Half a century ago, Beverly Crum and other children on the Duck Valley Indian Reservation were punished for speaking Shoshone - a language used in Idaho long before white explorers and settlers arrived.
Families feared maintaining that link to the past would make assimilation into modern culture too difficult."The parents didn't want their children to go through that painful experience," said Crum, now 67. "Any language that's treated in that manner, it's going to become less and less prevalent."
But now she has a master's degree in languages, and she has helped Boise State University linguistics Professor Jon Dayley compile a book of Shoshone words and phrases.
"Western Shoshoni Grammar" evokes a people whose language is rich with descriptions of game animals, streams teeming with salmon, fields of camass roots and geographic reference points the tribe used in day-to-day survival.
"The Shoshones have a very large vocabulary of flora and fauna throughout the region," Dayley said. "They were knowledgeable about their environment, much more than our culture."
Several variations of Shoshone were spoken in the Great Basin, which includes southern Idaho, most of Utah, central Nevada and portions of California.
Just as English and other Western languages sprang from Indo-European roots, Shoshone - also spelled Shoshoni - belongs to a family of tongues called Uto-Aztecan. It includes the Aztec civilization in central Mexico, as well as the Utes, Paiutes, Comanches, Hopi and Yaquis.
The various Shoshone bands tended to be named for their major food source. For example, a group on the Snake River subsisted on fish, so they were called the Akai Tikka'a or Salmon Eaters.
The central Idaho band that fought off the U.S. Army for months in 1879 from a mountain stronghold on the Salmon River was the Tukku Tikka'a, or Mountain Sheep Eaters, for the bighorns they hunted.
Mountains and valleys also were named as the bands migrated. Tonammutsa, or "greasewood peak," was later called Battle Mountain in Nevada. Pohokoi is the "sagebrush hill" on southeastern Idaho's Fort Hall Indian Reservation where young tribal members went for religious vision quests.
The tribe often lumped several of their words together for a new meaning. Nattahsu unkahni is "medicine house," or hospital.
Some Shoshone words even made it into the English dictionary. Chuckwalla, a large lizard in the Southwest, comes from "tcaxx-wal," and the sego lily is derived from "sigo."
But Shoshone sentences are ordered differently than in English, making the language closer in syntax to Basque or Japanese.
Dayley, an expert on Indian vocabularies, has studied Shoshone since 1967. He published two scholarly books in 1989 on the Panamint Shoshone language of Death Valley.
He also lived in Guatemala in the 1970s. From his work there with descendants of the Mayans he published the "Tzutujil Dictionary of San Juan La Laguna," one of 30 languages handed down from the Cen-tral American empire.
Crum has translated the Gospel according to Mark into Shoshone and co-authored another book on her dialect.
She is among several thousand people who still speak Shoshone. But Dayley said most are 40 or older and "only if they're quite old do they use it as their first language."
Shoshone also has no written tradition.
"The language is handed down generation to generation through the children," he said. "Not many languages are written. Out of about 8,000, only 78 have a body of literature, or about 110 through time."
More Shoshones speak their own language than many Indian tribes because they managed to keep their communities isolated from whites. Shoshones roamed the Boise and Payette river basins and the Humboldt drainage in Nevada but realized early on that those areas were attractive to settlers, Dayley said.
"They asked themselves, `Where are (whites) not moving?' " he said. "They chose Duck Valley and Fort Hall because they wanted to get away."
"Western Shoshoni Grammar," published by the Boise State anthropology department, is geared toward linguists and tribal members who want to learn more of their native tongue.
Dayley and Crum, who still lives on the Duck Valley reservation, also are considering compiling a book of Shoshone folk tales, historical events and other narratives.
"I'm really grateful this has been my life work," Crum said. "I feel I need to give something back to the creator, to celebrate life. If you can't find your heart and soul in your work, it must be a pretty darn boring life."
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ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Shoshone names
Traveling bands of Shoshone Indians in the Intermountain West often were named for their primary source of food. Here are the Shoshone names for some of the bands and the English translations as listed in "Western Shoshoni Grammar," by Jon Dayley and Beverly Crum:
Shoshone English translation
Tukku Tikka'a Mountain Sheep Eaters
Yampa Tikka'a Wild Carrot Eaters
Akai Tikka'a Salmon Eaters
Pasikoo Tikka'a Camass Eaters
Yahan Tikka'a Groundhog Eaters