Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul

by Stephen Jenkinson

She knew that her culture could survive starvation, as it had done times aplenty in the past. That was in her culture. And she knew that there could be enough memory and enough hunger for true things among her people to survive forced relocation, which didn’t have to be the end of anything. But she also knew through practice what linguists and anthropologists know through study: The culture lives in the language. When there is a rupture in the teaching and speaking and praying of a language that lasts two generations, when the memory goes the way of the lived experience, it is the real beginning of the end of something. The first generation unable to speak the ancestral tongue, though the language might feel to them like something backward, arcane, or useless and nostalgic, still has the sound of it inside them from their childhood and from the elders that are still alive. The second generation has neither the language nor the experience of hearing it live. That’s when a language withers and fades. That’s how culture dies.