Reconnecting With Shinnecock Culture Through Revival of Their Native Language

Shane Weeks beats a wooden drum with a baton as he sings in the Shinnecock language. The words mean On this journey, we go to the place our spirit remembers.

“Making songs is one of the best ways I’ve been able to learn the language,” he said. 

He was born and lives on the Shinnecock Reservation on the east end of Long Island, where there are no fluent speakers of the dialect of the Algonguen language spoken in that region left. This has been the case for over a century. 

English settlers in Connecticut founded the towns of Southampton and East Hampton on Long Island’s south fork in the late 1630s, leaving the Indigenous people there economically and politically subject to the English. The Pequot War of 1637 massacred and enslaved many Native American groups in the Northeastern region, which also weakened the resistance to English infiltration on Long Island. 

A Christian Bible is the only remaining text that exists in the Algonguen dialect formerly spoken among the Shinnecock, Montauks, Wampanoags, and other tribes in the Northeast area. The bible was translated by Cocknoe de Long Island, an Indian man who was captured while visiting Connecticut during the pequot war and enslaved in Massachusetts in the mid 1600s. There are also a handful of words that have survived along with this one written source. 

“This indian is ingenious, can read, and I taught him how to write, which he quickly learnt, though I know not what use he now maketh of it,” Reverend John Elliot wrote in a letter referring to Cockenoe de Long Island on Feb 12, 1649. “He was the first that I made use of to teach me words, and to be my interpreter.” 

John Elliot was impressed by Cockenoe de Long Island’s ability to speak and understand English as well as his own native language and made him his first Indian teacher and interpreter. John Elliot learned the native language to missionize the Native Americans and with the help of Cockenoe de Long Island, he published the first translated Native American bible.

Today, there are Indigeneous people on the Shinnecock Reservation eager to reconnect with their language. John Boyd is a teacher’s aide who contributes to the overall curriculum of the classrooms at the Wuneechanunk Shinnecock Preschool located on the Shinnecock Reservation. Along with additional research, he uses Cocknoe de Long Island’s translated bible as reference to incorporate the native language in the kids’ activities.

“It’s not something you can pick up in a book that’s in a library,” Boyd said. “It’s something we really have to study… we have to take ownership for our culture because no one else cares to.”

Aside from trying to christianize the Native Americans, the United States government also formed Indian Residential Schools starting in 1887 to mold tens of thousands of Native American children into the Euro-American culture. The children were taken away from their families and forced into these schools where they would be beaten and sometimes killed if they practiced their traditions or spoke their Native language, which was illegal to do until 1969.

“Kill the Indian in him, and save the man,” Richard Henry Pratt, who founded the first of such schools in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, said in a speech on the Education of Native Americans in 1892.

By 1926, 357 of these boarding schools were founded across 30 states with nearly 83 percent of Native school-age children in attendance. These assimilation schools existed until the 1960s in the United States. 

“We were kind of forced into the English way, into the Christian way,” Shane Weeks said. “From the great awakening, the church kind of imposed more and more on our people.”

Along with the inability of Indian children to practice their native tongue, the Eastern Algonquin Languages were becoming obsolete as adults had to acquire the dominant English language for economic necessity. After the settlement of New England and Long Island, traditional subsistence patterns were severely disrupted, not only by the colonizer’s appropriation of the lands, but also by the predators of their animals, which roamed freely over land used by Native Americans for hunting, gathering, and planting (Anderson, 1994). 

The language shift among Native Americans in southeastern New England and eastern Long Island occurred in the 17th century, when increasing numbers of them were learning English to seek employment with the settlers because the depletion of their lands left them starved. The number of fluent native speakers in the region decreased with time. 

“We’re hoping that we’ll have a generation in the future that will be close to being fluent once again,” lead cultural enrichment teacher Cholena Smith-Boyd of Wuneechanunk Shinnecock Preschool said. 

Smith-Boyd teaches kids from ages of six weeks up to four years olds about their cultural ways. 

“Language is used throughout the day. As soon as they come into the building we greet them in our language. We say Wahmi Pátôhtá (good morning),” she said. 

She and her colleagues have turned the multipurpose room in the preschool into a full cultural experience room. There’s labeling all over the classroom with words in their language. In all of their activities, they try to implement their culture as well. 

“We kind of took duck duck goose but made our own version of it – ‘cwekecum cwekekum nehom,’ which is duck duck turkey because this time of the year we are doing turkey study,” Smith-Boyd said. 

As of now, the children in the preschool know how to count up to 20 in their language. They also know all the primary colors and are currently learning some of the words for secondary colors like suki, which means purple. 

“It means a lot for our community… the last fluent speaker passed on over a 100 years ago now,” she said. 

Tina Terrant is a language researcher with the Shinnecock Indian Nation, who has been making efforts to bring back Shinnecock words since the ’80s.

“It’s a part of our culture that people haven’t been using as much as they could be, so I’m going to help them to be able to do it better,” Terrant said. 

Tarrant and Harry Wallace, who is the chief of the Unkechaug Tribe on Long Island, work together to find similarities in the different dialects of the eastern Algonguen language. 

“One of the gifts given to us by the creator is that we have been able to recognize the spirit in all things,” Wallace said. “So understanding the language is not just learning how to communicate, it is learning how to recognize the spirit in all things.”