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UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Wednesday, April 20.1994
5
KU professor of linguistics documents Kansa language
Heather Lofflin / KANSAN
By Sabrina Steele Special to the Kansan
Robert Rankin, professor of linguistics, said he had the last recordings of native-speaking Kansas Indians, the tribe that gave Kansas its name. His collection of reel-to-reel tapes includes languages from around the world, including other Native-American languages.
What appears to be the only audio documentation of the language of the Kansas, the Native-American tribe from which Kansas derived named, is in the hands of Robert Rankin, professor of linguistics at the University of Kansas.
"It's really frightening to realize I probably know more of the Kansalanguage than any living person, and I'm not even Kansa," Rankin said. "I don't really know the language at all. Most of my knowledge is in notebooks and on tapes."
The last two known fluent speakers have died since Rankin recorded the language onto cassette and reel-to-reel tapes in 1974.
Wanda Stone, who lives in Kaw City, Okla, and is head of the Kaw Nation, said that of the 1,770 members in the tribe, only four full-blooded Kaw were living today.
But the full-blooded Kaw and Kaw descendants don't speak the language.
Walker I. Hare Jr., who lives in Kaw City, Oka, and is director of administrative services of the Kaw Nation, said assimilation policies of the U.S. government almost had wiped out the language in the 1800s and 1900s.
"When they were sent to boarding schools, they weren't allowed to speak their native language." Hare said. "The language was stolen just like the land, through the guise of assimilation, the melting pot, and, 'You're Americans, so act like Americans.'"
Stone and Hare said Rankin's recordings were the only known documentation of the Kaw language.
Rankin's interest in studying the fading language of the Kansa was a result of a summer he spent teaching a field methods class at the University. While working with students to decipher a Native-American language, he became hooked on the process of translating and analyzing languages.
"I learned no one had ever written a grammar or compiled a dictionary of the Kansa tribe, the Kansa language," he said.
The curator at a Native-American museum in Oklahoma helped Rankin by providing the names of some surviving members of the tribe, which
was essentially disorganized in 1974.
The tapes of Maude Rowe's and Ralph Pepper's voices contain childhood stories, a history of the tribe and stories about their lives.
"If you get people to talk spontaneously or tell stories or talk about themselves, then they tend to talk in a more conversational tone, and they use the language as they would normally use it," Rankin said.
Rankin had the speakers take words through various tenses to analyze the
He plans to expand and revise a dictionary originally compiled by missionaries in the 1800s and to write a grammar book with the rules of grammar and pronunciations.
"At this point, there is no one who really knows the language," he said. "When a language goes, a valuable artifact is lost. It's lost to the tribe, and it's lost to anthropologists, archaeologists, and linguists who are interested in pre-history of the tribe."
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