Finding Each Other: How Technology is Reconnecting the Mvskoke People
Julia Mainzinger is building an online curriculum for learning the Mvskoke language, expanding access for the next generation of speakers.
This post was written by Wikitongues intern Daniele Basalone.
When she was growing up Julia heard her mother use some Mvskoke words around the house, but like many other young Indigenous people, she used English in daily life. Julia is a member of the Muscogee Nation and software developer living in Orlando, Florida, home to one of the two major Mvskoke groups in the United States. Her work these days focuses on using technology to develop pedagogical tools for Mvskoke learners and instructors. Through these, she is trying to address the loss that her generation of Indigenous people have inherited from their parents, who inherited it from their parents before them; the loss of their language.
From the 10th century CE, a confederacy of Indigenous peoples known as the Mvskoke (or Muscogee) populated what is now the Southeastern United States. This political union was a complex network of tribal towns with limited autonomy, with the most prominent tribal towns controlling their own networks of annexed territory. Within this state many languages were spoken, mostly from the Muscogean family. Most prominent numerically and politically was Creek, also known as Mvskoke. The Mvskoke had an agricultural tradition based on corn production and built earthen structures known as “mounds,” a practice they shared with other neighboring members of the Mississipian culture. They had two distinct areas of population density and linguistic diversity across their state: one in present-day northern Alabama and the other in present-day southern Georgia.
This distinction became important after the arrival of Europeans. Initial westward expansion pushed Mvskoke peoples living on the coast into one of the two population centers. From there, further expansion and a series of destructive wars in the early nineteenth century known as The Seminole Wars physically split the Mvskoke state into two nations, who became known as the Upper Creek and the Lower Creek. These wars were waged by the American government, first because they were enraged by the Mvskoke sheltering escaped slaves, and later to remove the Mvskoke from their land in Florida. Both the Upper and Lower Creek suffered under the strict enforcement of the Indian Removal Act, which saw Mvskoke people, among other Indigenous groups, removed by force or threat from their already diminishing lands by the U.S. Army. They were relocated to Oklahoma, or they escaped deeper into the inhospitable swamps of Central Florida.
The United States began the final large-scale war against the Mvskoke in 1855, sending troops to ostensibly finish the ethnic cleansing started two hundred years previously. Two hundred Mvskoke remained in Florida by 1858. Afterward, the American government quickly turned its attention to dismantling tribal government structures and autonomy. The introduction of Florida and Oklahoma to the U.S. as states sped up the spread of English into these areas as the dominant language of commerce, government, and education. Indigenous residential schools, most brutally repressive, pursued a program of forced assimilation by taking young Mvskoke boys from their families to teach them English and vocations. These programs were unavoidable in every part of the country the growing United States reached. The ultimate aim of the programs was to make the Indigenous population into English-speaking Christians occupying the lowest social levels of American society. To this end, school staff prohibited the use of native languages, and the violence they used to do so left many survivors bearing permanent trauma associated with their mother tongues. As was happening across the United States to all other Indigenous languages, the weakening of traditional Mvskoke society and the severe fall in population led to a sharp decline in the number of mother tongue speakers.
Today there are about 4,500 speakers of Mvskoke, most of these in Oklahoma. A significant presence remains in Florida as well, where an estimated 200 speakers are keeping their language alive. Fortunately, Mvskoke is well documented, and it has a significant literary history as well. The same education programs that attempted to erase spoken Mvskoke ended up creating a large class of literate Mvskoke people by the 1870s. They modified the Latin alphabet to create a standardized Mvskoke alphabet, and they used this new alphabet to write monthly newspapers, letters, and newspaper articles. Many texts, even some more than one hundred years old, can be read using this alphabet which is still the standard.
This strong Mvskoke auto-ethnographic tradition continues today. Within the Muscogee Nation, the tribal government serving Mvskoke people, the Muscogee Language Program creates instructional material, develops language curricula, and delivers lessons to promote the use of Mvskoke. The community has also coalesced around many activists working on projects to preserve and promote the Indigenous languages of North America, like a Florida project in which Mvskoke speakers have been working to record interviews, or another creating an immersive language school for children on the Brighton Reservation. One such activist is Julia.
During the Covid-19 pandemic the College of the Mvskoke Nation, based in Oklahoma, moved their classes online, which gave Julia the opportunity to follow Mvskoke language courses remotely. She followed the beginner and intermediate courses and then found connections with Mvskoke speakers and elders to continue her language education.
While following these courses, however, Julia noticed some problems with the type and quality of Mvskoke pedagogical material. The resources are made primarily by linguists, and have a primary goal of documenting the language rather than making it accessible to learners without special linguistic education. These grammars and dictionaries used by Mvskoke people and linguists today are high quality, but they are not what students need. Moreover, even the teaching materials that have been developed do not go far enough. “Most of the language teaching that has been done over the past few decades is very rudimentary…it says ‘here are your numbers and colors,’ and that’s as far as it goes,” says Julia.
Having identified this problem, Julia and her colleagues set out to find a way to bring a potential learner of Mvskoke to fluency. The first key aspect to the project is fostering a reform in curriculum and educational standards, led by young speakers who have a passion for teaching the language in an academically rigorous way. The second part is developing resources that can be used in this education. Much of this latter work consists of digesting linguistic documentation and making it friendly to learners, but at other times it sees Julia and her colleagues meeting with native speakers of Mvskoke and talking to experts. Input from native speakers is essential in this effort, as it is the only way to reliably cross-check the meaning of words and sentences found in old sources. Throughout the entire process, Julia is concerned with maintaining data sovereignty for the Mvskoke people, which is made possible by careful collection from original sources.
The main expertise of Julia and her colleagues is developing and using technology. It was through her profession of software development that Julia received the first spark of inspiration for her current revitalization initiative. While attending a women-in-technology conference, she met other Indigenous technologists, including a group working to translate Amazon Alexa resources into Navajo. She remembers thinking, “oh, people do do this!” and she decided afterward to get more involved in the language work surrounding Mvskoke. It is no surprise then that learning enabled by technology has always been at the center of the education model that Julia envisages. This has taken many forms, such as setting up Meta (Facebook) portals for learners across the world to participate in Oklahoma-based Mvskoke immersion camps, and creating resources like an online dictionary of Mvskoke. Additionally, Julia is part of Natives in Tech, a group of Indigenous technologists that supports and creates free, open-source projects benefiting native communities.
Like her, many of Julia’s young Mvskoke colleagues and classmates found their way to the language during the pandemic as well. She says that among her peers, there are several who are now nearly fluent in Mvskoke. This is an important metric to Julia, who notes that part of her work is simply helping people understand that learning an under-resourced language to a high level is possible and rewarding. She imagines that by growing this current language-learning group, developing better curricula, and creating Mvskoke technology resources, the language can one day occupy a more central position in daily public life. She says about her community, “we can reach a point where it’s spoken, and people can be comfortable using it with each other, and we can preserve it as a part of our heritage.”
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