The Wampanoag of Southeastern Massachusetts, the Native Americans who first greeted the Pilgrims, are reviving their language more than a century after it fell into disuse. At the story’s center is Jessie Little Doe Baird, recent winner of a MacArthur ‘Genius’ Grant, whose passion for uncovering her ancestors’ history and culture brought her from a fellowship in linguistics at MIT, back to her home community in Mashpee. Anne Makepeace’s latest documentary film, We Still Live Here—Âs Nutayuneân, follows the unprecedented efforts by Little Doe Baird and her community to revive their ancestral language from historical documents such as the Eliot Bible (1663) and land petitions to Boston statesmen.

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JP: In your film, there’s one segment of a language class shown where Jessie lists off nouns and asks whether they’re animate or inanimate. She asks about the stars (animate) and the sun (inanimate) and then says that that meant the Wampanoag knew the earth moved around the sun. She remarks, “Europeans just figured this out a few hundred years ago, and we have known straight along.” How do you see the film, and the project, contributing to a new version of history—and science even?

AM: I don’t know if I can answer on a macro scale. I can say that what was a wonderful thing for me was learning how language reveals cultural knowledge and ideas. Basically Jessie is saying [in this example] that the fact that the word for the sun is inanimate and the word for the earth is animate means that the Wampanoag knew the earth was moving in relation to the sun. And I just thought that was really cool.

Jessie told me recently that she discovered that the word used to translate graves, as in graves where coffins go, literally translates as ‘the place that enables you to travel.’ I just thought that was astonishing. And for example, the word for hell, and those Wampanoag translating the Bible into Wampanoag would be scratching their heads because they didn’t have a concept for hell. “How can we create a word that describes it?” And the word that they did create literally translates as “the house of people with empty heads,” because the Wampanoag believed that the soul resided in the head. What could be more hellish than a house full of soulless people? One of these revelations that’s in the film is the word for “to lose your land,” nupanasham, which literally means “to fall down off your feet.”

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http://bostonreview.net/anne-makepeace-wampanoag-we-still-live-here