Notebook #2
I plan to stick with my object – the Miami Illinois dictionary – my tribal language dictionary. As I’m beginning to research how the dictionary came to be (our last native speakers passed in the 1960s,) I found out that a UC Berkeley student in the 1980s decided to do his dissertation on our language. I’m already suspicious of universities in general; I know that the universities in Illinois, Ohio, and Indiana have my ancestors in their Anthropology Departments, and so this project for Ethnic Studies has piqued my curiosity about where in the UC system important writings/remains/”artifacts” about my tribe might be housed. I’ve got to go to the library before discussion so that I can look at microfiche.
I’m excited about what I will find but it’s often soul crushing at the same time. Case in point, I am Peoria but that name incorporates or is a morphed version of the pronunciation of early French colonizers. But just in beginning research for this, I found that my tribe might have originally been called the Illinois, also colonizer language, but actually something like or closer to Illiniwek, and that has got me twisted up right now. If we don’t even call ourselves what we have always called ourselves, why? I view this as one mode of vanishing the natives. Also, I am now wondering if it is tied to the fact that one of the states of the United States of America is named after my people and that’s not an association the powers that be want people to know and understand.
I feel like since I started college my entire existence is couched in the assimilation of my family, the shame of being from Oklahoma, the unknown family histories, the mandate to “marry white”, the poverty, the dysfunction. It’s all tied to our history, a history that is hidden from us and somehow forgotten by us simultaneously. There’s this feeling I have that as I dig deeper I won’t be able to separate out the national blinds of my history and existence; they are all intertwined. Being an American Indian, obviously, colonization. The assimilation of my family, pretending to be white, not ever talking about family history, etc. is one form I see of creating whiteness, creating an American. Additionally, the land which once was ours but has been taken, bought, sold, allotted and more is the making of Mother Earth into property, something to be taken and ripped of resources for numerous purposes, a foreign concept to my ancestors, but the way of thinking about land for the last 500 years. I’m just now in the last few years beginning to understand the impact to my tribe due to loss of language. I’m thinking now about language loss tied to citizenship like how folks a few years back tried to push for English to be the national language. I’d like to explore this more.
Some of the information I wanted to share:
 The place on Amazon to buy the dissertation (book) by the white PhD student for $75.
https://www.amazon.com/Miami-Illinois-Language-Studies-Languages-Americas/dp/0803215142/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1485665855&sr=8-4&keywords=miami+illinois
 The Myaamia Center - where members of one of my sister tribes do fabulous work!
http://myaamiacenter.org
 A link to our online dictionary:
https://myaamiadictionary.org/dictionary2015/
 An article on Indian Country Today about Daryl Baldwin, one of the authors of our dictionary, that mentions he became one of the MacArthur Fellows, aka the genius grant, for his work on language and culture revitalization for his tribe.
https://indiancountrymedianetwork.com/education/native-education/myaamia-language-preservationist-wins-genius-grant/