Pilgrim in the Palace of Words Read online

  Powwow is derived from an Algonquian term pau-wau or pauau, which referred historically to a spiritual gathering. It was generally a sort of religious ceremony, usually for the purpose of curing and healing. Powwows are practised across North America now, and many, like this one, are referred to as Gatherings of Nations. They feature dance competitions and drum circles. The people of many First Nations come from as far away as Yukon Territory to the north and Arizona to the south. All are welcome, even skinny white guys like me.

  Not a drop of alcohol was to be found anywhere on the huge fairgrounds. No one snuck it in, either. They had some pretty strict rules about that. The people here had come to be together, to converse, to meet, and to extend the hand of friendship across many nations.

  I drove across a rattling cattle gate, and someone waved me into a field to park my car. There were other cars there and loads of campers and tents. Several thousand people had come for the three-day event, and I could hear drums beating in the distance. It was dusty and hot, and I drove around a little until I saw a piece of grass where I could pull my car up and out of the way.

  I’d just turned off the engine when a woman in a buckskin coat hurried over to me. “You can’t park there.”

  Shit! I thought. I’d been there ten minutes and already I’d made some sort of mistake. I’d dishonoured something. I wondered if I’d somehow parked my car on a bit of sacred land. There must have been a reason why no one else parked there. It was a big green space, so maybe it was a teepee ring, a medicine wheel, or something.

  “I’m so sorry,” I muttered. “I didn’t mean to disrespect anything. I … ah …”

  The woman glared at me as if I were a complete idiot. “You can’t park there,” she said, “because you’re blocking the ice-cream truck.” And sure enough, I saw that I’d parked against the opened side window of a panel van. A gaggle of dark-haired little children had surrounded my car. They gazed up at me expectantly. Could I please get out of the way so they could get themselves a snow cone? Was that really too much to ask?

  Remember the anthropologist Franz Boas? He’s the one who came up with the four Inuit words for snow. Well, he had two students whose names are infamous in linguistic circles. One was Edward Sapir and the other was Benjamin Whorf. I actually spent a lot of time at university looking into their theories — what we now collectively and rather unimaginatively call the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

  Essentially, it says that a language sets up the categories and organizations by which we understand the world around us. “We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages,” Whorf wrote. We sort out the wild chaos of data that our sense organs bring in using the structures of the language we speak.

  The naming of colours is a good example. Colour actually exists along a continuum — the rainbow or, if you like, white light refracted through a prism — and the dividing line between, say, yellow and green isn’t an exact point. It’s open to cultural or even individual taste. There are no borders in a rainbow.

  So different languages tend to divide up colours in different ways. For example, the Haida have only four colour terms. The word ghuhlghahl corresponds well to the Chinese qing or the Dene doot3’izh, but not to any single word in English. It covers most of the range that English divides more specifically into terms like blue, green, purple, and turquoise. Ghuhlghahl, instead, is the colour of the sunlit living world, including the blues and indigoes of the sky, the greens and blues of the sea, the summer colours of the mountains, and the greens of needles, shoots, and leaves — clearly distinct from white and red, though it can sometimes include hues of yellow, brown, and even black.

  All of this is distinctly marked in different languages, so the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis says that colour — our way of thinking about it and even our way of seeing it — is organized by the language we have for it.

  In my graduate work I came across a quintessential set of experiments on colour. Two researchers, Brent Berlin and Paul Kay, tested speakers from ninety-eight different language groups. There were a few rare tongues with only two words for colour (the Dani language of New Guinea, for example, has only words for black and white, their jungle world being almost entirely composed of darker or lighter shades of green). A few more languages have colour words for three hues: black, white, and red. Languages with a fourth colour name usually include specific words for yellow or green. It goes on until you hit languages like English that generally speak in terms of eleven broad categories for colour: black, white, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, pink, purple, orange, and grey.

  But the thing is, even among speakers of languages with only two words, all people are equally able to distinguish between a broad range of hues. The Dani speakers of New Guinea make almost exactly the same mistakes as English speakers on a colour memory test involving more than forty colours, which shows, pretty conclusively, that the Dani speakers are no better and no worse than the English speakers in their perception of real colours.

  So what do we make of all this? Sapir and Whorf would have predicted that different language speakers really see colours in different ways. And they would be dead wrong. A strong version of their theory — linguistic determinism — had to be thrown out for a very simple reason. There are lots of things in our thinking that are outside the control of language. Colour is one of them. It doesn’t matter if the Dani don’t have a word for red. They can distinguish between the red of one flower and the pink of another, especially if they know that the red one is poisonous and the pink one isn’t. They figure that out pretty quickly, language or no language.

  But that’s not to say there’s nothing to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in general. Language rides pretty high in our consciousness, and to admit that it has at least some effect on our thinking is really a matter of common sense. Just what that effect is, though, is pretty hard to pin down.

  Researchers like Lera Boroditsky at Stanford University are still doing some pretty convincing tests (as recently as 2007) on the influence of language on colour in English as opposed to Russian, the ideas of time in English, Greek, Spanish, and Mandarin, and even on the gender of toasters (yes, toasters) and other inanimate objects in Spanish and German. Linguistic determinism is dead, but the view that language somehow still affects us is widespread and, in some cases, even provable. It’s a notion called linguistic relativity.

  In the summer of 1922 Edward Sapir himself appeared on the Tsuu T’ina land. Treaty Seven had already moved them into a particular two-hundred-and-fifty-square-kilometre reserve, and their language was already showing signs that it might disappear.

  Sapir worked with a Tsuu T’ina interpreter named John Whitney. Together they spoke with many of the elders of the nation and managed to fill seven notebooks with an incredibly detailed account of the Tsuu T’ina grammar system.

  What they failed to record, though, is how the Tsuu T’ina lived. They said nothing about the other semiotic systems under which the Tsuu T’ina make their way in the world — the tastes of their food, the clothing they wear, their haircuts, their dance patterns, the symbols on their teepees. All of these comprise a much larger grammar, something Sapir and Whorf never quite imagined, and all of it makes up their true House of Being.

  The central point of the powwow was a huge circular covered area. I sat cross-legged on the floor. There were no seats left, but I was in time for the Grand Procession. Representatives from all the attending nations would be dancing into the centre. Four or five different drum circles were dotted around the enclosure. Each drum circle had five or six guys, and the drum circles took turns playing. First, near the entrance, one circle went at it, banging out a fantastic rhythm like the swelling of a heartbeat. They chanted, too. I had no idea what they were saying. I didn’t even know if they were all Tsuu T’ina or whether some of the other circles were guest drummers from other nations.

  In time the first drum circle closed off its performance, and the group next to me started up. It had a few younger guys and one o
lder man, not quite an elder but clearly middle-aged, who called out instructions to the younger ones. “You’re cutting it off too soon!” he bellowed, and one of the younger guys, his hair in two long braids that came down over his shoulders, bent into the chant more conscientiously, his face contorted with the effort of getting it exactly right.

  Then the dancers came in, dozens of them, hundreds of them, each doing a version of their own nation’s dances. There were Cree and Blackfoot, Ojibwa from the East, and even a couple of Navajo from the far reaches of the southern United States. The range of costumes was incredible. They flashed with colour. Feathers and beads bobbed and tinkled. Some had headdresses, others wore furs. Elk skin moccasins pumped to the hypnotic beat of the drums. One young boy danced in, and all along his chest on a sort of leather jersey, he (or his mother more likely) had sewn blank silver computer CDs — a note from the present.

  It took almost an hour for everyone to enter. The drummers pounded on. The dancers wove and twirled until finally everybody was present. The drums quieted and the assembled were invited to sit. Then one man stood up at the front. I didn’t know who he was. He wore a lightly tanned rawhide jacket, the kind with leather tassels coming down from the hems. This man made the most amazing announcement. “We’ve now raised the money,” he said, “for a Calling Home Ceremony. Eleven groups will go.”

  Just as I was wondering what a Calling Home Ceremony might be, he began to explain. “Elders and representatives from eleven nations will be going this summer to Normandy.”

  Normandy? I thought. Like in France?

  “Many of our brothers fought in the world wars,” the man continued. “Many of them lost their lives in Europe. Now it’s time to call their spirits home. We will be a strong group — the Inuit and the Métis, the Cree and our gracious hosts the Tsuu T’ina. We’re going to bring our brothers’ spirits home at last.”

  There was great applause, of course. The man’s words left an indelible image in my mind: the elders of many nations standing on the beaches of Normandy, chanting softly for the spirits of their ancestors, those who sacrificed themselves along with all the other Canadians on the beaches of D-Day. That was a beautiful thought.

  Toward the end of the welcome speeches, one of the Tsuu T’ina elders got to his feet. His name was Fred Eagle Tail. He’s one of the small group of people who are still fluent in the ancient Tsuu T’ina language. Fred gave a prayer in the old language, but then switched into English for his speech. It was his final words that stayed with me. “Children of nature,” he said, “be strong. Remember always to hold your heads high.”

  I once travelled to a site just to the south of the Tsuu T’ina lands. On a long cliff rising unexpectedly from the prairies there’s an archaeological dig with the fantastic name of Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump. For many thousands of years the first peoples here ran small herds of buffalo off the cliffs.

  Sixty million buffalo once roamed the Great Plains, and life in the grasslands — for the Blackfoot, the Tsuu T’ina, or the Stoney people, who live just to the west — depended almost entirely on the migrations of these huge herds. The buffalo was their chief source of food, fuel, clothing, and shelter. Everything was used — from the horns to the tail. Nothing was wasted.

  Two spearheads found at Head-Smashed-In date to almost nine thousand years ago, making the site far older than even Stonehenge or the Pyramids in Egypt. I stood there on the lip of the cliff. On the western horizon the Rocky Mountains rose. To the east and south the wide grasslands stretched off unimaginably. I closed my eyes and tried to picture the place as it must have been.

  Today the Head-Smashed-In site is on Blackfoot land. Blackfoot is the literal translation for the name they call themselves — the Siksika. They speak an Algonquian language distantly related to Cree and as different from Tsuu T’ina as English is from Arabic. They’re from completely different language families, and yet both were intrinsically dependent on the buffalo.

  Neither the Blackfoot nor the Tsuu T’ina were likely the original users of the cliffs at Head-Smashed-In. No one knows who those first spear points really belonged to. It seems that wave after wave of migrations probably passed through these lands over the millennia, and as the people came, their way of life adapted to the prairies. All seemed to find a way to drive the buffalo off the cliffs. It was an economic windfall, a wealth of hides, food, and bone implements that would see them through even the cruellest winters.

  Buffalo in the Tsuu T’ina dialect is x.na. As the band spread into the grasslands, x.na must have come to mark a central concept, a crucial piece of vocabulary in their whole way of being. X.na, though, isn’t a word found in the Northern Dene dialects. There were simply no buffalo up around the Arctic Circle. In order to refer to a buffalo the Northern Dene use the same word they employ for a musk ox — hotéli ejeré.

  So where did the word x.na come from? When the Tsuu T’ina were presented with this new source of food and livelihood, who came up with the word to name it? Well, there are really only two ways in which a new word can enter a language. First, a new piece of language can be deliberately constructed — anything from the formal construction of a new word (like the Hebrew construction of the word airplane) to the more informal elements of slang (like the computer slang of surfing, hacking, or spam).

  The second way in which a new word comes into existence is just to borrow it from another tongue. A buffalo in the Blackfoot language is an iiníí. The middle n and the surrounding vowels in both x.na and iiníí may point to a shared cognate.

  Blackfoot, though, is distantly related to Cree — both are Assiniboine languages — and you would think that the Cree word might offer up some clues. However, it’s paskwâwimostos, which obviously bears no relation at all. It’s a mystery then. Both the Tsuu T’ina and the Blackfoot have adapted these words, but from where we’re not certain.

  In English I’ve been using the word buffalo, but that’s technically not correct, either. The animals in North America are more properly called bison. Still, this is exactly the point. Pretty much everyone here calls them buffalo. Languages are like free markets. They’re democracies wherein a thing gets named by whatever most people choose to call it.

  Of course, I’m still stuck on single words here. I don’t think the Dene dialects are quite as verb-heavy as Inuktitut, but still I’m probably making more of the individual word stems than they really deserve. The Tsuu T’ina language would be wrapped around a wide variety of phrases and sentences — everything to do with the way they hunted the buffalo and the way they butchered them. The language — all the slang and swearing, all the wordplay and joking, all the various comments and utterances that might have taken place around the fire after a big kill — that’s the real stuff. Even the grunts and shrugs between the words would hold communicative content.

  To understand it all, we would have to be there. We would have to be brought up in that particular society, in that particular place, at that particular time. It’s something lost to us, probably lost even to those few souls who still speak the Tsuu T’ina language today with any fluency. No one now on the Tsuu T’ina lands speaks only Tsuu T’ina. They’re all bilingual and speak English more and more in their everyday lives. No one hunts the buffalo anymore, and though they do keep buffalo on the Tsuu T’ina nation — I’ve seen them between the trees — the times are long gone when they would run them off cliffs, when they would butcher them and live in teepees made from their hides.

  Words change with the world around them. It’s a central feature of all languages. Nothing stays the same for long. Buffalo in the Tsuu T’ina dialect today is x.na-tiƒÁi, which means real buffalo or natural buffalo. This serves to distinguish them from the domestic cattle that now range across the ranchlands.

  And so it goes.

  When the powwow was over, I walked around the grounds for a while. The setting sun cast long shadows. Children played with water pistols. A few of the older kids were out behind a shed, sneaking cigarettes. O
ne old battered Winnebago sat on the field not too far from my own car. It had Arizona plates, and when I came around the side, a family had a barbecue going. They were cooking hamburgers — everyday normal beef — and the scent of it drew me closer.

  “Hi,” I said.

  They looked up from their cooking. One guy had a metal spatula in his hand, and except for the braids in his hair, he could have been any father barbecuing up a storm in the suburbs.

  “You from Arizona?” I asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “You drove up here all this way?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “Are you … Navajo?”

  The father flipped a burger over. “Yup, that’s us. Do you want a burger?”

  “Um, okay.”

  “Ketchup … mayonnaise?”

  “Maybe a little mayonnaise, please. Thanks.”

  He passed me the burger. It was delicious.

  “So,” I said, “can I ask you … do you also speak the Dene language?”

  “Navajo is a Dene language, yeah.”

  “So can you understand the Tsuu T’ina?”

  “Well, a little, yeah. If they speak really slowly, I can make out a few of the words. They’ve got a funny pronunciation, though.”

  Water in the Tsuu T’ina dialect is tu. In Navajo it’s tó. The sun and the moon are Sa and TådhåzaÝ in Tsuu T’ina. In Navajo they’re Shá and T3’éhonaa’éí. Clearly, they’re dialects of the same language. But here’s the thing. The Northern Dene, like the Willow Lake people at Talita, live in a land where winter still rules. They hunt caribou and cross frozen lakes for a good part of the year. The Tsuu T’ina live on the Great Plains and hunted, for centuries, the great herds of buffalo. The Navajo, meanwhile, are an agricultural people living in pueblo villages, growing corn and beans, and wearing jewellery of turquoise and copper.

  Halfway through my burger, I remembered a phrase I’d studied in Navajo. Very likely my pronunciation of it was horrendous, but I tried, anyway. “What,” I said, “does s1’áh naagháí bik’eh hózhó mean to you?”