“Even when I introduce myself at campus events, I will do the introduction in Seneca and I kind of explain what it means and try to put it into context in whatever given situation it is."
That’s Dr. Lori Quigley, Interim President at Medaille College and Chair of the Seneca Gaming Corporation. One of the first languages of the Americas, Quigley has been a part of the Seneca Nation’s effort to keep their native tongue from going extinct.
“If we don’t really emphasize the teaching of the language, we will unfortunately lose that language", said Quigley.
According to the Endangered Languages Project there are less than 50 Fluent speakers of the Seneca Language but that’s starting to change.
“There is a resurgence in our young ones learning the language. But we’ve had some really big people die during this COVID time, there’s not many fluent speakers left. It takes all of us to collectively work together."
That’s Joyce Jamison, known to friends and family as Beanie, she owns and operates Beanie’s Cafe at the Seneca Hawk Travel Center in Irving, NY. Jamison isn’t fluent in Seneca but does know some words.
“Part of the loss of the language for us in our area was born from the Thomas Indian School. A lot of our parents weren’t taught the language by their fluent speaking parents because of the Thomas Indian School. Our parents were punished and abused for speaking their language in the school and so consequently their solution was to not teach us," said Jamison.
For those who survived the boarding schools, the trauma stayed with them.
“The saddest thing for my mom is that her life began in an institution and ended in an institution. And when you have dementia, you lose that sense of reality with time and place. So, with my mom I realized that when I would visit her through the glass windowpanes of the door because you couldn’t go into the nursing homes, she began telling me stories," said Quigley.
Taken from her family at the age of five, Quigley’s mother stayed at the boarding school until she was 15 then was sent to work in a wage home in Fredonia.
She told me one story she goes “you’re not going to believe this Lori but those guys in the white coats they came and got me last night and they took me outside and they threw me against the brick wall of the building” and I’m thinking oh my god where did we put her, what kind of place is this," said Quigley.
The Thomas Indian Boarding School was located in Gowanda and was just one of several hundred boarding schools overseen by the federal government across the United States to assimilate Native children into white society. Children were forbidden to speak their native language and faced punishment and abuse if they did. New York State eventually took over the school, but the school still received funds from the United States government to operate until its closure in the 1950s.
“Taking our kids, forcing them from our homes, many of them were playing in their yards and were rounded up and taken away. That’s kidnapping now. They rounded up our children from all territories and moved them away and put them in these boarding schools and some never came home," said Jamison.
The Seneca Nation has made continuous efforts to keep a language that was forbidden to be spoken at boarding school like Thomas Indian school alive for future generations of Onödowa'ga:'
“We have tribal language programs taught on our territory, but we also have Seneca language in the schools, such as Salamanca, Lakeshore, Gowanda, Silver Creek. We’re trying to work with State Education to establish an indigenous language certification area, I mean Spanish teachers can get certified, French teachers can get certified why can't Seneca language teachers get certified? And that’s what we’re working on," said Quigley.
"It’s needed because it puts our indigenous language teachers on par with other language teachers. And why do we have to call it a foreign language? Those were the first languages spoken on this land. We’re sitting on Seneca territory," she added.
Secretary Deb Haaland, the first person of Native descent to hold the position in the Department of the Interior, the branch that was responsible for the creation and implementation of the boarding schools formally acknowledged the United States role in the government’s policy of forced assimilation of thousands of indigenous children which led to the breakdown of Native traditions, family, culture, and the language.
The Seneca Nation is one of the six nations of the Haudenosaunee, the original inhabitants of New York State and Southern Ontario. The Mohawk, Oneida, Cayuga, Tuscarora, and Onondaga are the other five nations that make up the Haudenosaunee.