When I first met Carol Dana, in the spring of 2018, she told me that she was thinking of getting a parrot. Dana, a member of the Penobscot Nation, one of five hundred and seventy-four Native American tribes recognized by the United States federal government, was attending a small ceremony at the University of Maine’s anthropology museum. She wore her silver hair pulled back from her face, and introduced herself to me as the tribe’s language master, a title, she added, that she wasn’t fully comfortable with. The idea of mastery seemed an imprecise way to describe the fraught relationship she had with the Penobscot words inside her head. Though not fluent, Dana has a better grasp of the language than anyone else on Indian Island, where six hundred of the world’s estimated twenty-four hundred members of the Penobscot tribe live. She admitted to being linguistically lonely. “I’ve been talking to myself in Penobscot for years,” she said. “You need to say it out loud, so your own ears can hear it.” Though she knew that a bird wouldn’t be able to carry on a conversation, she thought that simply hearing Penobscot words spoken at home by another living creature would be better than nothing.
Dana, who is sixty-eight, learned most of what she knows of Penobscot not from her tribal elders but from Frank Siebert, a self-taught linguist who hired her, in 1982, as a research assistant. He was seventy; Dana was thirty. Siebert had grown up in Philadelphia and had been passionate about Native Americans for as long as he could remember—as a child, he had slept with a toy tomahawk in his bed. He, Dana, and a few other assistants worked in a bare office on Indian Island, a mile-wide shallot-shaped island in the middle of the Penobscot River. Dana, who was brought up there, had as a child been forbidden to go to the mainland, and she’d spent her school-age days picking blueberries and mayflowers, building lean-tos, and impaling apples on sticks, throwing them like javelins. In the summer, she and her friends swam in the river; in the fall, they wrestled in the leaves. Siebert, who had moved to Maine permanently about fifteen years before Dana joined him in his work, had no such memories, but together they muttered and scribbled in a language that only a handful of people still spoke.
I first heard about Frank Siebert a year before I met Dana, from Jane Anderson, a legal scholar at N.Y.U. I was interested in the ways in which indigenous knowledge, passed down through many generations and often collectively held, is considered essentially authorless by Western intellectual-property law. Anderson, who is Australian, works with indigenous communities around the world to help solve conflicts over the ownership of ancient ideas. I had come to her with questions about a burgeoning movement in Guatemala to trademark traditional weaving designs, but within an hour I was convinced that I should travel not to Central America but to Maine, which, she told me, was home to a sovereign nation whose language was technically owned by a dead white man who had devised a way to write it down.
The name Penobscot is a mangled rendering of punawuhpskek—or pαnáwαhpskek, in the writing system Siebert introduced—meaning “the place where the rocks clear out.” For more than three hundred generations, the tribe, which once had fifty thousand members, hunted on the banks of the Penobscot River, navigated its waters, and spoke one of the many Eastern Algonquian languages heard along a swath of the northern Atlantic coast—an area that today extends from Nova Scotia to North Carolina. Siebert began studying the Penobscot language in the nineteen-thirties, four hundred years after European explorers arrived. By then, all that was left of the Penobscot territory, which once encompassed half of Maine, was a reservation that included Indian Island, which can be circumnavigated by foot in less than an hour, and some smaller islands along the river. The tribe’s language had nearly disappeared from use. Beginning in the eighteen-eighties, Penobscot children were sent to government-sponsored residential schools, where teachers beat them for speaking anything but English. “Anywhere else in the world, you’re thought to be more intelligent if you’re bilingual—except for us, for some reason,” Dana told me. The strategy, replicated across the country, was effective: more than three hundred indigenous languages were once spoken in the United States; today, linguists worry that within thirty years there will be only twenty. By the middle of the twentieth century, there were just two dozen Penobscot speakers on Indian Island, most of them elderly. When they tried to teach Penobscot to younger members of the tribe, their efforts were met with complaints that there was no use for it anyway.
But Dana loved listening to her grandmother speak the language of her ancestors. Like other indigenous New England dialects, Penobscot does not distinguish between certain commonly used consonants—“B”s and “P”s, for instance, or “Z”s and “S”s. The sonic effect of Penobscot—melodic, gentle, and worn-sounding, almost like singing—is at odds with the language’s structure, which is especially visual, efficient, and kinetic. Single words can express full ideas. Canoe is “that which flows lightly upon the water”; an otter is a “wandering portager”; lunch is “noon eat”; butter is “milk grease”; flower is “something bursting forth into the light.” Dana describes Penobscot words as “little poetic pictures.” Her grandmother was a stoic and remote woman when she spoke in English, but she seemed transformed when laughing and joking and talking with her Native friends. “That’s how language is conveyed,” Dana said. “Around the kitchen table.”
Dana first applied for a job on Siebert’s team in 1979; she told me that she had been frustrated when Siebert gave the job not to her or to another Penobscot person but to a “red-haired woman from Connecticut.” Two years later, Siebert agreed to take Dana on as well; he had her sort through stacks of materials—transcripts of interviews he’d conducted with elders in their homes, journals and notecards scrawled with vocabulary that was written in the orthography he’d developed, which was punctuated with unfamiliar, academic diacritics.
Dana was moved by what she learned. There is no word in Penobscot for “goodbye, ” only the more optimistic “I’ll see you again.” Verbs of motion almost always have prefixes. People don’t just walk or jump. They walk from here or to there; they jump across or out or up. Through syntax and morphology, the language conveys how the speaker relates to the event she is describing: Did she witness it, or does she have only indirect evidence that it occurred? Is it hearsay? Built into the language is the directive to cite one’s sources. When I asked Dana whether she ever felt resentful or embarrassed that she had learned her own language from a white man, she laughed. “Oh, yes, all of that,” she said. “But it didn’t quite feel like I was learning it from him.” It was her ancestors’ language that she was reading, not Siebert’s.
There was no bridge to Indian Island when Siebert made his first trip there, as a twenty-year-old college student, in 1932. The ferry, a flat-bottomed bateau, cost ten cents, round trip. It was August, and the river was low the day he boarded the boat and paid his fare. He asked where he might find someone willing to speak Penobscot with him, and the ferryman pointed toward a honeysuckle-lined path that led through the woods. At the end of the path lived a pious man in his sixties named Louis Lolar. Siebert introduced himself, and Lolar invited him inside. His small home was sparsely furnished; like the other houses on the island, it had no indoor plumbing. The two men sat by Lolar’s woodstove, and Siebert practiced Penobscot until the sun went down. To an English-speaking eavesdropper, the conversation would have sounded a bit like a choir lesson.
Siebert was nearsighted and nearly six and a half feet tall. Everyone thought he looked German. His high-school yearbook had remarked on his “unobtrusiveness and complete disdain (as far as we know) of the female sex.” By the age of fifteen, he had read everything he could find about Native Americans, and had grown so impatient with the limitations of the local public library that he’d begun creating his own private one. His first purchase, in 1928, was a reprint of a seventeenth-century Christian primer written in Wampanoag, a language related to Penobscot. It cost him twenty-five cents. Siebert’s father was a train inspector; his mother, a savvy stock investor. They wanted him to become a doctor, and so he did. It was when he entered medical school, at the University of Pennsylvania, that his double life began.
Siebert took the required courses in biochemistry and immunology, but he spent his free time learning about indigenous North American languages. He took regular trips up the East Coast, to attend lectures at Columbia, with Franz Boas, widely considered the pioneer of modern anthropology, and at Yale, with Edward Sapir, a founder of ethnolinguistics. At the University of Pennsylvania, Frank Speck, an anthropologist specializing in the Algonquian and Iroquoian peoples, nurtured Siebert’s special interest in Penobscot. Speck kept office hours in a book-lined neo-Gothic chapel filled with living snakes and lizards, and was known to shoot arrows from a crossbow into the door. Speck had visited Indian Island in 1907 and collected Penobscot stories from Newell Lyon, a speaker in his seventies. (At the time, linguists called such Native collaborators “informants,” as though in admission that their work involved a kind of treachery.) The stories chronicled the exploits of Gluskabe, a shamanic hunter and trickster whose grandmother, a woodchuck, teaches him how to survive in the wilderness using interspecies statecraft. The Gluskabe stories were passed down in the community like heirlooms. Sometimes one family would take a particular narrative into its care, as if for safekeeping, and another family would have to ask for permission to relay it. In 1918, eleven years after his first trip to Indian Island, Speck published the stories in an academic journal.
In Speck’s office, Siebert memorized Penobscot vocabulary while keeping an eye on a white fox, which hid behind a leaking radiator. To learn the language’s grammar and make his first attempts at a Penobscot orthography, Siebert pored over Speck’s transcriptions of Lyon’s Gluskabe stories, marking up their margins in green and red ink. Like the patients Siebert was learning to treat, the language was frail and suffering. In a letter he sent at that time, he described Penobscot as “nearly dead in all respects.”
Siebert joined the Linguistic Society of America; he collected stories and collated word lists from Native American communities in Ontario, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, and Long Island, some of them on the brink of disappearing. He wrote for peer-reviewed linguistic journals, presented at conferences, and did field work in the summertime. Once, during a medical internship, he sold his blood in order to buy a rare edition of an eighteenth-century indigenous-language guide. But linguistics remained a hobby. In 1956, he married Marion Paterson, an administrative assistant at a Pittsburgh hospital where he had taken a job. Marion, a decade his junior, had grown up in the area during the Depression. Their honeymoon, which he planned, was a driving tour of Civil War battleground sites. The next year, they moved to Vermont, where Siebert worked as a pathologist and as a regional medical examiner. Siebert and Marion’s first daughter, Kathy, was born in 1958; their second, Stephanie, in 1961.
Both daughters told me that their parents’ marriage was troubled. Neither attempted to diagnose their father, but, like other people I spoke with, they described the kind of bizarre behavior that one might associate with a nervous breakdown. In Vermont, Siebert became neurotically frugal, eating food out of the trash and not allowing Marion to buy formula for the babies. As Marion nursed and cooked and cleaned, Siebert thought aloud, in a booming voice, about Custer’s Last Stand. They had screaming matches and physical altercations. Siebert once told a bookseller that he had tried to push Marion out of a moving car and that she, in turn, had cut his brake lines.
The couple divorced in 1964, and that fall Siebert left Vermont without saying where he was going. For a time, he lived in Philadelphia, in a single-room-occupancy hotel. Marion and the girls returned to Pittsburgh to live with her family. Siebert never paid alimony or child support. Marion, who continued to wear her wedding ring and kept a framed photograph of Siebert and his microscope on a bookshelf, wanted to hire a detective to track him down, but she couldn’t afford it. She had no idea that her husband had moved to Maine.
Siebert bought a bungalow across the river from Indian Island and went to work. Preserving a hardly spoken oral language required innovative intervention. Of the two dozen fluent Penobscot speakers whom Siebert had started interviewing decades earlier, only a few were still alive, including Andrew Dana, who had learned Penobscot as a child by staying up past his bedtime and listening to his grandfather, a famous storyteller. (His family was close with Carol Dana’s, but she believes they were not related.) By 1968, Andrew Dana was in his seventies and sick. As he spoke, Siebert scribbled. Siebert’s notebooks are filled with the old man’s corrections—the sounds that Siebert misheard, the words he misspelled. Siebert, who had left his medical career behind when he moved to Maine, supported himself with investments and with private and federal grants, which enabled him to hire a small team of assistants. In 1980, the National Endowment for the Humanities awarded him a large sum for the creation of a Penobscot dictionary that would “provide scholars”—not speakers—“with a better understanding of the language and culture.”
Ives Goddard, who curated the Smithsonian’s department of anthropology at the time, has described Siebert as “clearly the most brilliant and most competent avocational linguist working on Native American languages that there has ever been, hands down.” But Siebert was known on the reservation as a crank. He wandered around in stained shirts and suits shiny with wear. He monitored his bank account obsessively and subsisted on canned tuna and beans. His letters from the time, many of which run on for multiple pages, are written in a nearly illegible script and filled with omnidirectional vitriol. His targets included the C.I.A., the F.D.I.C., Keynesian economics, libraries, Brazil, fellow book collectors, African-Americans, and the twentieth century itself. He mocked Daniel Boone, for his poor spelling (“like a four-year-old”), and F.D.R., whom he referred to as “Old Jelly Legs.”
Siebert seemed to spend a lot of time taking walks in a nearby graveyard, and he never had company. A neighbor—whose newspaper Siebert read to avoid paying for his own subscription—sometimes brought him dinner, but the food was seldom to Siebert’s liking, and he was not shy about saying so. He left Maine only to buy rare books, and to conduct library research. Clarence Wolf, a Philadelphia-based bookseller, thought that Siebert was homeless on first meeting him. In the insular world of antiquarian book collecting, he came to be known as the Indian Man. A linguistic anthropologist who met Siebert in the seventies noted that, despite his rapidly expanding bibliographic collection, he was “a scholar who trusted no scholar, and hence no products of scholarship.” Siebert believed that his university-affiliated colleagues were at a contemptible remove from their supposed areas of expertise; he, meanwhile, was satisfied only to learn from primary sources.
Carol Dana wryly described Siebert as “a different kind of person.” More than once, his abrasiveness brought Dana to the verge of quitting. She recalled Siebert following her out of the office one evening and blocking her car door while he railed about grammar. Once, at the grocery store, one of Dana’s daughters spotted Siebert walking down an aisle with a cart and asked her whether they should hide. Dana continued to work for Siebert for five years, in part because of Pauleena MacDougall, the red-haired research assistant from Connecticut, who had become an ally of sorts, often chiding Siebert for his rudeness. (MacDougall went on to forge her own career as a historian of Native American culture.) Dana recalled that, not long after she joined the team, someone brought in a photocopy of the Gluskabe stories that Lyon had told Speck all those decades ago. Dana seized on them, noting their comic timing and the way in which unrelated characters addressed one another as kin, just as her neighbors on Indian Island did. She liked how the stories, in celebrating negotiation and compromise, rebuked violence, deception, and fraud. She shared the photocopy with her friends, who shared it with theirs; simply spreading these stories, Dana thought, helped insure the continuation of her people. Eventually, a small, spiral-bound version with a red cover was printed and sold on the island. Siebert seemed not to notice.
As his assistants went over his field notes and conjugated verbs, filing them on index cards by root and appending usage examples to individual entries, Siebert, Dana said, was usually “in the other room, checking his stocks.” She studied his notebooks, memorizing sentence structures and vocabulary. Siebert wanted his dictionary to capture how he believed Penobscot was supposed to be spoken. Dana confessed to me that she still pronounces things according to Siebert’s system; she recalled recently overhearing a man around her age say the Native word for a walking cane with a quicker second syllable than she was used to, and is now trying to do the same. “Frank was so interested in Penobscot, but he also had a certain view of it,” she said. “He couldn’t stand that certain people spoke the language differently.” Once, Dana recalled, Siebert corrected the pronunciation of an elder speaker in front of a large group. Many people never forgave him for it. For decades, they had been told not to speak Penobscot at all, and now an outsider was instructing them on how to do it properly.
Dana had been working with Siebert for about two years when, in 1984, he completed a draft of the dictionary. It was twelve hundred and thirty-five pages long, with a forty-nine-page introduction. There were close to fifteen thousand entries, collected in the course of a half century and transcribed using an alphabet that was partly of his own design. Algonquian linguists consider it a masterpiece. “Without that dictionary, we wouldn’t have anything,” Dana told me.
Still, the project was flawed. Alphabetized in Penobscot, it was written for an imagined audience of fluent Penobscot speakers—a population that barely existed while Siebert was working on the dictionary, and which now doesn’t exist at all. “It’s not user-friendly,” Dana said. “Say you want to look up ‘morning star’—well, how can you if you don’t know the Penobscot word for it?” There was no English-to-Penobscot section. This deficiency made the dictionary an imperfect tool for reviving the Penobscot language; Dana was one of the few people who could conceivably use it, and that was only because she had been instrumental in its assembly.
By the mid-nineties, almost all fluent speakers of Penobscot had died, including Madeline Shay, a widely regarded language teacher on the island. Newspaper reports declared the language officially extinct. In 1995, a recent high-school graduate named Conor Quinn came to the area for the summer to assist Siebert with his work. Quinn, an aspiring linguist, had recently discovered an Irish textbook on his mother’s bookshelf and taught himself the language of his ancestors. Working with Siebert in his bungalow, he set about proofreading early versions of the Gluskabe stories and other narratives, using Siebert’s handwritten field notes as a guide. When they weren’t discussing Algonquian linguistics, Siebert shared macabre anecdotes about his past work as a pathologist. (Quinn remembers his description of the insides of infected lungs as looking like split-pea soup.) “Frank had very little patience for people who didn’t already know how to meet his standards or didn’t want to meet his standards,” Quinn told me. The Penobscot were, he said, “very suspicious of Frank.” Certain tribe members seemed aware that Siebert “didn’t think much of their command of the language,” Quinn went on. “He literally said to me one day, ‘I do believe there was once a standard Penobscot.’ And I remember thinking, Eh, I don’t think so. How could there be? Everyone learned it from their family and friends.”
Quinn, who now teaches linguistics at the University of Southern Maine, eventually realized that Siebert’s writing system was an obstacle for people who were eager to learn the language. “It was a giant pain for everyone,” he said. “Why did this white guy come in and introduce such a nonintuitive alphabet? It was really off-putting. Like, ‘This is the language my grandmother spoke, and now there’s all this technical stuff I have to learn?’ ”
Darren Ranco, an anthropologist and the chair of Native American programs at the University of Maine, met Siebert once, in the early nineties, and told me that he was struck by how Siebert seemed to refuse any sort of self-contextualization, dressing against the weather and generally behaving as though it were a different century. “He studied dead things,” Ranco said, referring to Siebert’s career conducting autopsies. “That was his approach to everything.”
Quinn told me that there is some debate today about using the diction of mortality to describe the status of indigenous languages. “ ‘Dead’ and ‘dying’ and ‘endangered’ and ‘extinct’ all make it sound like it’s a natural process, but this isn’t what’s happened,” he said. “I think if you’re going to use the death metaphor you should talk about killing and murdering.” Bernard Perley, a member of the Tobique First Nation, in New Brunswick, and the director of the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies, at the University of British Columbia, has called methodologies like Siebert’s a “ghoulish” kind of “mortuary linguistics.”
“For communities like my own,” Ranco said, “where our language was beaten out of us, literally, and discouraged time and time again, having someone like Siebert come in, with an interest only in documenting the language, not committed to reënlivening it—considering my relatives were his sources—this absolutely upsets me, after the hospitality so many Penobscot gave him.”
Two years before Quinn arrived on Indian Island, Siebert fell ill with bladder cancer, and a pair of married, non-Native research assistants contacted his daughters. Kathy and Stephanie were in their thirties at the time; both were married with small children and struggling financially. Marion was in her seventies. None of the women had seen Siebert in decades.
With their mother’s approval, Kathy and Stephanie flew to Bangor to visit Siebert. Stephanie described the trip as “very weird,” and her father as “hard to talk to, probably because he had been a hermit most of his life.” Siebert put his daughters up in a nearby hotel, hassled a waitress when they went out to eat, and drove them around in a rusted-out Pontiac that Kathy said was “barely functioning.” Stephanie was struck by her father’s height, his deep voice, his dirty clothes, and especially his glasses—the frames were from the forties. Kathy described him as miserly and self-centered, “like Ebenezer Scrooge,” and recalled begging him to cut his hair. Stephanie believed that he was regretful about having abandoned them. “I think he felt horrible,” she said.
In the next five years, the sisters paid a few more visits to Siebert, never staying long. When they took their final trip, in January of 1998, Siebert was in a nursing home in Bangor. A brutal storm had left the state of Maine looking like a vandalized jewelry case—a land of white satin and diamonds and broken glass. Trees and power lines were encased in ice; schools closed; hospitals filled up with hypothermia patients. L. L. Bean donated coats and long underwear to out-of-state emergency volunteers. For a week, hundreds of thousands of people lived in darkness and cold, and Siebert’s nursing home ran on a backup generator.
The sisters knew nothing about their father’s work, but they could tell from a quick survey of his house that they would need professional help. He had given them the contact information for Bailey Bishop, an antiquarian bookseller in Cambridge from whom Siebert had acquired many of his books, and they asked if he might come up and appraise the contents of the bungalow. Bishop agreed enthusiastically. For years, Siebert had begged him to travel to Maine and help him catalogue his collection, but at the very last minute he always called off the plan. Now Bishop was finally going to see what the elusive Indian Man had amassed during the previous sixty years. When Bishop arrived, the power in the area was still out, so he worked in a parka by kerosene lamp, sorting through piles of antique volumes, old letters, and woven baskets. A human skeleton sat on a shelf in the basement. In the living room, receipts for Siebert’s rare books lay scattered across the floor. “If Frank had an organizational method for storing them, it was no longer in effect,” Bishop recalled. With Stephanie and Kathy’s blessing, Bishop took the entire collection to his house, near Harvard Square.
Siebert died on January 23, 1998, at the age of eighty-five. His funeral, held three days later, in Philadelphia, was attended by a dozen members of Siebert’s extended family and three other people: Bishop; Clarence Wolf, the Philadelphia-based bookseller who had thought Siebert was homeless; and an elderly man nobody knew, who said that he remembered Siebert from the Cub Scouts. Recalling that day, Wolf sounded as though he were reciting a fairy tale: “These two young women . . . of very modest means . . . suddenly came into a great sum of money.” Then he got hold of himself. “The whole thing was just so odd.”
Siebert’s collection was auctioned off the following year, in a two-part sale at Sotheby’s. It comprised more than fifteen hundred items: books, manuscripts, maps, prints, newspapers, pamphlets, and photographs. Bishop, in an introductory essay for the sale’s catalogue, described Siebert as “the most knowledgeable Americanist of his time,” whose library was “probably the last great collection of Americana to chronicle and follow the frontier across our continent.” Selby Kiffer, a senior vice-president in Sotheby’s Books & Manuscripts department, called the auction “monumental,” saying, “Fifty years from now people will still be talking about it.” The collection, he added, “electrified the Americana book-collecting community.” The sale brought in more than $12.5 million. As stipulated in Siebert’s will, his daughters split the sum. Each bought a house for herself, and together they bought one for Marion. No provision was made for the Penobscot people.
Siebert bequeathed his dictionary and his field-work materials to the American Philosophical Society, a nonprofit scholarly organization, founded by Benjamin Franklin, in 1743, which is housed in a stately brick mansion in Philadelphia, a nine-hour drive from Indian Island. The A.P.S. encompasses a museum and a library with one of the country’s largest collections for the study of indigenous languages. It houses much of Frank Speck’s archive, and also the journals of Lewis and Clark, some of Charles Darwin’s correspondence, and materials from the Eugenics Record Office. The items in Siebert’s collection, whose legal copyright is held by the A.P.S., take up forty-one linear feet of shelving. Visitation rules are restrictive: guests must register in advance, make an appointment, and bring two forms of identification; only one box of manuscripts can be accessed at a time.
U.S. intellectual-property law, established as an economic incentive for inventors, privileges people who can write. In copying down the grammar, the stories, and the vocabulary of the Penobscot, Siebert made them his. In dying, he made them the American Philosophical Society’s.
In the twenty-odd years since Siebert’s death, a small group of people on and off Indian Island have been forced to reckon with his legacy. Carol Dana, armed with his word lists, has studied language-immersion and second-language acquisition. She has led games in Penobscot at the island’s day-care center and given weekly lessons at the elementary school, where students, when they need to use the bathroom, ask for permission to go to the wíkəwαmsis (“little house”). Dana has also trained other instructors, and she helped the Penobscot Theatre Company stage a production of Gluskabe stories starring local children. She likes teaching “while doing things—tanning hides, making baskets, weaving, anything you can put language to.” She often consults with Conor Quinn, Siebert’s former assistant, who has devoted himself to the pedagogy of indigenous-language repatriation. He has led summer language intensives on the island for local teen-agers and has been working with Pauleena MacDougall on revising the Penobscot dictionary. (Almost forty years after its preliminary version, the final volume will soon be co-published by the Penobscot Nation and the University of Maine Press.)
In 2002, Dana was given her formal title of language master, a position created by the Penobscot Nation’s recently founded Cultural and Historic Preservation Department. The department is led by the Penobscot tribal historian James Francis, who describes himself as a “second-generation nonspeaker.” Its aim, he says, is to “open the language gates that, out of shame, were closed so many years ago.” Francis, who is in his early fifties, grew up on Indian Island in an era of burgeoning indigenous activism. He feels that the key to saving Penobscot culture is not just studying the language but using it. “Take the strawberry preserves off the shelf and spread it on a piece of toast” is how he put it to me.
In 2012, Francis, faced with a grant deadline, called on Jane Anderson, the legal scholar at N.Y.U., whom he had met a year earlier, when he attended one of her intellectual-property workshops. Since then, she has worked closely with the tribe. Unlike many legal experts, Anderson is capable of viewing the law as the whimsical metaphysician it can be, transforming corporations into people and lakes into litigants. She is particularly interested in the ways in which American law “makes certain things into property that shouldn’t be seen as property,” and during the past few years she has focussed on the somewhat surreal legal status of the Penobscot language. “People say, ‘Hey, you can’t own a language!’ ” she told me recently. “And it’s, like, ‘Well, yeah, actually you can, through the misadventures of I.P. and copyright.’ ”
Anderson sees Siebert’s approach as archetypal of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century anthropological research, which tended to cast indigenous people not as participants but as objects of study, and rarely aspired to benefit them. Siebert’s work had been crucial, she told me, but he also engendered significant community shame. Anderson often speaks more like a psychologist than like a lawyer. “Because he failed at being a parent,” she told me, of Siebert, “he compensated by paternalizing his relationship to the Penobscot, whom he treated like children and tried to raise properly, in his eyes.”
Anderson, whose work frequently grapples with the problem of whether instruments of colonial dispossession can be used to fix problems of their own making, wants the Penobscot people to retain cultural authority over their language, even if they cannot technically hold its copyright. To that end, she has collaborated with tribe members on a few extralegal initiatives, including a project that is being implemented jointly with the A.P.S.: attaching digital labels to the documents in the Siebert collection, to indicate cultural sensitivity, discourage commercial use, and request that the information be attributed to the Penobscot community moving forward. Indigenous rules around how knowledge is disseminated are often incompatible with copyright law. Some of the oral narratives in the A.P.S. archive, for example, are meant to be shared only by women, or only in winter, or only by elders. Behind the modest-sounding scope of the labels, Anderson told me, is a “radical proposition”: an explicit acknowledgment that “there’s something really serious here that the law can’t necessarily contain.”
The ceremony at the University of Maine where I met Dana, in May, 2018, was hosted by Kirk Francis, the chief of the Penobscot Nation, and Susan Hunter, the president of the university. Surrounded by glass vitrines displaying sweetgrass baskets and deerskin moccasins, in front of a small audience and a local news team, they signed an agreement, drafted by Anderson, which stipulated ways in which the university would integrate the tribe’s perspective into future research processes: a Penobscot representative would hold a permanent seat on the museum’s advisory board, the new system of labelling the A.P.S. collection would be instituted, and campus signage would begin to include Penobscot translations.
When I spoke with James Francis, who was in attendance, he explained that, ideally, the tribe would have approval over the content and the expression of any piece of writing that relies on Siebert’s research. But implementing such a system would be onerous, he admitted. He wondered about the feasibility of asking tribe members to read hundreds of pages of graduate students’ unedited dissertations. “I mean, even Carol really shouldn’t be talking to you without tribal approval, but we’re still trying to figure all that out,” he said. “It’s prickly.” I wondered what my editor would say if I told her that every sentence of this article required approval from the Penobscot Nation. When I raised the subject with Darren Ranco, from the University of Maine, he acknowledged that the idea of such a system—which is at odds not only with the spirit of the First Amendment but also with journalistic ethical standards, which prohibit reporters from sharing drafts with sources—strikes many people as illiberal. Still, he said, “if colonization had never happened, and we had never been forced to unlearn our language, we wouldn’t have to have this sort of precious relationship with it.”
Dana has spent the past few years working to collate and edit the Gluskabe stories that Frank Speck began gathering more than a century ago. The collection, “Still They Remember Me: Penobscot Transformer Tales, Volume 1,” edited by Dana, Quinn, and Margo Lukens, an English professor at the University of Maine, will be published by the University of Massachusetts Press this summer. It will be the first commercial book to use Siebert’s writing system, with each story printed in Penobscot on the left page and in English on the right, and featuring illustrations by Penobscot artists. The publishing contract notes that all royalties will go to the Penobscot Nation, as will decisions regarding film or television rights. Every Penobscot household that wants a copy of the volume, priced at $24.95, will receive one for free. As a teaching tool, the stories are far superior to Siebert’s dictionary. Dana hopes that the new book can make the language accessible to future generations. If Siebert’s legacy was writing down the language, Dana’s is letting it be read, and its stories be told.
Before bed each night, Dana asks her ancestors to visit her, and sometimes she does indeed dream in Penobscot. Her role as tribal language master, she admitted, has been something of a burden, and often she wakes up feeling as if she no longer cares about Penobscot, and is tempted to give up. But she is constantly aware of how much more she could be doing to prevent her language from being lost, and finds herself drawn back to the idea of passing on whatever she can. “Who else is capable?” she once asked me.
“Carol is very intense sometimes,” Maria Girouard, a Penobscot organizer, activist, and historian, said. “She has a little bit of angst, which, you know, is understandable. Our language knowledge should not rest on the backs of a few people who have devoted their entire careers to it.” Maulian Dana, a distant relative of Carol Dana’s and a tribal ambassador in her mid-thirties, who studied Penobscot with Quinn when she was a teen-ager, told me that, today, there’s not a lot of talk about Siebert: “If you asked someone on the street, ‘Hey, who is the champion of the Penobscot language,’ they wouldn’t say Frank. They’d say Carol.”
On March 25th of last year, the Penobscot Nation, in an effort to insulate itself from COVID-19, erected a checkpoint on the bridge from Indian Island to the mainland. Only essential workers and tribal members were allowed to cross it. During quarantine, Dana, who lives alone in a two-story house near the tribal cemetery, has spoken less Penobscot than she has in decades. She never did buy a parrot; she got a dog instead, and named him Jejahk, a shortened form of the word nəčə̀čahkom, which means “my soul.” As Dana told me about him over the phone, he leaped into her lap. She murmured to him in Penobscot for a moment. “He knows I’m talking about him,” she said.
Once a week, Dana gives a seminar over Zoom. Gabe Paul, a language instructor in his thirties, attends Dana’s classes, and tries to speak Penobscot to his son, who is almost two. To truly learn a language, one must speak it spontaneously with other people—currently an impossibility for anyone wishing to master Penobscot. “I don’t need this language to, you know, buy groceries or get money out of the bank,” Paul told me. “It’s not going to be what it was, at least not right away. It’s going to take many, many generations.”
Another of Dana’s students, Jennifer Neptune, a basket-maker and the director of the Penobscot Nation Museum, who is married to James Francis, told me that, like everyone on Indian Island, she is troubled that the language’s survival is in the hands of so few people. “It’s terrifying,” she said, adding that the possibility of Dana falling sick had been her “very first thought” on learning about COVID-19. (In January, the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma made fluent speakers eligible for early doses of the coronavirus vaccine, along with medical workers and first responders.)
When I spoke to Dana at the beginning of this year, she talked about her belated realization that a traditional song in which a man walks sleepily toward the narrator is actually a depiction of someone who might be at risk of starvation. “He’s sleepy because he’s hungry!” she said. “He needs muskrat meat!” She told me about another song, in which a clever rabbit plays a series of increasingly elaborate pranks on a wildcat. I wondered aloud whether indigenous storytelling traditions weren’t perhaps the source material for Bugs Bunny cartoons, and then regretted it. “I don’t think so,” Dana said. “I don’t think too many people know our stories.” Occasionally, Dana overhears stray Penobscot words in casual conversation on Indian Island. She was thrilled when, not long ago, one of her sons, who is in his forties, took a photograph of a beaver with his iPhone and, in telling her about it, casually used the Penobscot word for the animal.
On a recent Thursday, Dana, addressing a class of five students, suggested drawing family trees to help remember the words for various relatives, and learning the vocabulary for kitchen utensils while laying the table. She talked about the efficacy of pantomime, narrating as she pretended to get dressed, using the Penobscot words for “shirt” and “pants” and “boots.” She held up pieces of construction paper with various words written on them—using, as she always does, Siebert’s orthography—and admitted to having the word for “stove” taped up in her kitchen, to remind her to turn it off when she leaves the house. She sang a song about body parts to the tune of “Ten Little Indians.” She ended the lesson with a common greeting, which translates as “How are you surviving today?” And then she provided the customary response: “It’s hard for those of us yet living.” ♦
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