TU Research Professor Heads $297,000 Project Designed To Save Endangered Yuchi Language

Monday, February 26, 2001

Richard Grounds, a research professor of anthropology at The University of Tulsa, will serve as director of a $297,300 project for last-ditch efforts to preserve the Yuchi language, which is spoken fluently now by only five elderly tribal members.

“We have very few fluent speakers who can help us learn our language and carry it forward,” says Grounds. “The language is vital for our ceremonies, for maintaining who we are as a people.”

Yuchi, also spelled Euchee, is the language of a tribe of Native Americans who were moved from Alabama and Georgia to Indian Territory, now Oklahoma, in the 1830s. The Yuchi spelling is most often used in linguistic and anthropological publications.

The grant of $99,100 annually for three years to the Euchee Tribe of Indians is from the Administration for Native Americans, a federal agency that administers the Language Support Grant Program developed under the Native American Languages Act of 1992.

“The primary emphasis of the project will be on documenting the unique language,” says Grounds. He says funds will pay for three key steps: documenting the language as spoken by the current fluent speakers, who are all elders; developing a series of CD computer programs containing the language; and providing training for teachers, volunteers, students and elders so they can pass the language on to others.

The initial phase will involve weekly recording sessions of three to four hours each built around cultural themes. “Periodic meetings, centered around meals for elders, provide structured occasions for documenting language use between speakers,” says Grounds. “We will also work with elders to develop new Yuchi vocabulary to describe technological or modern items as a step of hope for preparing the language to continue as a living part of the ongoing community.”

Audio and video recordings will be digitized and put on CDs. Emphasis will be on word lists, phrases and sentences, sayings and stories, dialogues, and grammatical paradigms.

Grounds says the use of CDs “will make possible the multiplication of the voice of our elders. They will be heard in many places at once, in homes and community centers.”

Linda Littlebear Harjo, an Indian education tutor for Tulsa Public Schools, will serve as the project’s assistant director, and Wanda A. Greene, a Yuchi artist and photographer, will work as media specialist.

Mary S. Linn, a doctoral student at the University of Kansas, and Trudi Patterson, assistant professor in the English and Languages department at East Central University in Ada, will act as linguistic advisors.

Grounds, himself a Yuchi, has helped conduct a garden and language project in Sapulpa that involves growing vegetables and using the language during the tending of the plants and the harvesting, preservation and consumption of the fruits and vegetables.

The Euchee Mission Boarding School, which operated from 1894 to 1948 in Sapulpa, bore the tribe’s name, but “was dedicated to suppressing our language,” says Grounds. “We now have only a small circle of people who know how to joke, pray and give tobacco in Yuchi.”