Racing against the clock, the last fluent speaker of a Native American language records folktales and creates a dictionary.
Jia Tolentino writes at the website Jezebel, “Marie Wilcox, an octogenarian Native American woman from the San Joaquin Valley in California, was born on Thanksgiving in 1933; she grew up in a one-room house with the grandmother who delivered her and spoke her native Wukchumni …
“In this 10-minute mini-doc from the Global Oneness Project, via NYTLive, Marie talks about speaking primarily English to her children, who worked alongside her in the fields for a good part of the year. She started learning Wukchumni when her sister started speaking it again in an attempt to pass the endangered language on to each their kids.
“ ‘I was surprised she could remember all that,’ her daughter says. ‘She just started writing down her words on envelopes. … She’d sit up night after night typing on the computer, and she was never a computer person.’
“ ‘I’m just a pecker,’ says Marie. ‘I was slow.’
“She decided to make a dictionary. ‘Not for anyone else to learn — I just wanted to get it together.’ …
“According to a New York Times piece on this documentary from 2014:
Before European contact, as many as 50,000 Yokuts lived in the region, but those numbers have steadily diminished. Today, it is estimated that fewer than 200 Wukchumni remain.”
Watch the short film Marie’s Dictionary, by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, here. I found it moving.
Photo: Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee
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