Linguistics professor and students awaken sleeping language in summer service-learning course

In the heat of a summer day, a ball whizzes through the air, whacked by a child wielding two netted sticks. Another child scoops it up and flings it to a Tulane student. Cheers erupt in a game that has been native to North America for hundreds of years.

Long before this game was called stickball, the Tunica people called it punatarahpani. For a period of time, that word fell out of common use as Tunica was classified as an extinct language.

Now, students from the Tulane School of Liberal Arts Tunica language course are working with Tunica tribe members to pass on both the game and the word to the next generation. It's just one part of a comprehensive effort to sustain the culture of the Southeastern Indigenous community.

"The past is not static, and reconnecting with it can benefit the whole community," said Judith Maxwell, professor of linguistics in the Department of Anthropology. "The past is part of a living legacy that they can bring forward into the present in ways that are going to enrich their lives."

Maxwell teaches the service-learning class for two weeks in the summer, which consists of one week in a classroom and one week volunteering at the Language and Culture Youth Camp for children on the reservation of the Tunica-Biloxi Tribe of Louisiana. The course is centered around the original language of the Tunica people who are part of the tribe, one of four federally recognized Native American tribes in Louisiana.

Thanks to the efforts of Indigenous families, volunteers and scholars like Maxwell, the language once deemed extinct by the language reference resource Ethnologue has since been reclassified, first as dormant and now as reawakening.

For Maxwell and her students, their work is part of a larger effort to further "wake up" the language, and, in turn, help keep the vibrant Tunica culture alive.

The class is connected to the Tunica-Biloxi Language and Culture Revitalization Program, which Maxwell started in 2010 in collaboration with Tunica Tribal Council member Brenda Lintinger and the linguistics program at Tulane. Working from materials compiled by 19th- and 20th-century linguists, tribal volunteers and Tulane graduate students created updated reference materials for the language, including a Tunica dictionary and a textbook.

The summer camp where Maxwell and her students volunteer offers a way to apply the results of that work in a real-world setting.

Before they arrive at the camp, the students spend a week at Tulane learning the basics of the language and how to teach it to children.

In the second week, the students take their newfound skills to the reservation in Marksville, Louisiana. Camp activities vary each year, from games like punatarahpani and nature walks to art installations and pottery. Tunica language and culture are intertwined with each activity, and campers participate directly in expanding the vocabulary of the language.

"We teach them how to make words in Tunica, and then when we put them in the dictionary, we can put the kid's name next to it and say that this was created by them at the summer camp," Maxwell said.

Maxwell and the student volunteers see firsthand the effect that the camp has on the children there. She recounted one of her favorite memories, that of the Green Corn Ceremony.

The ceremony, which traditionally marks the first day of a new year, involves crafting packets out of corn husks and placing them at the graves of loved ones at dawn. To accompany this, families would sing the Daybreak song to greet the morning and salute their ancestors.

On the day of the ceremony at camp, Maxwell accompanied the children, led by their trained group leaders, to a memorial wall within the museum at the Tunica-Biloxi Cultural and Educational Resources Center. The wall included the names of deceased tribal members. There, the children left packets for their own loved ones alongside small scrolls that they had inscribed with a prayer in Tunica.

"We had between 60 and 80 kids in a small space in the museum, and they were all perfectly quiet, except when they were saying their prayers and making their offerings to their ancestors," Maxwell said. "It was extremely moving and very important."

The summer camp is equally rewarding for the Tulane students who work with Maxwell. Many of them have returned to volunteer year after year, as they find the experience so enriching.

Sullivan Westerfield, a digital media practices and music composition major who enrolled in the class this summer, plans to be one of those returning students next year.

"I wasn't really sure what to expect with the course, if I'm completely honest. I am not a linguistics major, so the experience was very new to me," Westerfield said. "I found the experience to be very fulfilling, with a project I came to really care about and topics I found really fascinating."

Maxwell sees a broader connection between the work her students are doing with Tunica and the lifelong values a liberal arts education can instill in them.

"The liberal arts prepare you to deal with an evolving world, so that you can build on what you know of culture, language and everything from the past," she said. "That education can give you the foundation to not erase people, to embrace people and to continue to move forward in ways that enrich everybody."