Reviving the Wampanoag Language

A very cool Boston Review interview with documentary filmmaker Anne Makepeace on her new film about the revivial of the Wampanoag language:

Jessie told me recently that she discovered that the word used to translate graves, as in graves where coffins go, literally translates as ‘the place that enables you to travel.’ I just thought that was astonishing. And for example, the word for hell, and those Wampanoag translating the Bible into Wampanoag would be scratching their heads because they didn’t have a concept for hell. “How can we create a word that describes it?” And the word that they did create literally translates as “the house of people with empty heads,” because the Wampanoag believed that the soul resided in the head. What could be more hellish than a house full of soulless people? One of these revelations that’s in the film is the word for “to lose your land,” nupanasham, which literally means “to fall down off your feet.”