On the theme of: 

MASSACHUSETTS ON FILM

We Still Live Here: Âs Nutayuneân

2010, 60 minutes

For thousands of years, the Wampanoag people resided on the lands between Narragansett Bay and the outer reaches of Cape Cod. With the coming of the English, the Indigenous peoples of the coast were decimated by European diseases and for a half-century their domains were systematically encroached upon and appropriated. A last stand was attempted during the calamitous King Phillip’s War of 1675-76, which destroyed their tribal society. The survivors were either banished into Caribbean slavery or marginalized in ever smaller enclaves on the Cape and Martha’s Vineyard, where their Wôpanâak language was lost over the succeeding generations.

This documentary by Anne Makepeace depicts the efforts of Jessie Little Doe Baird, who in 1993 initiated the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project. Inspired by dreams of an ancestral prophecy, Baird would become a master's student in the MIT Linguistics Department and develop a program to re-introduce the language to the Mashpee and Aquinnah communities, using archaic texts and surviving Algonkian dialects as a guide. With commentators discussing how difficult it is to bring extinct languages back to daily use, Jessie Little Doe Baird's’ accomplishments make for an inspiring film about the restoration of cultural identity.

Please Note--This film is RATED PG, with images of historic oppression, cultural displacement and academic bias.