Anne Makepeace, director of the film We Still Live Here: Âs Nutayuneân, recently joined the Mount Saint Mary College community via Zoom for a question and answer session about the film.
We Still Leave Here tells the story of a cultural revival by the Wampanoag of Southeastern Massachusetts, whose ancestors ensured the survival of the Pilgrims in New England. In 1994 Jessie Little Doe, a Wampanoag social worker, began having recurring dreams: familiar-looking people from another time addressing her in a language she had never heard. She realized they were speaking Wampanoag, a language no one had used for more than a century.
These events sent her and members of the Aquinnah and Mashpee Wampanaog communities on an odyssey that would uncover hundreds of documents written in their language and result in something that had never been done before – bringing a language back to life in a Native American community after many generations with no native speakers.
The event was sponsored by the Mount's division of Social Sciences.