For his latest book, “On the National Language: The Poetry of America’s Endangered Tongues,” photographer B.A. Van Sise traversed the United States to document speakers of endangered languages. Amongst those he encountered were the Aramaic-speaking pastor of an Assyrian Church in Tarzana, a professor in Tacoma helping to revitalize Lushootseed and a New Yorker who sings in Ladino and many more.
“I wanted to make sure that there was a really broad definition of what language in America looks like, America is a plural place,” says New York-based Van Sise in a Zoom interview. “It is a diverse place.”
“If I had done the project in Asia, in Europe, in Africa, it would have been the same project, but the languages would have been different,” he adds. “If you’re talking America, you’re talking primarily about Native languages because they’ve been decimated by colonialism, by genocide, by disease, by the boarding schools more than anything else. But, I really wanted to include a broad definition of it.”
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Van Sise studied modern languages and fine art at Fordham and the two subjects have long intertwined in his work. His previous projects include “Children of Grass,” a series of portraits of American poets that includes pieces now housed in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. He’s an award-winning poet as well and has led workshops on the subject with New York Public Library. “On the National Language” also incorporates poetry with photography.
While working on another project in Oklahoma, he heard a radio interview with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, where the actor spoke of his Samoan heritage. That triggered an idea. “I did my first book about poets in America and it might be interesting to go explore language in America as well,” says Van Sise.
He began by meeting with language revitalizers in Oklahoma. “Over the course of three years, I met, in wildly, crazily remote locations, about 100 different endangered language revitalizers and learners and speakers,” says Van Sise. “And it was totally a joy.”
That many of the people he encountered live in remote areas isn’t a coincidence. Van Sise recalls a conversation he had while spending a week hanging out on the farm of an Amish man, a speaker of Pennsylvania Dutch, who also appears in the book. “He told me that he and everyone in his community knew in their hearts that all of their kids had hidden, secret cell phones,” Van Sise recalls. “He wasn’t particularly concerned that the kids were running around and doing nefarious things, getting into drug deals or looking at porn or anything like that. His big concern was that while they were on their cell phones, they were probably speaking English.”
The concern points to one of the reasons that languages fall out of use. “The outside world is the absolute biggest challenge for maintaining minority languages,” says Van Sise.
While some of the languages featured in the book are used by very few people, others are seeing a resurgence, thanks to revitalization efforts. “The biggest thing I learned is what makes a language revitalization program successful,” says Van Sise of the project. “It’s hard work. It’s incredibly hard work. A lot of people are really and truly bringing their languages back from the brink of silence.”
In some cases, languages have been down to their last few speakers prior to revitalization efforts. In other instances, there were no living speakers left and linguists had to work with archival materials to essentially reconstruct languages. Following that work, language revitalizers are tasked with teaching younger generations.
Van Sise points to California as a place where language revitalization efforts are flourishing. “What you see is that they’re doing wonderful things in their communities and creating immersion schools for very small children or pre-school programs for kids, getting people who are small and young and impressionable and saying you don’t have a choice, we’re going to bring you back to your culture,” he says. “There’s a really incredibly powerful thing about that.”
Fittingly, Van Sise’s “On the National Language” museum exhibit opened at Los Angeles’ Skirball Center shortly after the late September book release and will run through March 2 of next year.
In a time marked by divisiveness, “On the National Language” celebrates our differences while finding the common denominators between so many different languages. “I expected flack, just because we’re in this heated time where everyone is mad about everything all the time,” Van Sise says. Yet, he says, the response has been “uniformly wonderful.”
In “On the National Language,” Van Sise also documents language’s importance that goes beyond usefulness in day-to-day activities or business. “You do it because you love it. You do it because you care about it,” he says. “I think that I just I enjoy it as a great reason to do something. I care about it is a great reason to do something.”