Interviewed by Tali Trillo, NEC Staff
Would you mind introducing yourself, and who do you bring with you today when speaking about language?
Dvlaaha~ shxuushi Marva Sii~xuutesna Jones, my name is Marva Siixuutesna Jones. I am Taalaawa (Tolowa), Yurok, Karuk & Wintu and raised at my maternal village of Nii~lii~chvndvn along the banks of the Taalaawa (Smith) River.
I descend from the Charlie, Frank & Henry lineage of my Taalaawa family and several other villages along the Taalaawa River, Klamath River, & Trinity River. The greatest and most trusted influences in my language responsibilities comes from being raised in the home of my maternal daysri (grandmother) Eunice Xashweetesna Bommelyn, the lifelong dedication of my uncle Loren Me’lashne Bommelyn, my inspiration of my three children; Ch’vski Eunice, Nants’vn Wautek, Teexeeshe’ Adeline and my new grandson, Yaame’ta Nants’vn. I work alongside highly-skilled and amazing Waatr’vslh’a~ | Language and Culture Division staff Guylish Bommelyn, Language Teacher; Mattie Castellaw, Language Specialist; and Sheryl Suudaachu Steinruck, Education Department Director.
How does preserving your language connect with the health of yourself, your community, Tolowa lands, and nonhuman relatives tied to those lands?
Language is a key component in tying it all together: balance, understanding, knowledge, meaning, radical love, identity and purpose.
Being a place-based people means that we find ourselves engaged with our natural world so often. To carry the sacredness of self through our appreciation and gratitude of our Mother Earth offers us a depth and energy reinforced by speaking our languages. Our language is a direct link to all of our relationships, whether it’s with water, a place, an animal, our foods, or another spirit.
Being able to understand the etymology of a certain place, animal or action is powerful in reinforcing our connections. Understanding the source of our word for mountain, for example, is beautiful. Nants’vn means mountain. But parsing the word gives great meaning as it literally means “Bones of the Earth,” which describes our understanding so powerfully and the way we see and feel our environments.
To me, the more you understand and speak your language and engage with ancestral practices, the healthier you become.
What challenges have you faced in preserving your language?
Settler-colonization is the biggest challenge we face in preserving and maintaining our language. Ethnocentrism, assimilation, and acculturation go hand in hand in plaguing our language’s sustainability and has devastated every institution we live in. This colonial system is a sickness of disconnection and devaluation of our own inheritance and has left its mark, causing grave impacts and interruption of our very existence as Taalaawa speaking – Taalaawa people.
With settler-colonization, interruptions and oppression – we are faced with lack of knowledge, interest, compassion or care. Saying one cares, and actually making efforts to save our language from extinction, are two completely different things. It truly takes active attention to make a difference. I must ask, “What are your commitments to our language?”
In our last interview, you spoke of your daysri sru’ (grandma) and mentioned she was the last fluent Tolowa speaker for your Peoples. If you could speak to her today, what would you say?
I’d say, Sru’ xeemeexwvtlhya~ne weeya’ waatr’vslh’a~ hiichu wvn naa sri’ tr’aama nuuwaatr’umni shu’ ‘aashii ninla. (Gram, our teacher, thank you for your care & teaching of our language and culture.) Thank you for modeling love of self and love of our people through this responsibility. Your strength and passion is being carried forward with absolute care.
I remember you asking me: Who’s going to carry on our ways? Who’s going to keep this going? Who’s going to keep thinking like a Taalaawa person? What will become of our practices and values? I want you to be rest-assured that we are yet instilling your knowledge passed to you into your great and great-great grandchildren right now.
What is ‘A’-T’I XWEE-GHAYT-NISH (Still, We Live On), and why did this project come to be?
Our film represents an enduring history and a valuable story we all need to know. No matter what role you hold in the community – the importance, understanding, causes and efforts of our language’s survivance needs to be known. The impacts and ongoing efforts need to be available for all of us to understand, so that we can gain support and commitment in this very vital and fragile status.
Our language strategy needed to be updated and developed in this language preservation and maintenance effort, which included making this film. We want our communities to gain greater understanding and awareness; the journey of how we got here, what’s been done, what we’re doing, and where we’re going. This film needed to be shared in creating a stronger support and commitment in our efforts to avoid extinction.
What was your role in the making of the film?
I worked in a very functioning role as a co-producer for the film, where I got to discuss our approaches and help design the storyboard. This project has kept us busy in linking up our story with our absolute truths, pulling out our archival information, crediting all of sources, contacting those who wanted to share their language work with us, and editing our content.
What are your hopes for the film and its impacts?
We hope to save our language through the expressed seriousness of our language status. We hope to gain greater support and commitment from this story with not only the wider community, but within the hearts and minds of our Taalaawa people. We want this film to ignite the hearts of our people and especially our youth. We want our babes yet here to know how to speak our language as a normal way of communication. We want our language to live on not as a survivance but as a thriving, living, viable and purposeful place without fear of loss.
Please save the date Saturday, March 16th for a special screening of A’-T’I XWEE-GHAYT-NISH (Still, We Live On) at the Arcata Playhouse.