Verbs and Community: Topics in Tutelo Revitalization

Abstract

Tutelo is the commonly known name of the ancestral language belonging to the Yesáh people, comprising seven contemporary Southeastern Siouan tribal communities located across the eastern United States. The antecedents of these communities were confederated in southern Virginia in the early 18th century; however, they underwent several migrations that caused their geographic separation. Some of the Yesáh were later adopted into the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee located in Ontario, where the largest body of Tutelo documentation was gathered between 1877 and 1883. By that time, the language was limited to very few fluent speakers. The contemporary corpus of the language (pre-revitalization) is also limited: namely, a small number of lexical data (less than 800 words) and phrases compiled by explorers and researchers between 1671 and 1981. This study focuses in part on phenomena that occur in the verbal data of the pre-revitalization Tutelo corpus. The first dissertation chapter introduces the Yesáh community, the historical use and attrition of the Tutelo language within its tribes, and the preservation and revitalization efforts of the last 30 years. Tutelo revitalization has emphasized the creation of new nouns for which there had been no attested data, whereas less attention has been given to the complexities of Tutelo verbal phonology and morphology, the subjects of the second, third, and fourth chapters of this study. The second chapter introduces basic facets of Tutelo verbs, including the split intransitive system and the affixes of person, number, tense, aspect, and mood that attach to verb stems. It goes on to distinguish between verbs that end in consonants and those that end in vowels. Of the latter, it identifies non-abluating verbs as those with stem-final vowels that remain unchanged in every suffixal and other post-verb environment. The third and fourth chapters explore a group of Tutelo verbs that undergo a final vowel change in a process called ablaut. The final vowels in these ablauting verbs change depending on the suffixal and environmental triggers that follow them. The patterns of vowel alternations in these verbs appear to be both morphologically and phonologically conditioned. They are also highly variable, with some suffixes and environments singularly triggering one, two, or even three different final-vowel possibilities. Chapter 3 analyzes all the suffixes and environments that trigger one final vowel variant exclusively. Chapter 4 continues the analysis of chapter 3, focusing on those suffixes and environments that trigger two or more final-vowel variants in ablauting verbs. The fifth chapter explores how Tutelo verbs and other constituents in the language have been applied in the domain of land acknowledgments. An acknowledgment written by the author in 2021 is utilized to analyze and correct previous understanding of the language’s grammar before offering an updated version of the original. The chapter then goes on to illustrate a different type of land acknowledgment written by the author in Tutelo in 2024, one with stronger emphasis on the relationality of land and people than the 2021 text. The final chapter presents concluding thoughts about the material covered in the first five chapters, as well as the approach taken in the presentation of data and its ramifications for the Tutelo language community.