Anthropologists preserve history, language of the Assiniboine

After two failed attempts and thousands of dollars spent on schooling, former IU doctoral student in anthropology Linda Cumberland finally has a chance to finish her dream.

Cumberland, a research associate with IU’s American Indian Studies Research Institute, along with IU anthropology professors Ray DeMallie and Douglas Parks, has been struggling to transcribe the oral history of the Native American Assiniboine tribe.

Recently the National Endowment for the Humanities granted the American Indian Studies Research Institute $250,000 to help complete their work documenting the tribe’s language, Nakota or Assiniboine.

“We recorded traditional myths, stories told of ancient times when animals could talk and strange things happened, historical tales and stories of how people should behave that preached about morality and culture,” project leader DeMallie said.

The project started in the late 1980s when DeMallie and Parks conducted a survey of the different Sioux languages. While creating a dictionary of Sioux languages, Assiniboine elders asked for help in recording their language, DeMallie said.

The Assiniboine are typically regarded as a northern plains tribe, Cumberland said. Residing primarily in Montana and along the Canadian border, there are approximately 3,000 Native Americans who still identify as Assiniboine while only 30 to 40 still speak the language.

DeMallie and Parks spent two summers recording stories from the most respected Assiniboine elders. They ended up with 3,000 pages of handwritten transcription before the project hit a snag.

“In the late 80s we couldn’t get any funding,” DeMallie said. “The reaction was ‘We don’t know who the Assiniboine are. Why should we be funding this?’”

With so few of the Assiniboine left who can speak the language, the ultimate goal is to publish the literature for the tribe itself, DeMallie said. Not only will they preserve the language but also the culture. 

But Cumberland realizes that some question the rationale of documenting a language nearly extinct. 

“Languages are capsules, complete expressions of a population’s take on the world,” Cumberland said. “The only way to get a complete picture is to understand how all the different languages express humankind’s take on the world.”

Cumberland is currently working to complete three volumes of stories and is about to begin work on a dictionary for the tribe.

To finish this project, she routinely treks back and forth between her home in Oklahoma and the Assiniboine reservations in Montana to collect their stories and translate them. She then returns to the tribe to check for accuracy, she said.

She hopes the project will fill the gap in research on available languages as well as give the Assiniboine a history told by their own ancestors. 

“At the age of 50 I took this on, and by the time I get this grammar revised I may be 70 years old, but I’ll be really satisfied that I set out to do something and I accomplished it,” Cumberland said. “I’ll be leaving something that will last forever.”