Helen Salter, 93, lay dying in a Toronto hospital in December, and her passing was to mean more than a family's grief over the loss of a loved one.
When her spirit finally left her body, a language also took a small step closer to death.Mrs. Salter was believed to be the last person in Canada to speak Tuscarora fluently, those familiar with the language say.
One of the languages of the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, Tuscarora is one of 2,000 to 3,000 languages around that world that are moving - seemingly inexorably - toward extinction. In a world fretting about over-population, paradoxically up to half of all spoken languages are in danger of disappearing forever.
According to New Scientist magazine, the planet is home to about 6,000 languages, but only 600 are considered to be safe. The vast majority of the world's languages are spoken by only a small number of people, and the magazine says up to half of these languages could disappear within the next century as the few remaining speakers die.
Five languages have come to dominate the Earth: Chinese, English, Spanish, Russian and Hindi are spoken by half the world's population. If 100 other languages are added, the total covers 95 percent of what is spoken by the world's 5.7 billion people.
In California, there has been a backlash against the immigration-spurred proliferation of languages and calls for the official recognition of the Hispanic language. Some experts argue that moving to a few common languages improves communication and fosters a better understanding among people in the world.
But Joanne Weinhotz, a teacher at the Tuscarora School near Lewiston, N.Y., said language is more than just communication.
"It opens up our understanding of how we think."
If the Tuscarora language disappears, Ms. Weinholtz said, a full insight into Tuscarora culture and thinking will be lost forever. What will also be gone is the diversity of views about the world and life, said Amos Key, the language director of the Woodlands Cultural Centre at the Six Nations Reserve near Brantford, Ont.
Key said each language reflects a different cultural "world view," and that is what is being lost - sometimes deliberately eliminated - in the drift toward a few common languages.
Key, who launched a rescue program for Iroquoian languages 10 years ago, said there are 127 Cayuga speakers left on the reserve, 80 Mohawk speakers, 36 Onondaga and one Seneca, as well as 245 Oneida at another reserve near London, Ont.
Key said the reason it is so difficult to track down the last speakers is that for years many of the elderly often hid the fact that they spoke one of the Iroquoian languages. That is a direct result of a century of deliberate policies by the federal government, church residential schools and the public education system to eradicate aboriginal languages, he said.
"I truly believe my people were persecuted, socially, spiritually and morale-wise. That's why the languages went underground," he said. "My parents were punished for speaking their language, and they had horror stories to tell me about strapping."
Meno Boldt, a professor of sociology at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, agrees that very few aboriginal languages will be left if the current trend continues.
"There is this idea that languages will survive inadvertently ... simply because they have stayed alive this long," said Boldt, the author of a book entitled "Surviving as Indians: The Challenge of Self-Government."
"That is just wrong ... because all the trends show this is not going to be the case."
The Tuscaroras, a once-powerful tribe in the Carolinas, first lived in peace with settlers. But encroachments by settlers and the kidnapping of Tuscarora youth for slavery provoked them into a military conflict that decimated the tribe. The survivors began a 90-year-long migration north, where in 1722 they became the sixth nation of the Iroquois Confederacy. After the American Revolution, those who supported the British fled to the Six Nations Reserve on the Grand River in Ontario while those who sided with the Americans ended up on a reservation just across the border at Lewiston, N.Y.
Now, the reservation near Lewiston is the last Tuscarora bastion outside of a small population in North Carolina. At the Tuscarora School, teachers are working with a few remaining elders to try to teach children the language.
Preserving the language in the form of a dictionary is not good enough, said Ms. Weinhotz, because what is lost are the nuances and different phrasing in the language. Ms. Weinhotz and teacher Betsy Bissell are regular visitors to Tuscarora elder Howard Hill, 73, who is drafting his own Tuscarora dictionary and helping the teachers and students.
Hill said that as a child he spoke only Tuscarora until he was sent to school and suddenly found it forbidden. "We would hide in a closet to speak Tuscarora, because if we got caught, we'd be hit."
Efforts are being made to videotape and record the language, but even so, it is clear that much is already lost. There is no recorded version of the oratorical flights of speech that were once used by Tuscarora leaders in grand assemblies. Also largely gone is language once used in elaborate religious ceremonies.
What is now being recorded at the 11th hour are everyday words of Tuscarora that were used in conversations between family and friends. Despite the effort, it is an open question whether teachers at the Tuscarora School will be able to preserve a record of enough of that conversational Tuscarora to enable it to survive, or whether written dictionaries and pronunciation charts will be all that remain for future generations.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.)