Mischelle Dressler (above) and Steven James (inset, left) are striving to preserve the Wašiw language, teaching it to children and adults.
Wašiw homelands and disrupting every major ecosystem the tribe had so carefully tended. The arrival of newcomers led not only to the alteration of Wašiw lands but also to the de- struction of their language and culture. In the winter of 1890, federal officials
began rounding up Wašiw children and haul- ing them to the newly opened Carson Indian School (later called the Stewart Indian School) south of Carson City. Their hair was shorn, their traditional clothing burned and they were forbidden from speaking their Native language. Stories of children being separated
24 AMERICAN INDIAN SUMMER 2019
from their families are seared into the collec- tive tribal memory. Wašiw elder and teacher Melba Rakow recalls an aunt telling stories of standing up to school authorities. “She would gather girls together for games on the play- ground and speak in Wašiw; she didn’t care about the punishment that would follow.” The generation of children who were taken away in the early to mid-1900s is often called the “stolen generation,” and many of the survivors still refuse to speak their mother tongue.
SAVING A UNIQUE LANGUAGE
For decades, linguists grouped the Wašiw language into a larger language family known as the Hokan. Others have considered it a distinct branch of this family, but the Wašiw people have maintained that their language is a language isolate, unrelated to any of the surrounding tribes nor others who make up the Hokan language family.
Until the 1950s, Wašiw was solely a spo-
ken language. Then Roma James, secretary- treasurer of the first Washoe Tribal Council, who was working with other speakers, many of whom were elders, began to transcribe tribal stories and create a Wašiw orthogra- phy. Soon after, Marvin Dressler, a Wašiw tribal member who later became one of the tribe’s first language teachers, began translat- ing Wašiw words into phonetic English and recording them in detailed journals. As part of his doctoral research, William Jacobsen (who later became a University of Nevada, Reno [UNR] linguistic professor) recorded oral histories and songs, devised writing systems and created language teaching ma- terials for the tribe. In 1964, Jacobsen com- pleted his dissertation, “Washo Grammar,” and in 1979 he was hired to teach language classes two nights a week near Dresslerville. In the early 1980s, a group of language ac-
PHOTO BY HERMAN FILMORE
PHOTO BY SAM GORDON
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