By Laura Pellicer
This article features Dr. Marty Richardson’s journey of reconstructing, learning, and teaching the Tutelo-Saponi language, highlighting his lifelong mission to bring this language back.
Marty Richardson wanted to know more about his culture. He grew up with his family in Maryland, a ways removed from the Haliwa-Saponi Indian Tribe in North Carolina to which he is a member.
“We had moved up to Baltimore for my parents to find jobs and things like that. And so a lot of times people would ask me: who I am, what I am. When you come into processes like that, and folks kind of questioning who you are, you really take a look at yourself and say: Well, what do I know about myself?”
Those questions about his identity prompted Richardson to find out more about the Haliwa-Saponi people, based in Halifax and Warren Counties. He made his parents drive him to libraries around Washington D.C. and to the National Anthropological Archives at the Smithsonian Institution.
“As a 14-15 year old I started doing research. [I go] to local libraries. I go to local universities and I found the published articles on Tutelo. And that’s kind of what set me off,” says Richardson.
Marty emerged from those dusty library stacks with a discovery: his ancestors once spoke a language that had nearly disappeared in the 1700s.
The Tutelo-Saponi language belongs to the Siouan language family. Richardson theorizes that the language was nearly extinguished when ancestors of the Haliwa-Saponi were relocated to a small six-mile-square reservation called Fort Christanna in the Colony of Virginia. The last known speaker of Tutelo-Saponi is thought to have died in the 1980s.
This newly uncovered knowledge about a historic language became the key for Richardson to feel connected to his distant community. He dived full-force into historic texts and uncovered word lists written in Tutelo-Saponi. Through consultations with linguists he slowly started on what would become a life mission, to bring the Tutelo-Saponi language back.
Today, Richardson is reconstructing, learning, and teaching the language. He is considered one of only a handful of nearly-fluent Tutelo-Saponi speakers in the world. And his efforts and passion have created a foothold for the once dormant language. Within the Haliwa-Saponi Tribe, you might catch a ceremonial prayer delivered in the Tutelo-Saponi language. Or, you may hear the language in the songs of the Stoney Creek Singers, Richardson’s drum group.
The post One Man’s Fight To Bring An Ancestral Language Back To Life appeared first on North Carolina Public Radio.
