Trip of the Tongue Read Online Free Page A

dot was that said “You are here.”
    I wasn’t wrong. To call the time I’ve spent with Native languages eye-opening would be a gross understatement. But they provided me with a crucial framework for understanding the mechanics and ramifications of language loss. And, even more critical, they awakened in me an unexpected zeal. The languages that I once approached so cautiously—so reluctantly—are now the languages I would defend most ardently.
    I came to Montana from South Dakota, driving west along Interstate 90 through the Badlands and into northeast Wyoming. In a city called Buffalo the highway jogs north some 120 miles before heading west again at Hardin toward Bozeman Pass. Along this stretch you’ll find two great landmarks of the American West: the inn in Sheridan, Wyoming, where Buffalo Bill Cody auditioned for his Wild West Show, and the Little Bighorn Battlefield, where George Armstrong Custer had his last stand. You’ll also find my eventual destination, the great, grassy expanse of Crow Nation.
    The Crow Indian Reservation is the largest reservation in Montana and the sixth-largest reservation in the United States, comprising some 2.3 million acres. It is home to more than 8,000 Crow—about 70 percent of the tribe’s total enrollment—the majority of whom work for the tribe or for federal programs. The bulk of the tribe’s businesses and administrative offices are located in Crow Agency, an unassuming town just north of the Little Bighorn Battlefield on I-90. I stayed in Billings, some sixty miles to the west, hoping my research might benefit from the city’s relatively more expansive tourist infrastructure. But as I picked through the conspicuously flimsy collection of maps and brochures in my hotel’s lobby, I realized I wasn’t sure what I was going to find here—if, indeed, I was going to find anything.
    When I was a kid, I’d thought Montana impossibly uninteresting. Every few summers we would drive out to visit my father’s family, and Montana felt like an endless in-between. It was past Mount Rushmore but still days from the Pacific Ocean, north of Yellowstone but south of my grandmother’s house. There were so few other cars to spot that my license plate tally invariably leveled off, and despite being promised otherwise, I never saw a single grizzly bear. It was the kind of state that made me want to catch up on my reading—or my sleep. The only thing I remember clearly from those trips is how the roads seemed to have an improbably gradual slope, as if I were seeing the Earth itself curving away into space.
    By the time I drove onto the reservation for the first time I was rethinking things. I decided instead that the landscape in Montana is like a Rorschach inkblot. Before long you start to see in the grass and trees and ground all the things that happen to be swirling in your subconscious. And that day I was clearly fixating on my own inadequacies.
    The view from the highway through the reservation is the same as it is anywhere in eastern Montana, a panorama of compact, grassy hills and wide, grassy plains. But tucked out of sight are the valleys fed by the glittering, meandering tributaries of the Bighorn and Little Bighorn rivers. To the south the hills give way to the Bighorn, Pryor, and Wolf mountains and the part of the reservation that is open only to members of the tribe. As a child I’d thought there was nothing to see in Montana, but as an adult I began to wonder if maybe I just didn’t know what I was looking for. I was perpetually aware of some great presence looming in the distance; I worried I would never get close enough to know its shape.
    I didn’t pick the Crow language out of a hat. I picked it because Crow is one of the more vital Native languages in the country, and I wanted to visit a Native community that still spoke its traditional language on a regular basis. But I was also interested in