Students and their Muskogee speaker partners standing in front of the Seminole Nation’s Pumvhakv School. Image credit Jack Martin.
Muskogee is the traditional language of the Muskogee (Creek) and Seminole Nations of Oklahoma and the Seminole Tribe of Florida. With fewer than 400 speakers, the language is endangered and documenting spoken Muskogee is an important component of current language revitalization efforts. An NEH Documenting Endangered Languages grant allowed students enrolled at Bacone College and the University of Oklahoma, along with linguist Jack Martin at William & Mary, to work with Muskogee elders to document their language in a video format.
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Linda Wood interviews a Muskogee speaker. Image credit Jack Martin.
The project partnered native students with elder Muskogee speakers to record, transcribe, and translate spoken Muskogee in the form of stories, songs, and oral histories. The students were also taking intensive Muskogee language classes at Pumvhakv School in the Seminole Nation. The NEH grant provided funding to hire a videographer and expand the project to include video. Seminole Nation employee Linda Wood, a Muskogee speaker, interviewed over 25 Muskogee elders about a variety of traditional cultural topics, including cooking, weaving, and making ballsticks. Many of the interviews have been transcribed and translated. The project also recorded 76 songs, including many hymns sung in Muskogee. All of the project’s recordings, both video and audio, have been posted online and are freely available. The project has been incredibly successful, with videos getting 1,000 hits a month. It was so successful, in fact, that the Mississippi Choctaw have embarked on a project with the same format.
Muskogee speaker Leon Bell discusses his childhood and shell shakers with interviewer Linda Wood. Video credit the Muskogee Documentation Project.
Documenting Muskogee is vital for preserving the community’s cultural practices, many of which are in the Muskogee language—preaching in Muskogee churches, for example, has long been performed in that language. By preserving the language in its spoken and conversational forms, and not just in the written record, Bacone College and Pumvhakv School are helping ensure that Muskogee lives on.
