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THE ASTORIAN • THURSDAY, MARCH 17, 2022
‘You lose a language, you lose a culture’
Kalapuyans mentioned in Lewis and
Clark’s journals
Linguists and family work to
preserve Indigenous language
By MYERS REECE
Underscore News
On a drizzly January morning, Esther
Stutzman’s dining room table is covered with
sticky notes, worksheets, notepads and sev-
eral bulky Kalapuya dictionaries. Seated next
to Stutzman are her two daughters and grand-
daughter, all Kalapuyan descendants and
enrolled members of the Confederated Tribes
of Siletz Indians. Their jovial banter belies the
gravity of their mission: to revive the lost lan-
guage of their ancestors. The scattered docu-
ments form a paper trail to their heritage.
“This is probably the biggest group of
Kalapuya speakers in the world,” Stutzman
said during a semi-regular language study that
she launched at her Yoncalla home in western
Oregon after the dictionaries were published
in December. “And we speak the language at
a preschool level.”
The dictionaries are the product of a
decadelong passion project by the late Paul
Stephen McCartney Sr., whose fascination
with Kalapuya compelled him to devote his
post-high school teaching years to compil-
ing and organizing it, and to reach out to the
Stutzman family for their assistance. McCart-
ney, who passed away last year at 81, wasn’t
a trained linguist but loved language and
thought Kalapuya was beautiful, according
to Aiyanna Brown, Stutzman’s granddaugh-
ter. He poured an enormous amount of energy
into the dictionary project.
“He wanted to keep the language alive,”
Brown said.
‘Language is a thing of heritage’
McCartney had access to a trove of writ-
ten materials and a few audio recordings
from ethnographic interviews with John Hud-
son, a Santiam Kalapuyan who died in 1954.
Hudson has often been called the last “L1″
Kalapuya speaker, meaning he grew up in a
household where the language was spoken
fi rst. But linguist Henry Zenk, who holds a
doctorate in anthropology and is a foremost
authority on Oregon Indigenous languages,
says at least one other L1 speaker lived longer
than Hudson: Stutzman’s great-aunt, Laura
Blacketer Albertson, née Fearn. According to
Stutzman, who is also descended from west-
ern’s Oregon’s Coos people, Albertson passed
away in 1971.
“She was very likely, as far as we know,
the last speaker who had grown up with the
language from childhood,” Zenk said.
The audio fi les of Hudson from the 1930s
into the 1950s are the lone historical sources
of spoken Kalapuya, except for recordings of
Kalapuya songs from 1914 to 1915, accord-
ing to Zenk and fellow linguist Jedd Schrock,
both of whose published works were among
the diverse array of essential sources for
McCartney’s dictionaries. Additional audio
recordings may be housed in the Library of
Congress, although researchers haven’t yet
located them.
Zenk and Schrock, who have previ-
ously collaborated on Kalapuya research, are
both linguistic consultants for the Confed-
erated Tribes of Grand Ronde, where many
Kalapuyan descendants are enrolled citizens.
The two scholars note that McCartney’s
dictionaries aren’t rooted in foundational lin-
guistic practices, which renders them largely
unviable as academic resources. But they say
the extensive glossary-like wordlists serve as
an accessible gateway into the language for
non-academics. That assessment is echoed
by David Lewis, a professor in Oregon State
University’s anthropology and ethnic studies
department who advised McCartney early in
his eff orts.
The publications’ usefulness outside of
scholarly circles is evident in the informal lan-
guage sessions at Stutzman’s house. Schrock
points out there’s no single way to measure a
language or perceive its meaning.
“Diff erent people think about language in
diff erent ways,” he said. “To me, language is
more behavior than math. We have this enor-
mous mountain of data, but that’s not what
language is. It’s not really about all those
rules. It’s about what people do together.
Pictured: The Rosebriar Mansion
Leah Nash/Underscore News
From left, Melissa Tuttle, Aiyanna Brown, Shannin Stutzman, Heather Moore and Esther
Stutzman convene a Kalapuya language study in January in Yoncalla.
That’s what makes it a language. The peo-
ple who can bring back Kalapuya are the
Kalapuyan people. So it’s great that Esther
and her family are doing this.”
“Language is a thing of heritage,” he
added. “If it hasn’t been spoken in a long
time, it takes a lot of cour-
age to try to speak it again.”
According to Lewis, who has a doctorate in
anthropology, the Kalapuya people have lived
in western Oregon for close to 15,000 years,
once occupying more than a million acres in
the Willamette and Umpqua valleys. Zenk
said Kalapuyans were mentioned in Lewis and
Clark’s journals, although the Corps of Dis-
covery never crossed paths with them. The fi rst
documented Euroamerican contact came by
way of fur traders in 1811, according to Zenk.
Lewis, who is the great-great grandson of
Hudson, says about 20,000 Kalapuyans histor-
ically lived in as many as 19 tribes and bands
divided linguistically by regions of the Willa-
mette Valley: northern, central and southern.
By 1850, that number had dwindled to about
1,000, a catastrophic decline fueled by white
settlers introducing new diseases. Kalapuyans
were among several western Oregon tribes to
sign treaties with the U.S. government between
1848 to 1855.
Zenk and Lewis both contribute essays to
oregonencyclopedia.org that serve as authori-
tative and accessible resources about the histo-
ries and cultures of Indigenous peoples in Ore-
gon, including Kalapuya. Lewis also writes
essays on his own website.
Over the years, Lewis said people have
occasionally expressed surprise that Kalapuy-
ans are still around and that modern Native
Americans exist at all.
“I say, ‘Well, I’m here,’” Lewis said. “I
feel like for the longest time Kalapuyans were
ignored. We were written out of history books.
It’s almost as if history began with settlers,
white people in the area. But we’re starting to
see more interest. The dictionary is a stepping
stone to help bring more interest and attention
to the language itself and the culture.”
Stutzman hopes more participants will join
the language studies, either through Zoom or
in person if COVID allows. More broadly, she
would like to see the eff orts seep into everyday
life, especially among kids. It could be as sim-
ple as using a few words to describe common
objects, with more terms added incrementally
over time. Even if no verbs or grammar are
involved, tiptoeing into immersion establishes
pathways to cultural connection.
“We’re really wanting to get this thing roll-
ing and get a lot more people involved,” Stutz-
man said.
Zenk says it would be an “uphill struggle to
bring Kalapuya back as a living language,” but
it has been done before, notably with Hebrew.
Schrock is more optimistic about the chances
of revival, or at least a version of restoration
that tips the scale a bit further toward living
than dead.
“You lose a language, you lose a culture,”
Schrock said. “A culture and a language are
really the same thing. Language represents
how a group of people at a given time con-
ceptualize the world. We’re all sort of stuck in
our concepts of the world because we speak
English. A language comes about because of a
group of people’s experience. When you lose
a language, you lose all of that human experi-
ence. That way of seeing the world goes away
and we’re stuck with only the Eurocentric way
of thinking about the world.”
Komemma Cultural Protection Association.
Among the recipients are the University of
Oregon, Oregon State University and Port-
land State University.
The family ordered a second run of 50 sets,
funded by an additional $3,000 raised through
GoFundMe, the suggested
donations and contribu-
THE KALAPUYA
tions from organizations
Sharing the language
such as Zelle, which also
PEOPLE
Schrock is creating a dig-
partnered with BuzzFeed
ital archive of Kalapuya lan-
on a video about the Stutz-
HAVE LIVED
guage materials for the Con-
mans’ eff orts. As long as
IN WESTERN
federated Tribes of Grand
there is demand and fund-
Ronde’s cultural preser-
ing, Brown says the print-
OREGON
vation department. The
ings will continue.
archive project is a massive
FOR CLOSE
The Stutzmans empha-
undertaking that refl ects an
size that oral storytelling is
TO 15,000
unusual characteristic of the
integral to Kalapuyan cul-
language: dead in spoken
ture. Stutzman , 79, is a
YEARS, ONCE
form but kept alive through
respected storyteller and
OCCUPYING
a huge compendium of
hopes to acquire enough
recorded information, stem-
language skills to convey
MORE THAN
ming from work conducted
those tales, or at least por-
by anthropologists and lin-
tions, in Kalapuya. Brown,
A MILLION
guists in the late 19th and
22, is proud to help facili-
ACRES IN THE
early 20th centuries and fur-
tate a deeper cultural under-
ther advanced by modern
standing among her gen-
WILLAMETTE
scholars such as Zenk and
eration and for future
Schrock.
generations, including her
AND UMPQUA
“North American lan-
own kids someday. She
VALLEYS.
guages are dying and dis-
called her role in the project
appearing tremendously,”
empowering.
Schrock said. “A lot of them are already gone
“Our main hope for the dictionaries is to
and we don’t have much of a record for them. share our language,” Brown said. “As long
Kalpauyan is a rare instance where there are as we’re getting our language and culture out
no speakers but we have this enormous cor- there and getting more people to see it and
pus of existing Kalapuyan records.”
understand it, it has less of a chance to die
When McCartney dug into that corpus off .”
for his project, he approached Stutzman and
“Language connects people back to their
Lewis, the Oregon State anthropologist and heritage,” she continued, “and this is another
ethnohistorian, for guidance. While Lewis’ way for us to connect back to our homelands
involvement faded, Stutzman remained active and to our ancestors. I know it sounds hoity
throughout the process and enlisted her grand- toity, but I really do feel this is a way to con-
daughter, Brown, who launched a GoFundMe nect and communicate with our ancestors and
page last year to raise money for printing the keep those traditions that are so rich alive.”
dictionaries, just as McCartney’s health was
failing.
“When Paul contacted us and asked if we
wanted our language back, of course we said
yes,” Brown said. “We didn’t even know that
was possible.”
On his deathbed and unable to speak,
McCartney conveyed a message to Stutzman
inquiring about the prospects of publication.
Stutzman assured him that the dictionaries
would be printed. McCartney died two days
later.
Thanks to $10,000 raised through
GoFundMe, the fi rst run of 100 dictionaries
was printed in December. Each four-volume
set contains more than 3,000 pages and weighs
20 pounds, with two books of English-Ka-
lapuya translations and two of Kalapuya-En-
glish. Stutzman’s house has served as distri-
bution headquarters for the 400 heavy tomes.
As of late February, all of the dictionar-
ies had either been delivered or commit-
ted to individuals and institutions, includ-
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