ARD SU / NEXTGENRADIO

Join Arielle Farve Deer for a conversation with Joshua Hinson, a Chickasaw linguist who was inspired to learn Chikashshnompa’ after becoming a father. Now, he’s the Chickasaw Nation’s language preservation executive officer, and he’s made it his mission to rebuild a community of Chikashshnompa’ speakers.

Chickasaw father revitalizes Chikashanompa’ language

by | Nov 18, 2022

Listen To The Story

by Arielle Farve Deer | Next Generation Radio, Native American Journalists Association | November 2022

Click here for audio transcript

(Speaker introduces himself in Chikashshanompa’)

My name is Joshua Hinson. In Chickasaw, they call me Lakosh, which means gourd. You don’t get to pick your name. I want it to be something cool, like top killer, kills again, returned and killed, but instead, I’m gourd. It’s okay. You don’t get to pick anyway.

So my last granny that could talk died in 1938. She was the third or fourth successive generation to attend boarding school. They, you know, beat the language out of her at school, so I had none of that. I don’t think that experience is really much different from other, you know, disconnected Outlander folks.

When my first son was born, I don’t know, there’s just something about having a kid. You know, I mean, like, it’s one thing to be enrolled or, like, have your buffalo card that says how much you are or how much you’re not Indian. It just didn’t, I don’t know, It just didn’t mean anything to me, but I thought, I want, I want like a real connected experience for him. I want him to have a lived experience, not as an Outlander, but as like someone who’s born and raised with his people. So, I started learning that language, moved us back here, hanging out with old folks for 20-something years. 

And then I’m out, I met native speakers, for the first time. I just had this instinct, like, you know, they have everything that I want. Like, if I hook on to this language and try to, you know, capture it for myself, then maybe I could, you know, figure out how to be a good Chickasaw person. 

So you know, it’s just a whole shift in worldview. And the better you get at the language, the more you think the way they do.

You think about your relationship, to not only like other people, like to our land, and to animals, and not in a stereotypical silly, Indian way, but like real deal, like ancestral thought. 

So anyway, that started changing. And that identity sort of coinciding with his birth, wanting to give him more than than what I had been given? I don’t know, I think it just pushed me. You know what I mean? I connected him in every way that I could with the community by bringing him back home, and his younger brother was born here. I mean, the first words he heard was Chickasaw, when he came into the world.

He has the life I wanted for all my boys. You know, he has opportunities I want it for all my boys. Like he grew up here. He speaks the language quite fluently for a 17-year-old kid. He wants to work in the language. 

All of us, including the brand newest of learners know that it’s our obligation to get this stuff because we’re going to be the ones that have it in 20 years when all the speakers are gone. And increasingly, they’re citizens that are wholly disconnected from who they are as a people. And if we don’t teach them how to be. I mean, they’re, they’re lost. 

And we know what happens when people assimilate and take on the values of the dominant culture. We rot from the inside. And that’s just not something I’m interested in doing.

We have less than 35 native speakers.  But when you think about, like the future of the language, you know, we have to grow this small sort of core of people here. We have to maintain the language and those teachings and those obligations that I’ve been talking about, because you know, 20, 30, 40, 50, 100 years like, our people are going to need that, if we’re going to stay together, if we’re still going to be Chickasaws.

And that doesn’t mean you have to be fluent. But just the pride and the tapping to the ancestral power of saying, I’m a Chickasaw person, that’s a big deal. 

When you pick it up, and you realize like, what that means and your obligations, you will strengthen your community, 

You know, there are prophecies about the language. They had a prophecy that said when the last speaker Chickasaw dies, the world will end. But I’m not interested in seeing that day. Let’s just keep this thing going. Let’s push off the end of days for a while. And in so doing, I think will, will be a stronger, better community.

 

Lokosh smiles in his office.

Lokosh – also known as Joshua D. Hinson – smiles behind duck decoys decorating his office at the Chickasaw Nation Department of Language, Ada, Okla., Monday, Nov. 14, 2022. Lokosh, the language preservation executive officer for the Chickasaw Nation, is also an avid outdoorsman and an award-winning artist who crafts custom duck decoys using traditional Chickasaw designs and colors.

CORINNE CHIN / NEXTGENRADIO

If you ask Chickasaw linguist Joshua Hinson what his favorite Chickasaw word is, he’ll grin and open his dictionary. His finger will slide past the entry where his Chickasaw name, Lokosh, is listed and point to the word just below. 

“So when you say amosholi, that means, like, I’ve eaten to excess,” Lokosh says. “I’ve made a pig of myself, which is really awesome. Amosholi! I mean, it’s hard to say I have a favorite word, but that’s a good one.”

Lokosh holds his copy of A Concise Chickasaw Dictionary.
Lokosh points at a page in A Concise Chickasaw Dictionary.

Lokosh authored this edition of A Concise Chickasaw Dictionary, which is based on the first published Chickasaw dictionary by Vinne May (James) Humes recorded in the 1970s.

CORINNE CHIN / NEXTGENRADIO

Lokosh grew up in Texas, knowing only a few words in the language his ancestors had spoken for hundreds of years, Chikashshanompa’. Like most Indigenous citizens, federal boarding school policy disrupted his family’s connection to their language. The schools were a federally funded effort to force Native Americans to assimilate into white society.

Lokosh’s great-grandmother, Charlie Perkins Cox, was the third generation who attended such a school. The institution beat Chikashshanompa’ out of her. She was forced to use English, and that loomed over her when she became a mother. So, she shared little of the Chickasaw language with her children.

A photo from the 1930s of a group of people at a family reunion.

Lokosh’s grandmother Charlie Perkins Cox (front row, left) poses at her husband’s family reunion in the 1930s. She was a member of the third successive generation in her family to attend boarding school.

COURTESY / JOSHUA HINSON

The intergenerational wounds continue to afflict successive generations. Today, less than 35 Chikashshanompa’ fluent speakers remain. 

 “It takes one generation for this thing to break,” Lokosh says. “In some cases, even full-blooded families haven’t had speakers in two or three generations.”

 Lokosh didn’t experience a strong childhood connection to Chikashshanompa’ until Christmas in 1989, when he was 11 years old and unwrapped a Chickasaw dictionary from his grandmother. 

 “The dictionary turned out to be the right move,” Lokosh says. “I was just really taken by it. And you know, excited and ignorant in a way any kid would be about language.”

Lokosh holds a Chickasaw dictionary inscribed with a note from his grandmother.

Lokosh reads the note his grandmother wrote in the Chickasaw dictionary she gifted him in 1989, when he was 11 years old. After his son was born, Lokosh was inspired to become the first fluent Chikashshanompa’ speaker in his family since the 1940s.

CORINNE CHIN / NEXTGENRADIO

Lokosh dabbled in trying to put sentences together from then on. His eagerness to reclaim his heritage language moved past a child’s curiosity when he became a father. As he held his newborn son, Lokosh felt the gravity of being another broken link in his ancestral language’s chain.

 “You get the sense of obligation when you have children,” Lokosh says. “I mean, there’s a heaviness to it. It’s my job, you know, to do right by these kids and teach them how to be in the world.”

 Wanting to share more than just a citizenship card with his son, Lokosh moved his family to Chickasaw territory, where he got serious about learning Chickasaw culture.

 “I met Native speakers for the first time,” Lokosh says. “I just had this instinct, like, they have everything that I want. If I hook on to this language and try to capture it for myself, then maybe I could figure out how to be a good Chickasaw person.”

 Learning the language affirmed Lokosh’s connection to his people. Since then, he’s dedicated his life to helping others tap into the language and worldviews stolen from his people.

A sign outside an office door says “Lokosh, Joshua D. Hinson, PhD.”

A sign outside Lokosh’s office bears his name in Chikashshanompa’. Lokosh has worked in language preservation since 2007.

CORINNE CHIN / NEXTGENRADIO

After over a decade with the Chickasaw Nation’s Language Preservation department, Lokosh has become accustomed to the flood of requests his office receives during Native American Heritage Month. He’s selective about his department’s participation. 

Lokosh and his team don’t do “show and tell.” 

 “Just speaking professionally from a language standpoint, you go 11 months out of the year, and we’re just left alone to happily do whatever we want, doing the work that we ought to be doing for one another,” Lokosh says. “And then come November, it’s like, ‘Oh, we really want some Indians to come perform for us.'”

 Lokosh believes that if Native American Heritage Month is to have value, the annual observance must ignite American Indian citizens’ hunger to know their culture. He also hopes November will highlight contemporary Indigenous identities within people’s local communities – a mission Lokosh’s own children are helping realize. His youngest son’s dream is to join Lokosh’s effort and continue rebuilding the Chikashshanompa’ speaking community. 

“We have to maintain the language and those teachings and those obligations that I’ve been talking about,” Lokosh says. “Because in 20, 30, 40, 50, 100 years, our people are going to need that, if we’re still going to be Chickasaws.”

Lokosh stands in a bookstore flipping through a book.

Lokosh stands in the Chickasaw Nation Department of Language bookstore with his book “Chikasha.” Lokosh has authored and illustrated multiple books about Chickasaw culture, language and history.

CORINNE CHINE / NEXTGENRADIO

anumpa

  • language  (n)
  • message  (n)
  • speech  (n)
  • vocabulary  (n)
  • word  (n)

To learn more words in the Chickasaw language, visit the nation’s online dictionary here.