Preserving culture, identity and history through Indigenous languages

The Maskoke Seminole language is among the 7,000-plus Indigenous languages globally that are on the brink of extinction. According to United Nation experts, one language dies every 14 days around the world. From across Oklahoma to east of the Mississippi, only about 350 fluent Maskoke speakers remain. Marcus Briggs-Cloud is racing against time to revive the language he considers key to his tribe’s culture, history and identity.

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“I use to think that a viable solution to language loss was that you get in a classroom and you teach the language,” said Briggs-Cloud, a former language instructor for the Department of Anthropology at the University of Oklahoma.  “I realized nobody has ever learned a language sitting in a classroom.”

Briggs-Cloud began researching immersion methodologies and studying what endangered language communities were doing all over the world. He then had another revelation about what really hindered language preservation.

“We are all facing the same issue, which is obsolescence,” he said. He found that language communities usually address obsolescence – the process of becoming obsolete or outdated and no longer used – in one of two ways. The first is letting the language die. The secondary response, which he said is most prevalent, is that communities come together to create comparable words to describe English terms. 

“Thinking more critically, after you dump 3,000-plus words into your lexicon that are inherently premised on post-industrialization, capitalist, consumerist ideology, and driven by the tech industry, you deviate significantly from the ethos that our ancestors left to us,” said Briggs-Cloud. “It then begs the question of why not just speak English if all we are doing is making a mirror image of the English language and calling it our own?”

He said the Maskoke language was derived from tribe’s relationship with the natural world. That is what he is determined to restore. In a radical departure, he created a third response to addressing obsolescence by reviving the society in which the Maskoke language functioned best, premised on the intimate relationship with the natural world.

For the past 16 years, Briggs-Cloud has worked toward creating an ecovillage, located in a parcel of the tribe’s ancestral homelands in what is now Weogufka, Alabama. The Maskoke Seminoles were forcibly removed from their lands under the 1830 Indian Removal Act.

“I wanted to make an ecovillage community where we can be good to the earth, keep our language and culture alive, and be able to live as a full-time Indian so that we don’t have to schedule a ceremony at the mercy of the American labor force schedule,” he said. “Here, we can actually do things in accordance with the lunar cycles and what’s happening in the natural world.”

In 2018, the Maskoke community named Ekvn-Yefolecv (ee-gun yee-full-lee-juh) became the official owners of 577 acres of Alabama woods where a traditional village has been created. Residents of the village are building an off-grid, income-sharing community with natural building construction and renewable energy. In addition, the community has been working with Alabama’s Wildlife and Freshwater Fish Division to reintroduce native plants and animals sacred to the Maskoke people, such as the sturgeon fish and buffalo, while growing heirloom crops in an effort to improve the health of tribal members.

Nationally, Native peoples suffer disproportionately from diseases such as hypertension, asthma, cancer, diabetes and tuberculosis compared to other ethnic groups. Decolonizing diets and returning to the practices of using natural foods is also a priority according to Briggs-Cloud. He said Native communities are losing language-speaking elders too soon, due to preventable diseases.

Currently, the ecovillage includes 16 full-time residents and 42 transient members. Briggs-Cloud expects the membership to continue to grow as the ecovillage becomes more self-sustaining.

“My whole theory that a successful language-immersion program has to happen in a village setting has proven to be true thus far because everything we do in the ecovillage we have vocabulary in our language for, thereby creating the host society in which our language can thrive every minute of the day,” said Briggs-Cloud. When members exit the ecovillage, they immediately encounter the need for vocabulary that is not in the Maskoke language and are forced to resort to English as the medium of communication.

The village is an income-sharing community with everyone receiving a $400 monthly stipend, food and lodging in exchange for contributions to the community such as agricultural or construction work. Prospective community members must state their intent to become a resident, and the community observes them for four moons. At the end of the four moons, Briggs-Cloud said, they may extend the evaluation period or invite the person to become a part of the community.

“We have two basic rules; the first rule is no English for students during immersion school hours or during designated gatherings in the evening,” he said. Members pay a 25-cent fine for every English word used during these timeframes. “The second rule is that you have to come with a lot of love in your heart for your people and the language; otherwise, the efforts will never amount to any sense of success.”
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Briggs-Cloud hopes that in 25 years, Ekvn-Yefolecv Maskoke ecovillage will be a place where one can still hear the Maskoke language spoken fluently.