Can They Revive Their Dying Language? -- Only 3 People Remain Who Can Speak Quileute, But A New Generation Tries To Save It From Extinction

LA PUSH, Clallam County - Lillian Pullen holds up flash cards, coaxing the Quileute words out of seven pupils 75 years her junior.

When she gets to the cardboard cards showing colors, Pullen looks momentarily puzzled. One kindergartner has asked about the proper Indian name for her classmate's purple shirt.

"There was no such color in the early life," says Pullen, a smile spreading across the well-earned wrinkles of her 80-year-old face.

Later that sunny, windy afternoon, Pullen verbally spars with middle-schoolers in the old garage converted into a schoolroom, uninsulated against the peaceful rumble of nearby ocean waves. The lesson today for these nine students is their slang words and phrases, loosely translated into Quileute.

"Was ho, Jose," say the pupils, repeating Quileute words for "No way, Jose." Other sayings, like "awesome," "gross," "let's go cruisin' " and "get outta town" bring giggles from the students as they strain to reconcile "white man's words" with their native language.

Their efforts reflect the struggle to preserve a language of long ago. It takes place weekdays in this Quileute Tribal School classroom on the far western reaches of the Olympic Peninsula. Some 50 students, from kindergartners through eighth-graders, are being exposed to their culture, from dancing to carving to weaving, through the rapidly disappearing language of their grandparents and great-grandparents.

But they must race against time. Only three Native Americans - Pullen and two elders from the Hoh Indian Reservation south of here - remain fluent Quileute speakers. Two of the women are in their 80s, and they sense the urgency to pass to this younger generation what they know of Indian ways.

"If we didn't start teaching our language, we'd lose it in five or 10 years," says Helen Lee, 63.

She remembers not knowing one word of English when she was sent to first grade in Forks. Later, at an Oregon boarding school, she says her mouth was washed out with soap because she spoke Quileute with friends.

Lee worries about her neighbor Pansy Hudson, 80, the third Quileute speaker. Hudson has numerous health problems, and a recent stroke makes conversation nearly impossible for this oldest Hoh member. The Hohs are tribal cousins of the Quileutes.

"I really have no one to talk to now," Lee says. "And I start to forget how to speak the words."

Once, thousands of Native Americans spoke Quileute. The language is not a dialect but is related to the Chimakum tribal language spoken near Port Townsend, a language that has been extinct since the 1930s.

Quileute appears to be unrelated to any other language in the world.

History and the economy dealt the Quileute language its near-fatal blow.

After the Indians signed treaties in the mid- and late-1800s, and the government moved them onto reservations, more Native Americans left home for opportunities elsewhere. In the process, the tribal language took a back seat to English, the language of survival off the reservation.

The slow cultural erosion accelerated as Indian youths were educated either at the nearest town or government boarding schools.

"I'm really sorry I didn't learn," says Vivian Lee, 39, one of Helen Lee's six children. "We're now so related to the English language it's hard to get into the Quileute mindset."

Bridging that generational gap in language and culture was the impetus for restarting the tribal school in 1979. (The original Indian school in LaPush, founded in 1882, was later consolidated with schools in Forks, 15 miles to the east.)

The Quileute Tribal School is funded by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and is state certified. It's one of only 30 schools in the U.S. run by a Native American school board, said Terri Tavenner, coordinator for the tribe's language and culture project.

U.S. Department of Education grants, including a current three-year, $179,000 annual stipend, have allowed the tribe to develop a broad cultural curriculum that includes language books, audio tapes and 500 hours of videotapes. Students have access to 3,800 computer files, including games. A computerized talking dictionary featuring Pullen's recorded voice has been developed.

It's an amazing amount of progress for a language that wasn't even written down until 1968. Credit for that goes to J.V. Powell, a linguist from the Department of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, who started coming to LaPush as a graduate student that year to document the Quileute language.

Powell, 53, has returned here each year since, for up to three months at a time, recording elders and working with tribal members on formalizing the language. He's been given a Quileute nickname, Kwashkwash (blue jay), in recognition of his efforts.

When Powell arrived 24 years ago, he says about 50 Quileutes and Hohs could speak their language fluently. They were scattered in villages throughout the Olympic rain forest and coast. Now there's only Pullen in LaPush and Lee and Hudson at the Lower Hoh River.

"The language will surely die with these elders unless a new generation of Quileutes learn their tongue and learn it immediately," Powell wrote in "Quileute Language, Book No. 1," in 1975.

The first Quileute dictionary, 5,000 words and phrases in 518 pages, was published in 1976. It outlined a language of 33 consonants and four vowels, with eight different "k" sounds, no "r" and no nasal sounds. The words are long, with whole English sentences often condensed into a single Quileute word.

"When mainstream people think of Indian language they think of them as a bunch of grunts used to say rudimentary kinds of things," says Powell, taking a break from a recent taping session with Pullen.

"In fact, the Quileute language is an incredibly complex and expressive language that allowed the old people to say everything that was culturally important with a great deal of clarity."

Powell plans to spend 10 days this month in La Push, in part to work on a new dictionary that will include more of the 90,000 Quileute words and phrases. Taveneer said she's been studying the language for a decade "and I still can't speak it. It's very difficult."

"It's hard to learn," agrees 12-year-old Karin Swogger, a fifth-grader who's attended the tribal school for five months. "There are different accents, spellings and weird letters. But I like learning how to weave and the owl dance."

The tribal school's goal with Quileute is "not fluency but familiarity," said Tavenner. "When you lose your language, you lose the way you look at the world."

The school supplements the twice-weekly, mandatory language classes with weekly arts-and-crafts classes, including carving from red cedar and basket-weaving. A dance class, with drums, shawls and chants, rounds out the cultural program. Each session incorporates the Quileute language.

Once a year, the older students take a weeklong camping trip, living off the land in the "old ways" with canoes of hollowed cedar, fishing, digging clams, smoking salmon and, in the evenings, hearing legends and traditions from visiting elders.

As the school's culture program grows, so does its enrollment. From a low of 27 students, the school now has 50, up from last year's 39 students, said Tavenner. For the first time, Hoh students are attending the tribal school here. Four are Hudson's great-grandchildren; one is a grandson of Lee.

Ultimately, the tribe wants to offer high-school classes so Quileutes and Hohs will be able to finish their education on the reservation instead of going to Forks.

A tribal dropout rate of 90 percent continues to improve as more Quileutes learn in their own classrooms, Tavenner said.

"As hard to face as it is, what we've done is to grab a dodo bird by the toenail as it flies off to extinction," Powell says. "The Quileute language is destined to become extinct when the last of the people who know it now dies.

"But it will always be there, well-recorded, when a future generation of Quileutes becomes totally committed to reviving their language."

For Pullen, her Quileute language "is a custom, a tradition of our elders living here years ago. It shows the outside world we are a race of people who are proud to have our heritage."

Helen Lee likes the younger generation's revived interest in Hoh and Quileute culture.

"We are giving up white man's ways and reverting back to what we are supposed to have," Lee says. "I'm really proud of the children trying to learn our language. Now there is hope the language and our culture will continue after we die and cross over."

-------------------------------- QUILEUTES ON STAGE --------------------------------

Lillian Pullen, a Quileute speaker, is one of many Native Americans presenting music, dance and other cultural traditions this weekend at the Northwest Folklife Festival at the Seattle Center.

Today, from 2:30 to 4:30 p.m. in the Bagley Wright Theatre, Pullen will be one of eight Native Americans sharing century-old traditions.

For more information on the free festival, call 684-7300. The Times published a schedule of festival events Thursday, May 21.