‘As Nutayunean’ means “we still live here,” powerful words from a people whom many Americans believed vanished long ago. Their ancestors ensured the survival of the first English settlers in America, and lived to regret it. Now they are bringing their language home again.
The story begins in 1994 when a Wampanoag social worker named Jessie Little-Doe began having recurring dreams; familiar looking people from another time speaking to her in a language she couldn’t understand. Later, she realized they were speaking Wampanoag, a language that had not been spoken for more than a century.
These events sent members of the Mashpee and Aquinna Wampanoag communities on an odyssey that would uncover hundreds of documents written in their language and result in something that had never been done before- bringing a language with no Native speakers alive again in a Native American Community.
