From Sky news I'm Noelle Evans sitting in for Evan Dawson.

And this is connections.

This hour we are exploring what it takes to preserve and revive an endangered language.

It's a question that one of my guests this hour, Jamie Jacobs, a member of the Tonawanda Seneca Nation, has worked to answer over years.

Jamie's traditional Seneca name is Hoyer Nygaard, which means he is a surprising man.

He is the managing curator for the Rock Foundation Collections at the Rochester Museum and Science Center.

Jamie has gone to extensive lengths to revive Seneca language and all that it encompasses culture, customs, philosophy, worldview, and one of his most recent efforts took him to the Jesuits of Canada archives in Montreal.

I know this firsthand because I joined him and his family on the road trip there and back for an upcoming NPR story, and I got to see his work in action.

Jamie has teamed up with university researchers to use technology to revive Seneca words from historical texts handwritten by Jesuit priests in the late 1600s.

At that time, French Jesuit missionaries were embedded with indigenous nations, and they wrote down the language of the communities they lived with as they worked to convert indigenous people to Christianity.

Languages like Onondaga, which is Seneca, and Ganga, which is Mohawk.

Some of those 350 year old manuscripts in Montreal are damaged, faded, or water stained.

There are pages that cannot be read with the naked eye, so Jamie is using special imaging equipment to reveal those words.

Jamie Wyatt then I go, I thank you for being here.

thank you so much.

I really appreciate the invite to be here today.

I'm very happy.

And I just want to say thank you to the whole team here for, you know, putting this together.

Thank you so much.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Thank you.

also in studio is Professor Julie Decker.

She is the.

She directs the Rochester Institute of Technology's museum studies program and co-directs the Cultural Heritage Imaging Lab.

The lab is an effort between museum studies and RIT Imaging Science Center.

Julie has also authored and edited 11 books and coauthored numerous articles and book chapters on a range of topics, including cultural heritage imaging.

She has assisted Jamie with the technical side of his latest project.

Thank you for being here, Julie.

Thank you so much, Noelle.

It's nice to be here.

And thank you, Jamie, for being here in partnership.

Thank you.

Just to kick it off, Jamie, can you talk about this project that you're working on that brought you to the Jesuit archives?

sure.

So my, language journey began.

probably a little more than 20 years ago.

I was born and raised in the Tonawanda Seneca Territory, located just outside of Bassam, New York.

And I had.

I was very lucky.

I had a great grandmother who her first language was, Seneca language.

her name was, Esther Sundown.

she passed away in 2012 at the age of 96.

Growing up in the community, we learned the basics.

Obviously, this, language, connection was severed.

My parents, they didn't speak first language.

Seneca.

and even my grandparents, they didn't really speak a whole lot of it either.

But my great grandparents did.

And we grew up learning just the basics.

but it wasn't until around I was probably 24 years old, you know, around that age, I was trying to figure out, you know, where my place was in this world.

And I was looking for some direction.

And I thought, well, in the meantime, you know, maybe I'll study a little bit extra, with my great grandmother.

because at that time, even in the early 2000 and, our community was becoming poor with first language speakers, and we were also losing our orators, our ceremonial speakers.

So I thought, well, maybe I can do my part.

Maybe I can just do the basics.

maybe I can step in and do small things.

And I went to my great grandmother, and I told her that I was interested in translating songs because that's what I started out, as was, I sang some of our ritual songs and ceremonial songs and some of the songs had words in them.

And up until that point, I really wasn't really familiar with them.

I just sang them.

So she pulled the words out and she broke them down.

And that's where it just sparked my interest.

And I just became self-motivated to find out what every word was in every song.

That was in our repertoire of who, you know, Shawnee, songs.

And it just ballooned from there because then I started realizing, like, well, because I was so interested in it was very easy, easily returnable in my mind.

And then I said, okay, well, maybe I can speak some of it, and then I that's what I started doing.

And around 2012, I attended this, workshop that was put on by, the late Seneca linguist, Doctor Wallace, chief out in Santa Barbara at USC.

And he basically kind of broke down the language, for us, more from like, a scientific type of, you know, view.

But he also introduced something new.

And this was the idea that Seneca language was first documented in the 17th century.

And he showed us a page from something that was very unfamiliar to me, and it wasn't easily recognizable to me at the time.

And he explained what it was and what it was, was a word from this Jesuit dictionary of the word.

would you know Shawnee?

And he said, this is one of the earliest holding of Shawnee is the Confederacy.

Yes.

Seneca.

Mohawk.

Yes.

Yeah.

And then, just like how I worked with my grandmother on ceremonial language and songs, it just ballooned from there.

And I was just so interested in it.

And I had asked him for a copy of the whole dictionary.

And this was a digital, you know, something he had on CD.

So he gave me a copy of the CD, and on the CD were four, PDFs.

four of these Jesuit dictionaries.

And from then on, from 2012 till about, last year, it was all just kind of done on my own time.

if I had a little bit of time here and there, I would sit down and I would just comb through these digital pages, from these Jesuit, dictionaries.

And then I became even more interested.

and I had contacted the Jesuit archives in Montreal, Quebec, and I had asked them if they had any more material.

because I knew, well, more has to exist in just these four PDFs.

So sure enough, they sent me four more dictionaries, and I was just ecstatic.

And I was just so excited to get to work on them.

When you say four more dictionaries, like, how many pages are we talking about?

well, it ranges, you know, one PDF was probably, you know, 20, 25 pages, and then another PDF was 50 to 60 pages.

and what it seemed like to me was that it was one whole dictionary at the time.

And then just as time went on, the whole notebook or whatever it was, you know, kind of came apart.

so they had like, you know, four individual sections of, like what it seemed to be like one dictionary.

So, they sent me these former files, so I had eight altogether.

And out of the eight, four of them seemed to be like they were just faded.

You just could not read them, even in the digital.

so I became very curious, and it was kind of like, just like a carrot being dangled in front of my face.

Like I really, really wanted to know what was in these faded pages because of the treasure that I was already finding from, from the legible pages.

Right.

Like, it was just it was just, you know, I don't know.

So where did this idea come from to use multispectral imaging?

I mean, is that right?

Is it what multispectral imaging is, is one technology.

and so the way that, that, that technology works is it enables you to see pigments or information that are not immediately visible with what we would say, the naked eye.

So it communicates information by using the capacity of lighting, camera sensors to view material.

That's only visible in the ultraviolet or in the near infrared.

So so you were able to work with this technology?

Jamie?

Well, I didn't know I was capable of it.

Okay.

so what I did was, I'm a big fan of PBS, okay.

And I saw this show on Nova where they were multispectral imaging, this ancient device that they call the antique mithril device.

It's like an old thing that was built by Archimedes, and they were shooting in all different lights because there were inscriptions on this thing that they had pulled from the bottom of the, Aegean Sea.

And then I watched another show where they were using multispectral imaging for the Dead Sea Scrolls, to be able to reread them again.

And that kind of just gave me this motivation.

And I kind of fantasized about, well, what if we could just do this with the Jesuit dictionaries?

So back in 2024, I was encouraged to apply for this, this fellowship grant.

And I thought, well, maybe I'll give it a try.

I mean, I'm not a professional.

I'm an amateur.

maybe this will allow me to at least try something.

Okay.

And it was offered by what?

This, this organization called the, the American Indian Development Institute.

And it was funded by the Henry Luce Foundation, and it was an award of $75,000.

And a lot of that was to go towards technology and anything that you can do to preserve cultural heritage or knowledge keeping, you know, in your community.

So I applied for it and I won the fellowship, and I was very happy because now I knew that this was somewhere in reach.

Yeah.

You know, my eye was on these four dictionaries that were faded.

And the information that I was just waiting to be, you know, you know, read or, you know, just hiding, just sitting there, hiding.

It was within reach.

But at the same time, it was far away.

So you had seen these documents in PDFs before going to the archives?

Yes.

I had never actually seen them physically in person.

Yeah.

Okay.

So with the Henry Luce Foundation Fellowship, this would allow me to actually go there not just to see the dictionaries in person, but actually to attempt to use this technology, to be able to reread these for faded, you know, dictionaries.

so with the grant, I was able to purchase a camera.

I didn't know what I was doing at the time.

I had no idea what to even look for.

I just went on the internet and I looked for UV camera.

Well, at first it was infrared because that's what I thought was that's what I saw on the programs was infrared and UV.

so it brought me to this page of a forensic camera.

Again, I had no idea what I was looking at.

I just figured, okay, it shoots UV spectrum, it shoots infrared.

That's what I need.

Yeah.

You know, click.

I bought it, and even when I got the camera, even just regular photography, I've never really done too much of it in my life.

So I had no idea, like, you know what to do.

Yeah.

so what I did was I approached one of my colleagues at the Rochester Museum of Science Center, and she recommended that I get Ahold of somebody.

Right.

Okay.

And I again, I had no idea who.

I had no idea, like, you know, where to even start.

So she's like, well, I heard of a person named Julie Decker, and she's like, just, just email her and maybe she can at least help you.

And if not, then maybe she can at least point you in a direction.

Yeah, and it sounds like it was fruitful.

Oh, definitely.

Because before that I. I had no idea what I was doing.

I opened the box of the camera.

I saw these things that I had no idea how to use.

I had no idea of how to set it up.

so I emailed Julie and she was, very generous, and she invited me to at least give me a very short to to tutorial on at least where to start.

We're going to hear from Julie in a minute of just how this multi-spectral imaging works.

If you're just tuning in.

I'm Noelle Evans, filling in for Evan Dawson.

And today on connections, we're talking about using multispectral imaging to revive language and by extension, culture and a way of life with me as Hoyt Donegan, Jamie Jacobs, managing curator for the Rock Foundation Collections at MSK and RIT Professor Julie Decker, museum Studies program director and co-director of Ritz Cultural Heritage Imaging Lab.

So tell me about how this works and how it works with Jamie's project.

So her and so Jamie reached out.

Let me back up just to that little moment.

If that's okay.

So we reached out and, asked about coming over and checking out the lab and just meeting up in person.

And that connection enabled us to kind of see what Jamie's interests were, the equipment that he had purchased with this camera, and sort of how our expertise at right.

And I co-direct the lab with Dave Messenger and Roger Easton, and Roger was one of the people that, you know, Jamie had seen on this Nova show.

We could, first of all, I also absolutely love the the PBS shout out.

Oh, yeah, that's that's props to PBS.

so, you know, I wanted Jamie to come to campus so we could connect and see what the goals were with the project, what the equipment was that Jamie had, and, you know, do some wayfinding, like what could be done with that equipment?

We have technology that we have created.

Right?

Thanks to NIH funding that helped National Endowment for the Humanities.

Thank you.

funding that enables people to do multi-spectral imaging with, low barrier to entry.

So, when Jamie came to campus, you know, I had also called in, a colleague from Photo Science as Ted Kinsman and said, help us unpack what Jamie has, both literally and figuratively in terms of this camera that he's, acquired and what the capacity of that camera could bring to these material objects, and that the material objects being these handwritten.

Exactly.

Documents from the 1600s.

Exactly.

And so connecting those dots.

So you have a tool or an instrument, you have a collection.

And then when you bring those two things together in the same environment, what new information and what new knowledge can be gained.

So that was the beginning of that conversation of trying to figure out, okay, what's what, what is there a there there?

And can something be done to help recover this language.

So no, I mean it's fascinating right.

And I'm wondering just when it comes to looking for that knowledge that can be gained that's there in front of you, but you can't see it without this technology.

Just why does that matter so much to gain that.

So the thinking in general about imaging and multi-spectral imaging and using techniques like using a camera, a street, a street camera shooting through those light sources, what you're doing is creating an opportunity for information that had been known to become renowned by new audiences.

So that might be through flood damage.

Fire erasure a palimpsest which is where an object has been written, scraped away and then written on again, or drawn on, scraped away and drawn on again.

And so you're bringing both past and present together for new audiences.

And by doing that, you're also creating space for silences to be filled, so that silences that are there or have been there are now filled with this.

In the case of Jamie's project language, which is intangible but really has the capacity to give us a broader understanding of cultural identities, customs and culture in general.

So using this equipment, Jamie, what was it that you were able to find?

so I began working at the Rochester Museum back in 2006, and around the same time was the same time I started this journey with my great grandmother and, learning language and customs and history.

Well, one of the things that we didn't really touch on with my grandmother was the far history like to, you know, 300 years ago, you know, she was very familiar with local history and cultural history, but with oral tradition, you know, it only survives maybe 1 or 2 generations, and it starts to get a little bit foggy.

So working at the Rochester Museum, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but part of that is also because of Indian boarding schools, I take it.

Exactly, exactly.

So my great grandmother's brothers and sisters, went to boarding school, to Thomas Indian School, and her father and her uncles attended the Carlisle School in Pennsylvania.

and we know that because of, you know, the records that are available now to us today, but working at the Rochester Museum and seeing objects that were made by ancestors that date back 300, 400 and even a couple thousand years ago, it just really made me wonder if my grandmother could identify those objects in the language.

So one of the first things I did was I took pictures of the things that I had seen in the museum collections, and then what I did was I took those pictures back to my grandmother, and I showed her these photographs of these objects.

And I had asked her, what do you call this?

You know, what would you call it?

And she was very receptive to the project.

Right.

This is one of the first, I guess, like experiments that I had done to try and make these, you know, connections.

And there were some things that she really could not identify.

there were some things that she just could not explain or she knew the words but could not explain the history of the words she just said.

That's just what we call it.

Okay, so that's where the Jesuit dictionaries really came useful to me in repeating back not just linguistic history, but also like customs, things that we did that we don't do anymore, you know, how did they refer to those things?

So, for example, our ancestors had to pick up and move a village every 15 to 20 years.

Well, why is that?

Well, this just, you know, natural resources and the, unavailability of, you know, to, technology.

Right?

They didn't have iron boxes to, you know, log and split firewood.

so anyways, you know, what did they call that?

Right.

Because the reservation era is only a couple hundred years old, you know, whereas now, like, you know, I just we don't have to pick up and move a village.

But that was the custom that was done in somebody's lifetime.

In an ancestor's lifetime.

2 or 3 times.

And, and there was a lot of things that went with it.

It wasn't just something that they just did.

You know, overnight when you say things that went with it.

What do you mean?

Well, they had to obviously build new long houses.

You know, they had to, you know, build new clay pots and they had to do all this stuff in preparation to do that.

But what did they just call the simple term of moving a village?

Okay.

So we can guess what that is.

And contemporary, you know, Seneca language, but how did the ancestors think of it?

You know, how did they, you know, what did they refer to as in our language?

And that was one of the things that I had discovered in this Jesuit dictionary, because they were still doing that at the time the Jesuits came.

And the word that I found was gone underground.

That means to pick up a village.

And one of the reasons that I was able to identify with this was because one of the old ways of measuring that my grandmother had remembered was how to measure a journey from one place to another, and she called the neo quaint.

So when you say ni, that means how many?

The yo is the pronoun and then the gwyn is the verb to pick up.

So I had asked her like, well, what does that really mean?

Like just like like, what are you picking up?

Like, how do you know?

Why are you using that for this, this, you know, measurement.

And she says, well, I don't know.

That's just what my father would say.

So looking into other documents, well, what it really means is to pick up your camp.

Because ancestors had to walk and then camp while you're picking up your camp.

So if it takes you ten times of doing that it's ten, ten journeys, ten new quests.

So it's the same burden that it's the same verb you're using to move the village, which makes sense.

And that just ties in together, like, yeah, you're picking up a village and you're moving it just like you would pick up a camp and move it.

Yeah.

And that was just that was just so interesting to me because, there were other words like that.

And just like the songs and the things that I had, you know, started out with, it just kind of ballooned from there.

And I really wanted to know how our ancestors thought at that time, and I really wanted to know what the words were for the things that we haven't made in 2 or 300 years.

Yeah, yeah, we are going to take a quick break.

It's the only break of the hour, and then we'll be right back to continue this conversation.

On working with multispectral imaging to revive a language.

If you'd like to contribute to the conversation, you can give us a call at 844295 talk talk would be 8255.

That's toll free.

Or you can call (585) 263-9994 or email us at connections@wxxi.org.

We'll see you right after this break.

I'm Meghan Mac.

Coming up in our second, our guest host Noel Evans, leads a discussion about play.

When you think of play, you might think of kids, but play benefits adults too.

Noel explores the science and joy of play with a panel of researchers and facilitators who say fun is serious business.

That's next on connections.

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This is connections.

I'm Noelle Evans, filling in for Evan Dawson.

I'm here with Jamie Jacobs, whose traditional Seneca name is Hoya.

Tony.

Glad he is managing curator for the Rock Foundation collections at the Rochester Museum and Science Center.

I'm also joined by RIT Professor Julie Decker.

We're talking about using advanced photographic technology to essentially pull faded ink from the pages of 300 year old handwritten historical documents to capture, preserve and hopefully revive an endangered language.

And that language is Onondaga.

Seneca.

Yes.

So we were just talking a bit more about your project here.

Jamie and Julie, I want to bring you back in.

You mentioned that this imaging, this, the lab that you work with.

Yeah.

It was funded in part by a National Endowment for the Humanities.

Is that right?

So, yes.

So the Cultural Heritage Imaging Lab at MIT has been in existence for a long while.

And again, you know, Roger Easton and Day and Dave Messenger have been working in that space for some for decades.

in 2020, we received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities to create a system that does multispectral imaging and a software to accompany the system that is low cost, low barrier to entry free and open source, so that people can download the plans and create their own multispectral imaging system for historical artifacts, otherwise known as meta.

So that's the letters for each of those words.

So anybody and literally you can go to our website at RIT for our lab and click on a link, fill out a Google form, and then we'll send you the plans, a spreadsheet.

And you can download everything and build your own there literally by clicking some links and purchasing some things.

And, and using our manual to build it.

Why does it matter to make it accessible like that?

It's it's a good question because that type of technology, of imaging systems have been in use in the imaging world.

So in the quote, science world for decades to bring it into the space, the humanities require certain capacities.

The first of those is to have an institution that's large enough and well endowed enough to be able to support the purchase of that system from a commercial vendor.

And those types of systems, multi-spectral imaging systems run about 150 to $200,000, which for some humanities organizations has their entire budget.

In addition, those systems are highly complicated to use, and the software is.

So you're talking to a humanities person here.

less intuitive than one, like, so that sort of really makes an unevenness in terms of the items that get to be imaged.

In other words, it's from certain institutions with certain individuals who have certain keys to those tools to make those, items imaged and more accessible.

With this project, funded by the NIH, we when you say this project with project a meta project are low cost, low barrier to entry, free and accessible system that enables anyone to do this work literally and to remove the barriers to entry.

Also, in terms of what we think of as worthy to be imaged, that that idea that there's a canon of things that an institution like National Gallery, we love the people at National Gallery of Art, but they have one of these high end systems, you know, they're able to image things that are within their four walls that are considered worthy to be imaged.

But multi-spectral imaging through our project, it is a tool that's available to anyone.

Jamie can take our system.

We've already told him you can take our system to Montreal and and image those documents and really do what you want with them.

And and it makes Canon City just not important.

It doesn't matter that someone decided this was an important object.

You think it's an important object, and you think it's worthy to be imaged because you think there's something there that is beyond what we can see and beyond what we know.

going back to that, National Endowment for the Humanities, given changes at the federal level, is there any risk of this work being able to continue?

So are first Grant was a research and development grant and it was for the construction of this system and the software.

this next grant that we were awarded in 2024 was an education and training grant.

that was unfortunately terminated on April 3rd of this year.

However, we still have a strong commitment to doing the education and training work around it, and we are still moving forward with that.

It will take us a longer time and it will take different funding streams to make that possible, but we're still committed to doing that work.

I appreciate hearing that determination.

It looks like we have a caller, Douglas from Rochester, asking how does the story materials from your research compare to oral histories online?

One Douglas, I believe you're on the air.

Hello.

Hi.

Yes, there's absolutely fascinating discussion in so many ways.

And so much of indigenous history is passed down through oral tradition.

And I was wondering whether you have yet been able to find enough written material that, the two can match up the story that you have by oral tradition.

you find, 300 year old written documentation that, to see whether they, match up or whether over the years, oral tradition has modified the stories to some degree.

yes.

And I think I know who this is.

yeah.

It's good to talk to you, Doug Fisher.

Right.

but, anyways, I.

Yes, this is and also, this is also what really sparked my interest was seeing the continuity, the fact that I heard words from elders and stories, but also seeing this some of the same words, you know, because not every word in the Jesuit dictionary was new to me.

Like, I could recognize a lot of them.

And I was just really fascinated.

The fact that these are still things that we still use, right?

We're still mentioning them in our ceremonies.

But some of them, even though we mention them, we don't really have an understanding of them because we haven't really done the practice of them.

You.

Right.

So linguistically, they survive and we still use them.

We still mention them in ceremonies, but it's just that the practice was put aside because of colonization, because of different objects that replaced the things that we made by hand.

So one of those being is a Matt.

Okay.

So, Haudenosaunee women in ancient times made mats from bulrush reeds, and then those became a symbol for governance, because the leaders of the people would sit and rest on these mats, because sitting and resting, you have more of a chance of making better decisions, because now you're at peace, right?

You can deliberate softly within your mind, amongst your colleagues, sitting and resting on the mat.

So it became a symbol for governance.

So when we refer to the hood, you know, so many people, we refer to what we call a Guyanese hat goer, which means the great binding law.

And the symbol for this law is a mat, a white man of peace.

So there have been discussions over, well, what's the mat originally made of?

And even some of the elders will say, well, it's we think it was made of this.

And then another elder will say, well, I heard it was made of this, but in the Jesuit dictionaries it gives us a very specific material of what these mats originally were made of.

And that's the bulrush reed, because it gives us the word for the plant bulrush.

And then the derivative from that is the bulrush mat.

But then what happens is especially when colonization comes and, warfare takes over, well, metaphorically, the mat becomes stained with blood.

And then now this mat becomes a symbol for warfare.

Okay.

So again, the Jesuit dictionary gives us this insight as to what the word now becomes for warfare.

Right.

Because there's a way you can say, okay, people are fighting, people are at war, but there's a symbolic way of referring to it.

And that's what really gives us this insight.

So now we can trace back, with modern oral tradition and kind of add to each, the complement each other.

Right?

The Jesuit dictionaries and the words that they did.

And then what the oral tradition is, is, is telling us they, they both add understanding to each other.

just following up, one of the things that you mentioned on the road trip home, from Montreal, of some of the things that you found, one was about cooking pumpkin, for instance.

Yes.

Have you tried that yet?

And can you talk about, you know, what you found there in terms of like the two words you said that regarding how cooking pumpkin was, was done?

Oh, yes.

So definitely.

so, you know, one of the other movements that's taking place in a lot of, Haudenosaunee communities is, food sovereignty and the idea that we should return back to these traditional cooking practices.

And one of the main things is cooking in clay pots.

But also we know that, you know, other ways of cooking is outside of the clay pot.

And, you know, what are those?

So one of the words that I had found in the Jesuit dictionaries was how to roast a pumpkin.

And one of the ways that it describes is that you take hot ashes and you cover the pumpkin and bury it in just hot ashes.

So there's no open flame, there's no coals.

It's just using very hot ashes and then removing the pumpkin from the hot ashes.

And to me, that was just it was just amazing because now we can take that.

Not just the word, but the practice.

And we can apply that and we can experiment with that because we've never done that.

I've never done that.

I've never had to do it.

You take a pumpkin, you kind of put an oven, right?

Yeah.

Right.

And that's how you cook it nowadays.

but using this older practice, which is basically the same thing, but it seems like it's more traditional, it's more grass roots, but obviously, you know, discovering this, you know, I discovered this in the winter time and haven't had a chance to grow a pumpkin and do it.

So this is something that's still yet to be done.

And I'm very excited to try it, especially because my wife is very heavily, you know, interested in reviving some of these ancient practices of our traditional foods.

Yeah.

Your wife, Corinne Thompson was talking about that.

Yes.

That's that importance, that connection to, within a community to the Earth.

I'm also wondering as well, for one thing, I don't know if we've touched on it.

You're creating something here, right?

With this project.

What is that?

so my hope is to create something that where I can disseminate the knowledge that I learn from this whole process, you know, and I'm.

I'm learning more things than I that I thought I would ever learn, especially with even just the multi-spectral imaging.

Hopefully this is something that other people can use in their language journey.

Or if they're studying language history and they come upon the same obstacle.

well, now they have something to go off, you know, and but also what I would like to complete at the end of, you know, when it's all said and done, is something that I can put in the hands of our people, and it's has linguistic value, it has cultural value.

It has, you know, even art value.

and so, for example, something we haven't made in two or, you know, 300 years, 200 years.

Well, we have some of these things available to us still in museum collections.

And what we can do is we can revive that practice, but we can also add the history of it.

Why did our ancestors make it?

Why did they stop making it?

What is it made out of?

And you know, we can provide the word for that, and we can provide the historical understanding how our ancestors referred to it and why they refer to it that way.

And then we can also, contemporaries that word into modern Seneca because really, Seneca language has changed over time in the past 100 years.

So if I were to go back in time and speak to my ancestors in the 1650s, 1660s, we may have a difficult time understanding each other, even though it's the same language you had mentioned.

Sorry to interrupt, but you mentioned that it's so similar to older Seneca.

So similar to contemporary Mohawk.

Yes, yes yes, yes.

So some of the consonants has, you know, has has disappeared since then.

So they don't exist, but they still and they still exist in, you know, modern Mohawk.

so one of that being the, our so our a sound.

So today, you know, the mohawk still have the aura.

And along with Cayuga language.

so, yeah, I mean, definitely, you know, like, I would have a better chance of learning modern Mohawk and then going back in time and then we'd have a better I'd have a better chance of understanding each other if I did it that way.

Yeah, yeah.

And those, we'll probably go to some images if you're watching on YouTube of some of those archives that you were looking at, if you are just tuning in, I'm Noelle Evans, filling in for Evan Dawson.

And today on connections, we're talking about using multispectral imaging to revive language and by extension, culture.

And a way of life.

With me is Hoyt Doniger, Jamie Jacobs, managing curator for the Rock Foundation Collections at MSK, and RIT Professor Julie Decker, museum Studies program director and co-director of RIT Cultural Heritage Imaging Lab.

We do have a comment on YouTube.

And Lee, Jim, Jim, my gosh.

And Lee Jemison, saying I appreciate you using and attempting to use on on the work.

go ino Seneca language.

Great work and appreciate the episode to share more about the culture and language.

Thank you so much, Ansley, for, listening.

We haven't really touched on, what's at stake necessarily?

according to the online language Encyclopedia of Analog, the United States and I would venture to say that this count that they have include sovereign indigenous nations here is home to 197 living indigenous languages, and at least 49 indigenous languages are now extinct.

And experts with the Indigenous Language Institute say there used to be more than 300 indigenous languages.

Here, ethnology identifies Seneca as an endangered language.

And I take it you aim for Seneca not to not become the next extinct language here.

And also, as you'd mentioned, like this work for you.

There seems to be this potential impact for other indigenous people whose languages are on that cusp, that precipice, that this could do more for them as well, by extension, in some way.

Do you mind elaborating a bit on that?

Sure.

so to be able to have the connection with a knowledge keeper and an elder, it was my great grandmother's passion to make sure that the language survives because she understood that the way our ancestors thought, it was very philosophical.

It was very metaphorical.

It's a very beautiful language, and a lot of our customs and a lot of the reasons why we think the way we do and the way we describe ourselves and the way we believe in ourselves, comes from the way we speak.

And she understood that.

And at first I didn't have that connection, so I couldn't understand why, you know, what she was talking about.

And once I really started to learn the language, I really started to just understand why she thought it was just so important.

Today, unfortunately, the Tonawanda community, we have no first language speakers left.

When did that happen?

so that happened just after the pandemic.

We lost three of our last first language speakers knowledge keepers, elders, ceremonial people.

Chief Kirvine, Jonathan, his wife Evelyn Jonathan, and Chief Stuart Jamison.

They were all first language speakers, and they all passed after the pandemic.

And ironically, they didn't pass because of the, you know, virus.

They just passed because they got old and we did start efforts, about seven, eight years ago to begin an adult immersion program at Tonawanda.

and obviously, we understood at the time we were not going to be 100% successful in producing fluent speakers, but we at least started the process because what we were able to gain from those two year cohorts was we were able to gain at least people who had a very good understanding of the language.

And that was a start, because now we could put those people into classrooms, and now we then and they can teach.

They can at least teach young children who don't have the capacity to learn at a higher level, like like myself and other adults.

So that's a start.

So the next hour or so, the next goal would be to teach somebody more advanced.

So then you can speak a little bit more and then they can teach, you know like middle school.

And then the next goal would be to teach, you know, a a very higher level.

And that just takes time.

Right.

So I heard a statistic that says it takes one generation to lose a language, but it takes three to gain it back.

And I'm finding out and we're all finding out that that's probably very true.

So it is going to take us a couple more generations to get it back to at least this good momentum.

producing actual speaking students.

And you have to remember too, that it's not just Tonawanda Seneca community that exist.

We have to more that are also working very hard.

And I give them a lot of credit because how do you teach a language that you didn't have to teach before, you know, how do you teach something that you didn't have to sit down and give lessons?

This is just a language that you learn because you were born into it.

My great grandmother never attended language school.

She didn't have to have linguist and to tell her, you know, what language, how it was structured.

So she just learned it because her mother and father used it every day.

Her brother and sisters use it every day, and so on and so on.

So to be able to figure that out, that it takes a lot of work because I'm not a trained linguist, I'm not a trained, teacher.

so we just kind of had to experiment and figure that out as we went.

And we're still doing that.

And that's it's it's a lot of work in terms of those efforts.

It seems like there are some examples that you can look to.

For instance, very close to Montreal.

There's the, Garner wag, a mohawk reserve, where they have an a language immersion program.

and it was wonderful to be able to step into that space and see how it's done.

And, one of the language coaches there, at least Monkey Bar, who, I was able to meet thanks to you.

she had mentioned that, you know, it's not just about language can't just exist in a school.

It has to be living, you know, it has to be in the community.

It has to be, children need adults to talk to in the language.

So.

Yes.

Yes.

Like there's.

Yeah.

Yes.

So like I said, I was very lucky because I had my great grandmother to talk to or at least attempt to, you know, to have a dialog with.

But it also took a lot of self motivation.

I had to make that commitment because rather than turning on the radio and listening to Ecdc or, you know, Metallica, I had to turn on a language lesson.

and that's, you know, and that was one of the blessings of having a one hour commute in the morning and one hour commute going home.

Sure.

Was that was two hours out of the day where I could just turn on the radio and just listen to nothing but Seneca.

Yeah.

And I did that for a decade, and I've been doing that for about 20 years now.

So that's 20 years.

I've had a two hours a day at the minimum.

Okay.

But also just driving, you know, driving and looking at a tree and saying, okay.

And then repeating the word to myself in the head, or in my head.

Yeah.

And then, just repeating derivatives, you know, a tall tree, a short tree, a dead tree.

just repeating those back and forth in my head.

That's something you have to commit to.

And sometimes it's it's it gets tiring.

It gets mentally frustrating because maybe you don't remember, or maybe you just don't have anybody to confirm that you are right.

Yeah.

And that's that's that can be very discouraging sometimes.

We do have a call online to we also have a YouTube comment.

I very much hope I'm not about to break this word.

why?

Hey, Jack is used today to describe lending a clan name to a person from another clan.

Translate literally, as I put it around his neck.

If that sounds familiar.

Jamie, this person is wondering if there are any references to this word in these dictionaries.

That comment is from Cole Reuben.

yeah.

So definitely, one of the things that I, you know, should kind of add on to this is that the Jesuit dictionaries were also written in the time when the Senecas were responding to something in our history, and that was foreign diseases.

So foreign diseases decimated a lot of our populations.

And in response to that, we were doing a lot of adopting of other tribal nations, and they had to have names.

so definitely that's that's literally what that means is to hang around the neck.

and when you give a name to somebody, because we don't really own our names, like, I don't own my name, I wasn't that wasn't a name that I chose that was given to me.

And then as I pass, it's it's released from me and it's given to the next person.

When you say your name, are you referring to Jamie or who?

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

The what?

Yes.

So he is a surprising man.

Yeah.

So it feel like it's fitting.

Yeah.

so it actually belongs to the women of the clan.

Right.

It doesn't really belong to me.

So that's why we refer to it as such.

But I haven't really seen anything specific in the Jesuit dictionaries yet.

Okay.

Because there's a lot of information in there that I still haven't even touched on.

Sure.

Yeah.

Yes.

so we have a caller Hoover from Pittsford, talking about a reference to Handsome Lake and Alfred Parker, former historians, curators responsible for native archives.

Hopefully I get this right.

Oh, goodness.

Okay, Hoover, I believe that you're on the air.

And if not.

Hi.

Can you hear us?

Okay.

There, I hear you.

All right?

No, I, I can hear you.

Yeah.

it's interesting because, I just jumped on, the the program about 20 minutes ago.

I. Yeah.

I'm sorry if I'm duplicating anything, but, I'm reading out, Alfred Parker's book on Handsome Lake, and I use Hansen Lake in part of my last novel because he was a philosopher for the the Senecas and the, Iroquois.

He talked about climate change in, 1790, 1795, before the Treaty of Canandaigua.

He spoke about caring for the lakes and the animals.

And are you aware of that?

Plus, I did not know that the former executive director of the of the Rochester Museum and Science Center, Albert Parker, was a, Native American.

He ran that museum for 20 years.

And when I was a kid, I used to see all these wonderful native American exhibits at the Museum in Science, and some of them are still there.

They've been there for 60 years, and now I understand more about it.

So it's a beautiful language.

It's a great program.

Thank you for doing this for our community.

I'm going to get off down.

I want to hear about Hansen Lake.

If you can talk about thank you so much for calling in.

And I mean, speaking to our emcee, Jamie, you have just curated a permanent exhibit there.

Yes.

Tell us about it.

sure.

and then answer questions.

Okay.

Okay.

yeah.

so, I just curated, in partnership with Marcy and the staff, a very wonderful exhibition called Houdini, showing the continuity, innovation and resilience.

And the idea is to show, and educate the public that we are not a dead culture.

We are not people of the past, that we are living culture.

We still are innovating.

We still continue some of these art forms and philosophies and we had to be resilient over things over time.

foreign invasion and colonization, boarding schools.

You know, some of the things that we mentioned and we handpicked, seven artist, wonderful artists, very talented.

And to portray that, to portray all, all three of those values in their artwork.

And they all did an awesome job.

And again, kudos to all of them.

Yeah, was wonderfully immersive.

so throwing it back to Handsome Lake.

sure.

So just a correction.

it was actually Arthur C Parker.

that was his name.

Who was the director of the Rochester Museum?

for a time, in the early 20th century.

And, back to Handsome Lake.

Handsome Lake began, working in 1799. because this is post American Revolution.

This is post, Sullivan campaign, 1779. this is also just after, the Treaty of Canandaigua that he mentioned and the Seneca people.

Well, a lot of the Houdini society people, communities were just in this mode of just of of destruction.

because of colonization, because of these conflicts, because of this, warfare and the morality of the people was just at its all time low.

Yeah.

And unfortunately, some of our people, turn to, different vices and one of those being alcoholism, because they didn't know how to transition from this, you know, longhouse living life where everybody cares for one another.

You work the land with your hands, and you are thankful, and you're grateful and you hunt and you, it's you know, you provide for everybody in the village, too.

Now.

Okay, now you're on and you're now you're on a piece of land where you can't leave.

You can't hunt where you used to because one, the animal populations have been decimated because of the trade, the fur trade.

but also because of all some just different things.

Yeah.

There's so much to explore here.

And as we come into our last minute, Julie, I know we've kind of, really focused so much on on Jamie and the work that you're doing in all of this, but is this sort of the I mean, the kind of work that you're hoping to achieve with the lab and this multi-spectral imaging work?

Yes.

Thank you know how it is.

I mean, I think part of our goal is to really help people to see that technology is within their reach and that our lab is here to support, education and training and learning around cultural heritage.

Fabulous.

And with, 20s left.

Any final thoughts?

What do you want people to take away?

well, I just want to say a really big thank you to Julie, because I had no idea what I was doing prior to going to the Jesuit dictionaries.

and the camera that I had, and I don't I wouldn't have been able to achieve what I did without them.

So I really want to just throw them a lot of gratitude.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Jamie.

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