This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
The present award (NSF #0854299) builds on an earlier pilot project (NSF #0756035) which provided intensive linguistic training for the PIs and allowed for the filming of the traditional sun dance ceremonies and the recording of the accompanying sacred language of the Northern Cheyenne. Under the current award, the language will be transcribed and analyzed to determine special features of the sacred language and how it differs from the everyday Cheyenne language. There are a few field recordings of sacred songs that have been made over the last 115 years and they will be examined to determine persistence and change in the sacred language that is expressed in these songs.
Sacred language is a specialized component of many indigenous languages, transferred from adult to adult and used within the context of philosophical discourse, prayer, and ceremony. With the decline of Native languages, many North American tribes' sacred language is no longer in use and has never been documented. The Northern Cheyenne sacred language is still vital and in use by a shrinking number of fluent speakers, but it has not been documented. This is a rare opportunity for fieldwork in full collaboration with an elite group of fluent ceremonial men and women. This small but prominent speaker community, numbering about 20, has been instructed throughout their adult lifetimes by their ceremonial elders who, in turn, learned from their ceremonial instructors. They have put aside long-held mistrust, forged through years of historic struggles, in order to fully document this sacred language which is so crucial to the preservation of Cheyenne culture. Fluency in Cheyenne is the platform for learning the sacred language, and the fact that all fluent speakers of the everyday Cheyenne language are above the age of fifty means that this moribund language will likely be gone in a generation. The field audio and video recordings with accompanying field notes will be deposited in the Archives of Traditional Music, Indiana University, where all but about 10% of the collection, the most sensitive cultural information, will be available for educational use.
