https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/04/19/how-did-a-self-taught-linguist-come-to-own-an-indigenous-language Skip to main content The New Yorker * Newsletter To revisit this article, select My Account, then Close Alert Sign In Search * News * Books & Culture * Fiction & Poetry * Humor & Cartoons * Magazine * Crossword * Video * Podcasts * Archive * Goings On * Shop Open Navigation Menu To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories Close Alert The New Yorker Letter from Maine April 19, 2021 Issue How Did a Self-Taught Linguist Come to Own an Indigenous Language? The Penobscot language was spoken by almost no one when Frank Siebert set about trying to preserve it. The people of Indian Island are still reckoning with his legacy. By Alice Gregory April 12, 2021 * * * * * Save this story for later. Penobscot Bay Frank Siebert wanted his Penobscot dictionary to capture how he believed the language was supposed to be spoken.Illustration by Laura Lannes * * * * * Save this story for later. 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. Published in the print edition of the April 19, 2021, issue, with the headline "Final Say." Alice Gregory is at work on a book about the artist Robert Indiana. 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