Aug 07, 2007 - 08:41:52 CDT
TWIN BUTTES (AP) - An effort to save the Mandan language may rest on the shoulders of a 75-year-old horse rancher.Experts believe Edwin Benson is the only person living who speaks fluent Mandan, the language of the American Indian tribe that became the host of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark during the explorers' winter encampment in North Dakota more than 200 years ago.
For past three summers, in six-hour shifts, Benson and California linguist Sara Trechter have camped out in a small office so he can speak into a microphone while Trechter takes notes. The two recently finished transcribing seven Mandan folk stories.
Benson's grandfather insisted on keeping alive Mandan traditions and language. Ben Benson forbid speaking English in his home, a log cabin near the mouth of the Little Missouri River.
Trechter, who teaches at a university in Chico, Calif., learned about efforts to preserve the Mandan language from her doctoral thesis adviser, a Siouan language expert at the University of Kansas. She got in touch with Calvin Grinnell, who works in the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara cultural preservation office on North Dakota's Fort Berthold reservation. Grinnell directs the language preservation project with Joseph Jasztrembski, a history professor at Minot State University.
The effort started about seven years ago with a grant from the National Park Service, which paid to videotape Benson telling folk stories at the Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site near Stanton.
The project's goal is to produce material for language labs on the reservation, ideally with the videotapes of Benson telling his stories in Mandan and follow-along captions of Trechter's transcriptions on the bottom of the screen.
Work has been slow, plagued at times by technical problems, sporadic funding and busy schedules. Benson uses an office near the Twin Buttes Elementary School, where he teaches Mandan.
Since finishing the folk stories, Trechter and Benson been recording and transcribing Mandan social and cultural customs.
Trechter has had to master some quirks of the language. She learned, for example, that a bird is said to "stand" while flying but "sit" when perched on a tree. She has found that some words or phrases simply defy translation into another tongue.
In the archives of the North Dakota Heritage Center in Bismarck, Trechter said she found "boxes and boxes" of material, including a Mandan dictionary compiled in the 1970s and 1980s, and manuscripts from the 1920s and 1930s.
Jasztrembski compared the work to restoring an endangered plant or animal species.
"I think language revitalization is something like that," he said. "It takes a great deal of time to do."
Grinnell said the tribal college archives has hours of tape recordings of elders from the 1970s that might provide helpful material.
Trechter, 44, said she already seen enough material to keep her busy for the rest of her career.
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