Did Language Die With `Last Catawba?' -- Death Leaves Questions No Tongue Can Answer

BOSTON - When a man who called himself Red Thunder Cloud died in Massachusetts in January at the age of 76, he was eulogized as the last known speaker of a language called Catawba.

It may have been another sorry milestone in the decline of native North American dialect and culture - or not.

"Let me put it very diplomatically," said Barbara Heinemann, who is preparing a Catawba dictionary: "He did speak things that he learned from written accounts . . . from various sources, and that was the extent of his knowledge."

In fact, tribal historians agree, the Catawba language died way back in 1954 when a chief named Robert Lee Harris went to his grave. Thunder Cloud was only a belated reminder of a lost language.

Languages dying fast

Of the 6,000 languages now spoken in the world, up to half will die out during the next century, according to the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Only 21 of the 175 surviving native dialects in the United States are being learned by children.

"One does not need a crystal ball or even your pocket calculator to determine that if the youngest speaker of a language is 65, it won't be around much longer," said Michael Krauss, director of the native language center at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks.

Krauss said language has a scientific value, and not just to linguists. South American native dialects, for instance, can provide a wealth of information about medicinal plants.

Most such dialects are disappearing faster than anthropologists can transcribe or record them.

David Murray, a linguistic anthropologist, has recorded some of the last living speakers of an Athapaskan dialect called Han Kutchin in the Pacific Northwest.

"We should care as much about these languages as we do about an endangered species," Murray said. "Each one of these is a unique, never-to-be-repeated example of human evolution." Few Catawbas remain

The Catawba Indians alone spoke more than a dozen languages when they were encountered in the 1500s by a Spanish explorer. But, like other native societies, the tribe was hard-hit in the late 16th and 17th centuries by epidemics and by European expansion - especially after 1670, when a trade in Indian slaves began in what is now South Carolina.

The 50 Catawba who remained in South Carolina by the late 1800s gave up their property in exchange for land away from white settlements. Today, 2,500 people make their homes on the Catawba reservation in Rock Hill, S.C. Another 500 live in the Pueblo, Colo., area, and about 200 more live in Oklahoma.

Their language lives on in the names of the Peedee and Santee rivers and other Southern landmarks but no one speaks it fully and fluently.

"The battle of the Wild West was transferred to the classroom," Krauss said. "Teachers punished Native American children for speaking their languages, all in the name of bettering their conditions."an."

Heinemann and a team of linguists in South Carolina are compiling a Catawba dictionary. She said she is convinced it will be possible to re-create the language, but admits to "big, big gaps and holes because we are no longer able to talk to the people" who spoke it.

"All native languages have fully developed vocabularies," said Bruce Pearson, a linguistic anthropologist at the University of South Carolina. "They are as fully developed as English or any other language."

Red Thunder Cloud told friends he learned to speak Catawba as a boy in the 1920s at the knee of a grandfather named Strong Eagle, a story tribal historians dismiss. The historians, including Tom Blumer, an editor at the Library of Congress, think he picked up some vocabulary from a 1934 book on the Catawba dialect by an anthropologist named Frank Speck.

Born Carlos Westez in Newport, R.I., Red Thunder Cloud was part Puerto Rican and his relatives say they don't know if he had any native blood. But after attending powwows as a youth, he became fascinated by Indian culture.

He began to call himself Red Thunder Cloud, was married for a while to a Blackfoot woman and made his living teaching Indian dance.

"All I know is that he studied the language," said his niece, Nancy Williams. "I really don't know how he came to know it. He lived his life the way he lived his life, and to him he was a Catawba Indian."

Linguist Frank Siebert was working on the Catawba reservation in Rock Hill in 1941 when he heard about Red Thunder Cloud. When they met at a YMCA in New York City on May 10, 1941, Thunder Cloud stepped off the elevator wrapped in a blanket with a feather in his hair. He spoke some phrases in Catawba and described the way his ancestors had carpeted the paths of enemies with straw dipped in rattlesnake venom, a story widely known.

"He didn't have the words right, and I don't know where he got them from," remembers Siebert, who now is retired and lives in Maine. "He kept pumping me for information and I judged from his questions that he was trying to find out, if he went down there, if the Catawba would accept him."

Thunder Cloud eventually traveled to the reservation and was accepted by the tribe in 1942, but was subsequently asked to leave because of a personal dispute.

He returned to New England, where he met a Massachusetts Institute of Technology linguist, Hugh Matthews. Now retired in Montana, Matthews said he is convinced that Thunder Cloud could speak Catawba.

"I have a good argument based upon comparing his Catawba with that which appears in Frank Speck," Matthews said. "There are some differences between the two, and they're consistent differences, that tell me he didn't pick it up from Speck."