorless by Western intellectual-property law. Anderson, who is Australian, works with indigenous communities around the world to help solve conflicts over the ownership of ancient ideas. I had come to her with questions about a burgeoning movement in Guatemala to trademark traditional weaving designs, but within an hour I was convinced that I should travel not to Central America but to Maine, which, she told me, was home to a sovereign nation whose language was technically owned by a dead white man who had devised a way to write it down.
The name Penobscot is a mangled rendering of punawuhpskek—or pαnáwαhpskek, in the writing system Siebert introduced—meaning “the place where the rocks clear out.” For more than three hundred generations, the tribe, which once had fifty thousand members, hunted on the banks of the Penobscot River, navigated its waters, and spoke one of the many Eastern Algonquian languages heard along a swath of the northern Atlantic coast—an area that today extends from Nova Scotia to North Carolina. Siebert began studying the Penobscot language in the nineteen-thirties, four hundred years after European explorers arrived. By then, all that was left of the Penobscot territory, which once encompassed half of Maine, was a reservation that included Indian Island, which can be circumnavigated by foot in less than an hour, and some smaller islands along the river. The tribe’s language had nearly disappeared from use. Beginning in the eighteen-eighties, Penobscot children were sent to government-sponsored residential schools, where teachers beat them for speaking anything but English. “Anywhere else in the world, you’re thought to be more intelligent if you’re bilingual—except for us, for some reason,” Dana told me. The strategy, replicated across the country, was effective: more than three hundred indigenous languages were once spoken in the United States; today, linguists worry that within thirty years there will be only twenty. By the middle of the twentieth century, there were just two dozen Penobscot speakers on Indian Island, most of them elderly. When they tried to teach Penobscot to younger members of the tribe, their efforts were met with complaints that there was no use for it anyway.
But Dana loved listening to her grandmother speak the language of her ancestors. Like other indigenous New England dialects, Penobscot does not distinguish between certain commonly used consonants—“B”s and “P”s, for instance, or “Z”s and “S”s. The sonic effect of Penobscot—melodic, gentle, and worn-sounding, almost like singing—is at odds with the language’s structure, which is especially visual, efficient, and kinetic. Single words can express full ideas. Canoe is “that which flows lightly upon the water”; an otter is a “wandering portager”; lunch is “noon eat”; butter is “milk grease”; flower is “something bursting forth into the light.” Dana describes Penobscot words as “little poetic pictures.” Her grandmother was a stoic and remote woman when she spoke in English, but she seemed transformed when laughing and joking and talking with her Native friends. “That’s how language is conveyed,” Dana said. “Around the kitchen table.”
Dana first applied for a job on Siebert’s team in 1979; she told me that she had been frustrated when Siebert gave the job not to her or to another Penobscot person but to a “red-haired woman from Connecticut.” Two years later, Siebert agreed to take Dana on as well; he had her sort through stacks of materials—transcripts of interviews he’d conducted with elders in their homes, journals and notecards scrawled with vocabulary that was written in the orthography he’d developed, which was punctuated with unfamiliar, academic diacritics.
Dana was moved by what she learned. There is no word in Penobscot for “goodbye, ” only the more optimistic “I’ll see you again.” Verbs of motion almost always have prefixes. People don’t just walk or jump. They walk from here or to there; they jump across or out or up. Through syntax and morphology, the language conveys how the speaker relates to the event she is describing: Did she witness it, or does she have only indirect evidence that it occurred? Is it hearsay? Built into the language is the directive to cite one’s sources. When I asked Dana whether she ever felt resentful or embarrassed that she had learned her own language from a white man, she laughed. “Oh, yes, all of that,” she said. “But it didn’t quite feel like I was learning it from him.” It was her ancestors’ language that she was reading, not Siebert’s.
There was no bridge to Indian Island when Siebert made his first trip there, as a twenty-year-old college student, in 1932. The ferry, a flat-bottomed bateau, cost ten cents, round trip. It was August, and the river was low the day he boarded the boat and paid his fare. He asked where he might find someone willing to speak Penobscot with him, and the ferryman pointed toward a honeysuckle-lined path that led through the woods. At the end of the path lived a pious man in his sixties named Louis Lolar. Siebert introduced himself, and Lolar invited him inside. His small home was sparsely furnished; like the other houses on the island, it had no indoor plumbing. The two men sat by Lolar’s woodstove, and Siebert practiced Penobscot until the sun went down. To an English-speaking eavesdropper, the conversation would have sounded a bit like a choir lesson.
Siebert was nearsighted and nearly six and a half feet tall. Everyone thought he looked German. His high-school yearbook had remarked on his “unobtrusiveness and complete disdain (as far as we know) of the female sex.” By the age of fifteen, he had read everything he could find about Native Americans, and had grown so impatient with the limitations of the local public library that he’d begun creating his own private one. His first purchase, in 1928, was a reprint of a seventeenth-century Christian primer written in Wampanoag, a language related to Penobscot. It cost him twenty-five cents. Siebert’s father was a train inspector; his mother, a savvy stock investor. They wanted him to become a doctor, and so he did. It was when he entered medical school, at the University of Pennsylvania, that his double life began.
Siebert took the required courses in biochemistry and immunology, but he spent his free time learning about indigenous North American languages. He took regular trips up the East Coast, to attend lectures at Columbia, with Franz Boas, widely considered the pioneer of modern anthropology, and at Yale, with Edward Sapir, a founder of ethnolinguistics. At the University of Pennsylvania, Frank Speck, an anthropologist specializing in the Algonquian and Iroquoian peoples, nurtured Siebert’s special interest in Penobscot. Speck kept office hours in a book-lined neo-Gothic chapel filled with living snakes and lizards, and was known to shoot arrows from a crossbow into the door. Speck had visited Indian Island in 1907 and collected Penobscot stories from Newell Lyon, a speaker in his seventies. (At the time, linguists called such Native collaborators “informants,” as though in admission that their work involved a kind of treachery.) The stories chronicled the exploits of Gluskabe, a shamanic hunter and trickster whose grandmother, a woodchuck, teaches him how to survive in the wilderness using interspecies statecraft. The Gluskabe stories were passed down in the community like heirlooms. Sometimes one family would take a particular narrative into its care, as if for safekeeping, and another family would have to ask for permission to relay it. In 1918, eleven years after his first trip to Indian Island, Speck published the stories in an academic journal.
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In Speck’s office, Siebert memorized Penobscot vocabulary while keeping an eye on a white fox, which hid behind a leaking radiator. To learn the language’s grammar and make his first attempts at a Penobscot orthography, Siebert pored over Speck’s transcriptions of Lyon’s Gluskabe stories, marking up their margins in green and red ink. Like the patients Siebert was learning to treat, the language was frail and suffering. In a letter he sent at that time, he described Penobscot as “nearly dead in all respects.”
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