Mimahuk Ikanǫsa

Linguist Corey Roberts ’24 remembers a day in Senegal when he watched four children playing. The children, he says, each spoke their own language — one using Wolof, and the others, Serer, Pulaar and Lebou. They spoke to one another and listened, Roberts says, and “they all understood each other. They felt no need to change language.”

“That,” he says, “is the human capacity for language. And that was what Native America was before colonization happened.”

The English language, Roberts notes, sitting in what was then his graduate-student office at the University of Arizona, contains more than a million words. But when he ran across a dissertation on the language of his ancestors, Tutelo — called Yesa:sahį́ (“the speech of the people”) by many of its speakers — he counted only 753.

Yesa:sahį́, he knew, had many more. And he is unearthing them.

Roberts, who will complete his linguistics doctorate in December, is of mixed ancestry. With family members, he’s carried out thorough genealogical research. Some of his predecessors, he says, were Tuscarora, others African, still others British. Not until his father’s funeral did he find out from a cousin that, through a grandmother, he also is Occaneechi.

The Occaneechi, a Native American tribe of the North Carolina and Virginia Piedmont, once spoke Yesa:sahį́. Roberts’ mission now is to ensure that the language is spoken again — by children and their parents, at powwows, in prayer and in daily life.

“The state of my language,” he says, “is such that I’m going to have to work on this for the rest of my life, and even then, I won’t get to do all the things that I would like to see happen.” A language, Roberts is careful to note, is rarely “extinct.” Linguists who labor to recover languages — like Roberts; like his best friend in the U of A linguistics department, the last speaker of a Manchurian language — hold a measured distaste for the word.

“As long as there are people alive that have descendancy, as long as there’s any will to learn the language,” Roberts says, “a language is not extinct. It might be dormant; it might be sleeping; it might be revitalizing. But not extinct.”

Of course, languages do sometimes fall away. The last speaker of Ofo with tribal descendancy, Roberts says, passed away in 1914. Ofo is one of the two closest sister languages to Yesa:sahį́, the other being Biloxi. Each is among the Siouan language family’s 21 tongues. And The New York Times in 2017 told the story of Amadeo García García, the last living speaker of Taushiro, the language of a tribe that had escaped the ravages of colonization by fleeing into the Peruvian Amazon.

Once, an elder asked him to share the tribe’s creation story. At first, Roberts thought it might be a test of his cultural knowledge. As he shared the story, however, he understood that this cultural information was largely unavailable, and the elder was helping to fill in gaps. That moment was a revelation for Roberts: his language goals began to carry the added task of cultural revitalization.

Language and culture, Roberts says, are interwoven, fused. The loss of language is the communal loss of access to pieces of culture. “There is this ancestral sense of loss, even if it is not consciously or palpably known — and that loss is intergenerational,” he says. “It’s about inter-generational trauma. That loss carries,” expressed in heightened rates of depression and suicide.

But the obverse also is true: To recapture language is to recapture well-being. Language, for Roberts, is a vehicle for better physical and mental health for individuals and communities. “When you start giving [a] community the tools that it needs to start having access to its language again, you see those gaps start filling up,” he says. “And it’s beautiful.”

During his doctoral work, Roberts offered a monthly Yesa:sahį́ class to members of the Occaneechi tribe. He paused the lessons to write his dissertation on the language, but he means to begin sharing his accrued knowledge again.

Roberts speaks seven languages: English, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Russian, Wolof and Yesa:sahį́, in order of fluency. A love of languages, he says, is a theme of his life, along-side a love of ancestry. In high school, he dropped his American classmates so that he could hang out with the Spanish exchange students. He has studied in Brazil, Russia and Senegal — places, he says, where English was not primary.

In Brazil, he studied capoeira, a mixed practice: part dance, part martial art. In Senegal, he took courses in theater pedagogy. But he was swimming in language in those places, just as he is now.

Yesa:sahį́, he says, is agglutinative, like many Native languages of North America. Word pieces are melded together, bit by bit, to build phrases and full sentences, sometimes in a single word. “You think of ‘gluten’ — glue sticks together,” he says. “So, all these word parts stick together.” What might take three words to communicate in English — “I eat it,” for instance — is expressed in a single word.

In his language, then, as in his life: a fusion, a mosaic. Parts that build a whole. More than anything, Roberts’ Yesa:sahį́ students sometimes say, they’d like to speak to their ancestors when they die. And “I’m going to do my best to have at least some of what we say be understood on the other side,” he says.

“Knowing that that is now a possibility,” he adds, “brings about a level of spiritual health the likes of which we hadn’t had access to in a long time.”

Roberts recently made a worldly crossing over of his own, accepting a professorship at Elon University, which sits on the Occaneechi’s North Carolina ancestral lands. The university, he says, has “a great, great relationship with my tribe, and they are working to build it.” Roberts has been tasked with starting a program in Native American and Indigenous studies — a program that will focus on its relationship with his people.

To study a language like Yesa:sahį́, Roberts told another school in a job interview, is to learn not only about Siouan languages, but also about languages like Japanese, which have a subject-object-verb word order (think: “I cookies eat”), rather than the subject-verb-object order of English. “It’s also,” he says, “to learn something about history.” He says that many places in the U.S. take their names from Siouan languages and peoples: Kansas, Iowa and Missouri. Osage County, Biloxi and Omaha.

To study Yesa:sahį́, then, becomes a journey across space and time — a journey of parts pieced together, not unlike Roberts’ own.

“Studying my language in the way that you have to makes you examine language in a way that you would never do otherwise,” he says. “And it helps to enrich your understanding of Language, capital ‘l,’ as a concept, as opposed to a particular language, lowercase ‘l.’” Roberts knows that his won’t be the final word on Yesa:sahį́, just as the dissertation he ran across was by no means the end. From the beginning, he’s just wanted to be a part of the whole.

“I said, ‘Well, I might as well do what I can to help work on this language and give back to the communities,’” he recollects. “And that’s kind of been motivating me ever since.”