Auditory Passions

Two of my most constant passions have been music and language, primarily when they are given life through sound. Emotions, expression, communication, all developed over the entirety of human existence. Isn't it wild to think that humans have been speaking to each other since before recorded history?

Given my enthusiasm for language and its intrinsic humanness, I am familiar with not only my first language, English, but also French, Latin, Spanish, German, American Sign Language, Korean, Shawnee, and Icelandic. I do not claim fluency in all of them, though I will share my insight based on what I do know. I will primarily focus on those I am the most familiar with and fluent in, which would be German and Shawnee.

Deutsch (German) is the primary language of my ancestors. My Swiss German great-grandparents immigrated to the USA shortly before World War I. My mother grew up in a German farming community in Southern California, in a time before it was the metropolitan sprawl of today and there was still a plethora of orange groves. While she never spoke German because her German neighbors and grandparents were shamed out of speaking their native language, she did pick up a German accent when speaking English. When I was growing up, she worked as a naturopath inspired by the Swiss herbalists of her ancestry.

As a diplomatic person myself, I always felt a connection to Switzerland and began learning German when I went to college. Most of my heritage is from Germany and Switzerland, so I had a strong motivation to become fluent and visit my ancestral homelands. I took German language classes for two years, then decided to continue my German journey by taking classes taught in German while I studied Linguistics. I learned in depth about German history, culture, and language, and even learned Mittelhochdeutsch (Middle High German). A true nerd reading tales of King Arthur in the German of the Middle Ages. German was the first language I fully immersed myself in, refusing to stop before I became fluent. Since I was taking highly scientific linguistics courses at the same time, the German courses reminded me why I cared about language. My language learning journey taught me so much more than just how to speak German, and it solidified for me that the best way to learn about a culture is through its language. Politics, religion, literature, history, all wrapped up in language.

saawanwaatoweewe (Shawnee language) is the second language obsession of my lifetime. While my father's side is majority German just like my mother's, his family has been in America for far longer. They have lived all over the country, from Virginia to Ohio to Kansas to Arizona to Montana to Colorado. His grandmother was born in Kansas as a citizen of the Shawnee Tribe, or saawanooki, at a time when they were about to have their reservation and federal recognition taken from them. Rather than going south with her fellow citizens who were merged with the ᏣᎳᎩ or Tsalagi (Cherokee Nation) in Oklahoma at the turn of the twentieth century, she moved to Montana to join her sister and her brother-in-law of the Apsáalooke (Crow Nation). There she met my great-grandfather, a German man from Ohio who was a trusted photographer and translator for the Apsáalooke. They named him Boxpotapesh (high kicker) in the Apsáalooke Aliláau (Crow language) and adopted him into the Apsáalooke along with my great-grandmother. They got married and raised their children on the reservation in Montana. Unfortunately, my great-grandmother died from typhoid fever when my grandfather was only five years old. Due to the political climate of the time and losing his mother so young, he left the reservation to build a future in Colorado. He turned his back completely on the heritage of his mother and his upbringing, but my father reconnected with it. My father has always been frustrated that he could not learn more from his own father about his Indigenous heritage.

I took my own path to navigate my family's forgotten heritage. When I was contemplating my future with graduation fast approaching, I realized that learning Indigenous languages didn't have to be a hobby. I had an epiphany that I had coincidentally chosen the perfect area of study to keep Indigenous languages alive as my career. I began to research both the Apsáalooke Aliláau of the people that took my great-grandparents in as their own, and the saawanwaatoweewe of my great-grandmother's people. Both were in need of assistance with language revitalization, but I felt called to saawanwaatoweewe. I studied it under the tutelage of a specialist in Algonquian languages, the language family of saawanwaatoweewe, with the hopes of one day being able to collaborate with one of the three federally recognized Shawnee tribes (Shawnee Tribe, Eastern Shawnee Tribe, and Absentee Shawnee Tribe) in Oklahoma on language revitalization. At first graduate school seemed to be the only option, but less than a year after I graduated, I got an email that felt like a dream. The saawanooki (Shawnee Tribe) was in search of a full-time linguist, and I had been recommended for the job. I've now been the linguist for the Shawnee Language Immersion Program (SLIP) for three years. Learning German was one thing, but exploring a language completely unrelated to any other one I've known has been an endlessly fulfilling experience. Every day I know that I am working to keep a language alive, and all of the culture and history held within it. It has only deepened my feeling of human connection, because even with a language and culture that developed independently from Europe, Asia, and Africa, I can't help but find the similarities produced by the weaving threads of humanity.