Author’s Note: The standard language of the dominant culture is used to enforce linguistic and cultural conformity. This harms humanity. It harms their communities which are too often already marginalized to begin with. It strips people of their dignity and replaces it with something hollow.
***
From the report of Dr. Stephen Musk, Socio-cultural Analyst
Department of National Resource Enrichment
Blue Veil Mountain Project
July 17, 5020
There was nothing outwardly wrong with the child. She had the bright, intelligent eyes of her people, and sat up straight on the examination table while the technicians placed their cap of wires over her head. She had tied back her hair with willow-fiber string, the silica beads woven into it glinted under the fluorescent lab lights. She was consistent with the rest of her people - compliant - a trait that our government, upon initial contact, had naturally found encouraging. Of course, that docility had made her inscrutable. We worked with what we knew.
The Singers, as we had come to call them, were a matriarchal society of hunter-gatherers living together in a small tribe of 78 people. They dwelled deep in the previously uncontacted cloudpine forests of the Blue Veil Mountains. They communicated entirely through melodic vocalizations, mostly humming and singing. The government had made contact under the pretext of friendship and mutual aid but, of course, we were interested in the resources of that region; namely the rare earth minerals that had accumulated within the caves in which they made their dwellings. The adults had been relocated to a camp on the other side of Gladstone Lake (named after Col. Marcus Gladstone who discovered the tribe). The military had erected a small boarding house several miles from the camp and were educating the children in writing and reading while the adults were conscripted into the process of mining 7 days a week.
In a dash to secure the site’s resources, initial contact had been sloppily done. The government had forcibly relocated The Singers and were now outsourcing them as laborers to assist in mining the deep caves. The Singers had to be coerced into the work by the withholding of food and other resources.
We linguists, anthropologists, and so forth, were contracted by the government to establish an understanding of their language so that communication could be more easily carried out.
We had chosen this girl of about 11, whom we called Ruth, because of her docile nature which several of us came to hypothesize was perhaps due to a cognitive impairment. The brain scans, however, showed no evidence to support this. We ran scans on her brain while she vocalized through the tribe’s idiosyncratic use of song and whistle. The scans showed neural activity which did not deviate from the norm; her brain was processing speech and language within the same regions as that of any other normal human brain. As for the practical application of verbal communication, we were struggling to make much headway. We pressed on.
The Singers had no written language, and what visual communication they did utilize had mostly to do with the novel arrangement of objects which, we surmised, were sacred to them: the silica beads with their prismatic colors, the bits of crystallized limestone from the cave, and the willow-fiber which they dyed with ochre and plant matter, wore as clothing, and employed in a great many iterations by all inhabitants. Most precious of their homespun objects though were the small black feathers taken from the cave-dwelling birds which were known to only emerge from the deepest parts of the caverns at dusk.
The span of several months passed before we had a glimpse of the birds at all. Several ornithologists had been brought to the site to study them; many hoping that this was a new species. It was one of them who first spotted the birds. They were tiny, maybe the size of my hand, and would press their bodies against the rock walls with their eyes shut tight to avoid the light from the team’s headlamps. The ornithologists did not see them in flight and planned to return at dusk at a future date.
We discovered that the people of the Blue Veil held these birds to be some form of spirit or manifestation of deity. They even performed a ritual of some kind with the birds every day at dusk. The ornithologists were ready with cameras, scopes, and binoculars on the night we were granted permission to witness this event.
The whole village - men, women, and children - gathered at the entrance of the cave mouth and sung in unison into the darkness. This went on for a full 17 minutes. After a grave pause, all at once the sound of thousands of tiny wings were heard as the flock of cave-birds poured out into the darkening night. The low light of campfires gave us a blurred view of them, making them look like a fiercely crashing wave. The people sung a long-syllabled melody all in unison as the birds flew overhead, encircling the group. As the birds flew low, I could see many of them alighting on the heads and outstretched hands of the people. The singing continued. The birds’ mouths opened and shut as though mimicking the singing of the people. I thought for a brief moment that the birds may have been singing on some undiscovered frequency, one that only the tribe and the birds could tune in to - a closed channel. As fantastical as this thought seemed at the time, the recordings I made of the event served to bear evidence that supported that hypothesis. More recordings and tests would have been needed, however.
At the time, we were under the impression that the government’s current priority went to our language efforts, but a new administration brought budget cuts and our research was shut down almost as soon as it began.
* * *
August 1, 5045
Myself and one of my colleagues from the original project have been brought back to the Blue Veil site through a private research company. We were asked to reconnect with The Singers, specifically to find Ruth and to continue to study her speech. It has been so long since our team last visited the tribe that we are now forced to start where we had before- at square one.
We were prepared to spend six months on the project. However, upon our arrival we discovered that nearly the entire population of Singers has been successfully integrated into the mining population. It had apparently not been without a struggle, however. One week after we had left, The Singers had taken an oppositional stance against the miners and had begun to wage a kind of sound war upon them. The result was the whole Singer population lining up at the cave’s entrance and linking arms while chanting from dawn to dusk. This display was a clear protest to the mining efforts and went on for a full 48 hours before the government stepped in and removed The Singers.
We also learned that just a few months after we had made initial contact, the tiny cave-dwelling bird population was rapidly driven to extinction. The noise, dust, and rubble from the miners had damaged the cave-bird nesting sites and caused the delicate birds to die off very rapidly. From all accounts, this seems to have had an immediate negative effect on The Singers, one that we found to be almost unbelievable. They had stopped communicating. An immense silence befell the camp according to the government workers who had stayed on. They said that the people lost all will to resist. Some even lost the will to live. The reports say that 11 people, all adults, died of self-imposed starvation. The remaining 67 people were aggressively worked on. Their native dress, hairstyles, and social practices were discouraged and they were all educated in standard english. The strategy was to adjust them while they were in a malleable frame of mind. The Singers slowly came to accept the dominant language and culture as their own.
The native group now operates their own little studio where they create handmade items using chicken feathers and plastic beads to sell to the growing number of tourists who visit the Blue Veil Natural Area.
We located Ruth, the little girl we had studied when the project began. She was sitting on a boulder near the entrance to the cave, weaving a small keychain that would be sold at the tourist shop. She still had the same bright, intelligent eyes and looked at us with intense recognition but did not speak to us.
We turned to walk back to the camp when we heard the sound of a woman’s low moan. We spun around to see that Ruth had stood up and, dropping the keychain, was exhaling a desperate moan from deep in her chest. It began to grow louder and became a desperate keening like that of a creature in the throes of abject pain. On and on the wailing went. The cave amplified it and sent it booming into the village. People came running to see what was making this sound and soon there was a group of Singers, tourists, and miners all standing at the cave mouth with looks of complete horror.
The Singers then did a strange thing. All of them - young and old - walked silently over to Ruth and held her. After a few minutes they all turned at once and went slowly into the cave. The shuffling of their feet was the only sound to be heard now. Ruth’s wailing had finished.
The Singers never came out of the caves and their bodies were never located.
* END*
NOTES
As Gloria Anzaldua puts it: “Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity - I am my language.”(pg.39) The twin skin concept ignited ideas for me about how people have an outer identity and an inner identity, which I think of as a kind of spirit, and chose to represent as birds in this story. Language is one of the most meaningful ways that people express their selves, sometimes through poetry and song, other times, simply through the practice of conversation with our community, peers, and teachers. If people from non-dominant cultures have their language identities taken away from them they may begin to lose that essential connection between their inner and outer selves.
Inoue, in his essay “Habits of White Language” considers how “logical insight, the rational, order and objectivity are valued most” in standard English and are opposed to “the subjective and emotional”(pg. 4) and serve to further the agenda of white language supremacy. This kind of pragmatism is embodied in the narrator, Dr. Musk. Through his detached handling of the situation with Ruth and his subtle, deeply ingrained racist beliefs, he furthers the agenda of a white supremecist government and is implicit in acts of oppression under the banner of science.
The birds and The Singers commune with one another. When the birds are wiped out, so is the spirit of The Singers. The process of having their spirit broken is slow and tragic, and the scientists, miners, and tourists all think that they have done them a favor by folding them into their own warped sense of culture. They even give them a shabby substitute for cultural expression in the form of the craft studio. But The Singers are not convinced, and in the end they go back into the caves. I like to think they found a little secret grotto deep inside the cavern. Maybe there are even a few nests tucked far back into the rock walls.
Works Cited:
Anzaldua, Gloria. “How To Tame a Wild Tongue”. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza.
(1987).
Inoue, Asao B. “Habits of White Language (HOWL)”. 2023.
Works Consulted:
Johnston, Taylor and Zhang, Christine. “The Native American Boarding School System”.
The New York Times. 2023.
Mullett, G.M. “Spider Woman Stories” 1979.
Ramsey LLM, Lily. “Singing and speech linked to same neural networks in the brain”
News-Medical.net. 2023.
Zitkala-Ša. American Indian Stories. 1921.