Listen to this episode and find more information about the topics therein at theallusionist.org/timucua

This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, remove a tissue from language’s pocket before putting it in the washing machine.

This episode is about a project to reconstruct the lost language of extinguished peoples, and the surprises you can find about the people who had written it down.

Content note: in the episode there is mention of slavery, genocide, and mistreatment of indigenous people of what is now called United States of America. Also, if you have trouble hearing anything in this episode - or any of the other ones - remember there are transcripts of every episode at theallusionist.org/transcripts. And if you hear snoring during this episode, it’s not me, it’s an interviewee’s dog, it is not me.

On with the show.

HZ: Timucua is somewhat under-reported in scholarship of indigenous languages and literacy.

AARON BROADWELL: Yeah, I think that's really true. I think it was virtually undescribed until pretty recently. So these documents have existed for a long time, but because there are no longer Timucua speakers, I think that many of the details of how the language worked were very obscure until pretty recently. There's still a lot of open questions. We still don't know what other group of languages it might be related to. It's what linguists call an isolate, just meaning we don't know, but an isolate is sort of like an orphan linguistically; we know that it does have some kind of parents or some family it belongs to, we're just unable to say what that might be at this point based on the evidence that we have. Because it's not related to any other language that we know, because there were not any native speakers, because there's not a dictionary from the colonial period: all of those things were big obstacles in making much sense of Timucua language structure or grammar until pretty recently.

My name's Aaron Broadwell. I'm a professor of linguistics and also a professor of anthropology at the University of Florida.

ALEJANDRA DUBCOVSKY: And I'm Alejandra Dubcovsky and I'm a professor of history at the University of California, Riverside.

HZ: What are you working on together?

ALEJANDRA DUBCOVSKY: What are we working on? We're working on translations of this amazing 17th century Timucua language materials, a language that was once spoken in what is now northern Florida.

HZ: The Timucua encompassed around 35 different tribes of Indigenous people living across a large area of what is now known as Florida and Georgia. Although these were separate tribes, they had some shared culture and politics, and they spoke dialects of the Timucua language.

AARON BROADWELL: And when the Europeans first came, there were a very large number of Timucua people. It's hard to estimate how many there might have been. Some estimates are in the range of a hundred thousand of them, but very unfortunately, these people were the victims of a lot of very bad things historically.

HZ: When the Spanish arrived in Florida, there were an estimated 100,000-200,000 Timucua people; just two centuries later, the Timucua population was down to one hundred.

AARON BROADWELL: They were allied with the Spanish, and the Spanish were losing control of Florida at that time, so there was a lot of warfare right on the border between the English and Spanish colonies. There was also disease and there was also slave-taking. So this population was greatly, greatly reduced. And when the Spanish left Florida and gave up St. Augustine to the English, they left to go to Havana, Cuba.

HZ: That was in 1763. And they took some Christian Timucua people with them.

AARON BROADWELL: So some of the Timucua ended up in Cuba. Others probably intermarried with other native groups of the southeast, although that's pretty unclear, but that's probably what happened. Other Timucua people were probably sold into slavery and maybe their descendants live among descendants of African-Americans in the southeast somewhere.

There are not a lot of people who identify as Timucua descendants, but that's probably because not a lot has been said about Timucua people until pretty recently. So we have had some contacts with a few people who have a family history that says that they are descended from these people. We think they will probably find more people over time. But that's kind of where they were. And so the dates that we know about them are from the first European contact in the 1560s or so up until about 1780s, which is about the time that the Spanish lose control. And we don't know when the last speakers lived. Probably maybe the early 19th century might have been the last time that someone spoke the language.

HZ: But the Timucua language was partially preserved in texts. Going back a few years down the Allusionist back catalogue, we talked in the Key episodes about some of the translation and reconstruction methods used with languages which have no remaining speakers and not much in the way of explanatory materials. Here’s how Aaron made progress in understanding Timucua.

AARON BROADWELL: Getting to read the language, the Timucua original was a really hard problem. Maybe I first glanced at these materials, you know, maybe more than 20, 25 years ago, and kind of decided the problem was too hard, that it was just impossible to read the original without a good grammar or dictionary of it. But linguistic software has gotten a lot better, and there's some free powerful linguistic software that a lot of linguists use that allowed me to put in a lot of the text and then use the computer to help me search for certain kinds of patterns and the data. And it was through that kind of computational method that I started to crack certain parts of the grammar of the language.

And once I kind of understood the grammar and I had hypotheses about the meanings of the words, I could start to put together what the original Timucua says. So there was kind of a long journey of grammatical discovery with me and Timucua slowly working out what it all means. And I think I understand the great majority of Timucua grammar at this point, but there are still, you know, difficult passages in there. There are some unexplained little thickets, basically, where the Spanish is not parallel and the Timucua is saying something complicated that I still cannot read. But I have hoped that at some point I'll be able to read all of it. Just at this point, I can read most of it, especially the clear parts, and I can sort of understand what they are saying.

HZ: Aaron and Alejandra have around 138,000 words written in Timucua language to work from, and most of them are in the form of missionary texts. A writing system for Timucua was developed using the Latin alphabet by the Franciscan missionary Francisco Pareja, who taught Timucua people to read and write, then published several books in Spanish and Timucua: catechisms and other religious tracts, and a Timucua grammar.

AARON BROADWELL: And these texts are the oldest text in a Native American language from the US. They're written many, many decades before anything earlier from the US. So the earliest are from 1612.

HZ: How come Florida is thus honoured?

AARON BROADWELL: Florida is one of the first places where the Spanish established a colony. So in 1565, they established the city of St. Augustine, Florida. And then in the decades that followed, these Franciscan missionaries came from Spain to try to convert the local people to Christianity.

ALEJANDRA DUBCOVSKY: And they're only going to towns in which received an explicit welcome. I think this really important. It's not like they're setting shop and people are coming to them. It's the other way around. And in fact, it takes an uprising in 1656 for that really for that change and for the missions to really much more follow a Spanish model. And these spaces are really indigenously driven and dominated.

HZ: There were surprisingly few Franciscan friars out there in Florida trying to convert the locals - only about seventy, at peak Franciscan friar.

ALEJANDRA DUBCOVSKY: And these Franciscans depend on native people to feed them, to bring them grain, to provide for them, to bring them water, all those things. And these are spaces in which the Spanish, they very much understand that they need to work with the language if they're gonna have any success, because Spanish is not the dominant language that's being spoken at moment of time.

AARON BROADWELL: And so part of their process of conversion involved establishing some schools where the kids learned to read and write their native language. They didn't have a written form of the language before the Spanish, but the Spanish missionaries worked out a way of writing it using the Roman alphabet. And they taught it to the kids in these schools, and then they translated Catholic religious material into the language and taught the kids to read the catechism, the confessional, that kind of thing.

ALEJANDRA DUBCOVSKY: These are also used for the Franciscans themselves, so they can learn to properly take and grant communion and all the sacraments, confession and the like, so that could be also done not just in Spanish or Latin, but in the Timucua language, so they could be, in theory, better ministers of the faith by communicating with indigenous people in their own language. So these are texts that are supposed to be indoctrinating for other people, but also tools for themselves to guide.

HZ: As we heard from Caetano Galindo earlier this year in the episode about Brazilian Portuguese, it was often easier for European Christian missionaries to learn the languages of the people they wanted to convert, rather than make them learn a whole new language then convert them to Christianity.

ALEJANDRA DUBCOVSKY: But you also see a lot native people it upon themselves to learn Spanish, so you see some Timucuas who are learning Spanish in the documents who were serving as translators and were playing a pivotal role in this process.

HZ: The Spanish colonizers and the Timucua, were they using each other's languages to an equal degree?

AARON BROADWELL: To some degree we don't know. But in most colonial situations that we're able to observe in the world, what we see is that most of the burden of bilingualism falls on the native people. So they are kind of obliged to learn the language of the colonial and not so much the other. We know that the Franciscans, to some degree, could speak Timucua and could communicate and maybe lead prayers and things like that.

ALEJANDRA DUBCOVSKY: And in this early 1600, we're in this moment where there's a big push to learn and work with indigenous languages. And Francisco de Pareja, who is the main Franciscan who works on Timucua - he's not the only, but he's one of the main - he spent a long time sort of praising himself about how important it is to work on this language, and how dadada. And he gets on his high force and then provides a bunch of examples and basically prove he doesn't have as much control of the language as he thinks he does.

AARON BROADWELL: I think maybe the civil authorities, like the soldiers, the state power in St. Augustine, probably could not read Timucua. So I think that the Spanish often relied on native interpreters to do their work. Probably, I would say, the people most likely to have been bilingual would've been native people and Spanish religious officials.

HZ: What do these texts look like? There are some where you've got both the languages side by side, right?

AARON BROADWELL: Right. One model is the two languages and two columns like Spanish on the left and Timucua on the right. Those are usually the simplest texts, where the Spanish is just maybe like one sentence. But then we also get these really complicated things where there'll be like three or four pages of Spanish and then four or five pages of Timucua after that. So one of the problems for the linguist is you have to figure out how to match those two things with each other, which is extremely tedious. And another thing that happens is the Spanish is only like four or five lines, and then there are four or five pages of Timucua after that. So the Spanish is just a little summary, it’ll say something like, you know, “God created the world in seven days, blah, blah, blah, et cetera.” And then it goes in Timucua, which goes on and on and on with lots of details about this. Those are some of the most interesting parts of the Timucua literature. They don't have any Spanish translation, so we're reading those for the first time, and we can read some parts of that and not others. But a cool example is that the text describes the creation of different things that live in the air and on the land and in the water. So there's a long list of things that live in the water. We know the words in there for whale and certain names of fish, and we can guess at what some of the others of them mean. But it's kind of a nice list of living things.

ALEJANDRA DUBCOVSKY: And the Spanish has none of that. So the Timucua gives you a sense of people, especially coastal Timucuas who are doing some farming, but the majority of their food is coming from waterways, it's coming from gathering. And so, just a really different way of understanding the world, right? The Spanish are saying, “The world was created in seven days, there we go.” And Timucua writers sit down and think about their own world and document it.

HZ: Usually, religious documents like these don’t give you that much insight into the people writing or translating them, because there’s not colloquial language or scenes from everyday life in there.

ALEJANDRA DUBCOVSKY: And they're so boring! And they're not joyful to read; they're repetitive, they're doctrinal, they're heavy. So they were not exciting texts necessarily work with, except perhaps like these momentary sections within the text that seemed to describe something particular about Timucua culture and life.

HZ: The Timucua text is not a direct translation of the Spanish - often far from it.

AARON BROADWELL: So one of the things that we started to notice really early on in looking at these documents is that the Timucua does not say the same thing as the Spanish. So the texts almost are never exactly the same. The Timucua almost always clarifies or explains in some way, adds something or omits something. And we started to get interested in the patterns of what's added or omitted from the Timucua, and so a very general pattern that we found is that pretty often the Spanish text says something fairly negative about traditional Timucua practice. For example, we've got a text that says something like, "Did you engage in the devilish practice of whistling at the wind in order to make the storm stop?" And then when we can properly read the Timucua, it just says something like, “Did you whistle at the wind to make the storm stop?” So the Timucua writer is doing this editing function of taking out certain parts of the Spanish. So early on we see the Timucua writer has their own voice. They take things out when they disagree with them, or they add things in as well when they think that the Timucua readers need more context or more explanation.

ALEJANDRA DUBCOVSKY: This is not just a moment of Spanish bad translation, right? There's active agencies in these discrepancies between the Spanish texts and the Timucua text, the removal of these condemning that's like violent and, and, definitely harmful language that's just absent in the Timucua text, in these key moments where the Spanish is very, very damning. And all of a sudden we're like, this is huge! The moments of mistranslation where you see not just like a misunderstanding, but a different text that emerges.

HZ: For instance, in the Timucua rendering of the story of Adam and Eve.

ALEJANDRA DUBCOVSKY: We all know the Spanish, blaming Eve for her choices, her ability to be so persuaded by the snake. And this is not the first time, but we've seen moments where women in the Timucua version get sort of more limelight than in the Spanish. The Spanish often has them as part of the sentences, but they're often not tied to any verbs, they're just there. But in the Timucua, they have action to them: they're doing things, they’re making choices. Often they speak in the Timucua and they don't speak in the Spanish.

And Timucua Eve is just - I mean, she's just a badass! She says she wants to eat this apple, whether the snake wants it or not. In the Timucua it's almost like you're hearing her thoughts, she's thinking, and she sort of says like, “If I take this to my husband and he eats this, he's gonna be the boss of me, and I don't want him to be the boss of me, I want to be the boss.” And so she eats the apple. And the word she uses for boss is ‘parucusi’, a Timucua word for war chief. So not just any chief, but a very particular military position of power, which is traditionally men - I have not found women in that role. So here in this incredible translation of it, the woman is just not only far more active, but has a lot more sort of choice and agency in her story.

And again, the negative is almost gone from that. It's like, you are supposed to understand that that's a bad thing, that she wants to be the boss of her husband. But in the Timucua it’s not necessarily - maybe the parucusi element of it is hinting at a transgression that she's making, but it doesn't have that component. And that is just extraordinary. That was one of my favourites.

HZ: The Timucua version is also more frank about sex than the Spanish. Where the Spanish text says, “Speaking with some woman or embracing her or taking her hand, did some alteration come to you?” the Timucua version does not go for a euphemism like “alteration”. It says, “Did you get excited and did the flesh of your body stand?” (Boners, it means boners.)

AARON BROADWELL: I was also going to mention that if you just read the Spanish text, it has a very European stereotypical view of gender and marriage. But we know from other kind of evidence that the Timucua had a third gender role and that marriage practice was substantially different than it was for the Spanish Catholics. And so when you look at the questions in Timucua that deal with marriage, one of the things you notice is there's just a general word that means spouse. There's not different words that meet husband and wife. and there are no genders in the pronouns either. The Spanish might say something like, “Did you forgive your wife when she walked with another man?”

HZ: “Walked.”

AARON BROADWELL: “Walked.” Right. And the Timucua will say something like, “Did you forgive your partner when they wanted to have sex with another person?” So no genders there in the Timucua. And so what we see is that if you're able to read the native text, what you get is a far less stereotypical gender situation. You get a Timucua text that's much more flexible in terms of the genders or identities of the people involved.

ALEJANDRA DUBCOVSKY: Absolutely. And it insists on it. So as the Spanish text very clearly sort of asks questions that are gendered, that very clearly says like “your wife, your husband, your man, your woman” - and there are words in Timucua for man and woman - the Timucua is not using not those words. We'll get caught in this ourselves: we'll be translating and all of a sudden we're like, “Did the text actually say ‘man’?” And we go back and go, the text never said ‘man’. And we have to go back and take out our own gendering as we translate.

HZ: Something else that caught Aaron and Alejandra’s eyes was a section of text where the Spanish question Timucua food practices.

ALEJANDRA DUBCOVSKY: This is this particular section which is asking about what the Spanish call superstitions or ceremonies or practices - and again, using clearly charged negative Spanish language. So these are not like, “What were the customs you did?” There's a sort of damning element, even to the structure, the way the Spanish are asking. And there are questions about food in there and the ways in which Timucua people consume food, preserve food, pray over food. “How do you fish? And do you pray in any particular ways after catching the first fish, or even after creating your first trap? Do you pray over that?” And the Spanish are saying all those things are bad and sinful, “You shouldn't pray over your fish, you shouldn't pray over your new catch; you should just pray to the virgin. You should pray to the correct Catholic order. You shouldn't be praying, that's heathen, that's pagan.”

You see questions; the Spanish are curious in efforts, often to clamp practices down, but they are asking about all that. And you have to understand that for a lot of the Franciscans, they are totally dependent on native people feeding them. So they are paying attention to this world, in part because they need to to survive in this world. They're not in a comfortable space where the majority of people look and talk like them. They’ve got to be on people's decent graces if they're gonna eat the next meal and survive the next day.

HZ: Yeah, it does seem like a bold move to neg the local culture if you don't wanna die.

ALEJANDRA DUBCOVSKY: They do that too. There are two surviving letters written by Timucua people. These letters, the 1651 letter and the 1688 letter, begin to give us some sense of this sort of the tremendous violence that's occurring in these places. And I think this is very important, because there's way in which mission history can very sanitised. And I'm rooted here in California, and there's a huge wave of rethinking the missions in California and thinking about incredible violence, and the word ‘genocide’ is much on the forefront of Californian missions study. That is not at all where Florida missions and historiography is at all. Even documenting that the fact that these spaces are not just learning environments, but fact very oppressive. The Franciscans are recording practices they want to clamp down on, and you see in other documents from the officials that are recording the sort of drastic population decline as a result of the disease, as result of abusive labour practices, as a result of people migrating out, because they don't want to be part of this.

AARON BROADWELL: You might also ask a question like who were the Timucua writers that we're talking about? Mostly we don't know their names because the Spanish never gave credit to native people for writing and translating things. But certain particular styles, word choices or spellings allow us to allow to identify different authors in the text. So you like author A, author, B author, C. Some of your listeners might be familiar with, for example, the Hebrew Bible: we know that there probably are different writers in there too, there’s the J author and the E author and so on. You can tell by different word choices they make in the Hebrew text. In the same way, we can identify different authors in the Timucua text.

HZ: They do have a small handful of names of Timucua writers - the people who signed those two letters that were written in 1651 and 1688.

ALEJANDRA DUBCOVSKY: Even their names themselves tell you this deeply colonial story, because they were all signed with a Spanish name, often with the honorific marking Don, so they'll be like Don Pedro, but then they'll say ‘olata’ [?] which is a Timucua marker for a chief or someone of ranking or authority. And they include their town name, often both the town name in Spanish - you know, San Pedro, San Pablo, whatever - and then the Timucua word next to it of that. So even in their signing in the 1688 letter - and if you think about it, 1688, we're talking a hundred plus years after colonization. So this is deep in the process of the colonising. We always say colonization is a process. It's not a one time event. Well, here we are, deep in that process - even in the names that writers assign themselves. You see this high effort of who they are as Timucua people writing in their own language and using all these honorific markings. That letter is amazing. As Aaron has alluded, they're very clear about who they respect and who they don't respect and that only comes out if you work on the Timucua language.

HZ: What ways were the Timucua people using writing as a sort of tool of resistance?

ALEJANDRA DUBCOVSKY: In one of the early conquistador stories, you’re thinking of first encounters, sort aliens coming meeting for the first time: native people do often things of like tricking the Spanish by putting up fake crosses and things that look like letters, to trick the Spanish. So even the earliest understanding of writing, as a tool or a technology that indigenous people can use themselves for their own purposes to undermine Spanish goals, is there from the get-go. And definitely by the early 1600s, when these become part of the way Franciscans are communicating, Timucua people really readily pick this up as a way for them, of course to learn the Catholic faith and communicate it, but also to interact with one another, exchange information across vast distances and the like.

But there's also all the literary resistance that we've been talking about, about expressing their own beliefs within these really religious texts, and instead of expressing condemnation to their own beliefs or downgrading them, preserving them, in fact sort of maintaining records of them and expressing them in ways that are beyond not being condemning, they're in fact preserving and enduring of the Timucua language and ideas and expressions. So I think that's a literary resistance that's there too.

AARON BROADWELL: Alejandra mentioned this 1656 rebellion, it's called the Timucua Rebellion. We know from the history that it was partially organized by chiefs sending written letters from one village to another. The letters have not survived, but we have historical accounts that mentioned these letters, Timucua language letters going back and forth between the chiefs to help organize the rebellion.

ALEJANDRA DUBCOVSKY: Also, using the written word to write petitions to the Crown, to write petitions to the governor: that's a very common practice throughout the Spanish Americas of petition-making. So the fact that Timucuas are engaged in this sort of intra-indigenous process of resistance gives us a sense that they're really plugged into how to not just understand the colonial world, but how to fight against it as well.

AARON BROADWELL: You can think of writing as a kind of technology that originally the colonials bring for their own purposes to kind of use to control native people. In that way, it's kind of like the horse or the gun. But these technologies very quickly get out of control, and native people appropriate them and use for their own purposes.

HZ: You heard from Aaron Broadwell and Alejandra Dubcovsky. You can find more of their work on Timucua at Hebuano.org, where you can learn Timucua grammar and vocabulary and look at some of the texts. Aaron’s book of Timucua grammar is due out in 2024, and Alejandra recently published the book Talking Back: Native Women and the Making of the Early South. I’ll link to all these things at theallusionist.org/timucua.

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Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…

nival, adjective: of or relating to regions of perpetual snow.

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This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman, on the unceded ancestral and traditional territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.

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