LearnHidatsa.com

Oct 22, 2008 - 04:05:16 CDT

By LAUREN DONOVAN
Bismarck Tribune

TWIN BUTTES - In only one school in America could children honor their teacher by speaking the lost words of the Mandan.

Edwin Benson's face was full of happiness Tuesday as every elementary child came to the microphone to say one word, or a phrase in a language only he knows.

Benson is the last one to speak the Mandan language fluently, though he has labored for years to teach the children simple words and phrases and tell them the stories he has known all his life.

He is sought out by linguists from around the world and is, in many ways, a national treasure. But his most important work has been on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation at the Twin Buttes school, where he has taught words and stories for 16 years.

The children, some parents and community members celebrated Benson's 77th birthday and his supposed "retirement" from the school in a ceremony of gifts and food.

To him, retirement means cutting back from full time to a few hours a day.

Kids love him and they all call him "Grandpa Benson."

"He's a pretty cool guy," said Roy Morsette, 5. "He plays bingo with us."

It's a game Benson devised for showing the same word in English and Mandan.

Tiffany Weigum, the kindergarten teacher, said the children love to see him in their classroom.

"They really enjoy it when he comes in," she said.

Cory Spotted Bear is a language apprentice and is working for the Twin Buttes community council on a Mandan language initiative.

He works with Benson to preserve the language, getting as much taped, digitized and memorized as he can, adding to similar efforts in the past.

"Language, identity and land - to me they're all the same," Spotted Bear said.

"It's like the reservation - it's not what we've been given, but what hasn't yet been taken away. It's the same with language," he said.

Benson finished his hearty lunch and looked around the community center.

He said most of the people there could, at best, speak a word, or two, of Mandan.

No one could speak with him in the first language he ever learned.

Any fluent speakers he knew have since died and they were few because so many more died in early 1800s smallpox epidemics when the Mandan still lived as free people along the Knife and Missouri rivers.

"The language really got lost when we couldn't speak it at school, until we got on the playground and we could use it on the sneak," he said.

Now, rather than hide it on the playground, children learn it in school, from Benson.

But they know a few words, or a phrase or two and some can imitate the breathy, nasal sounds of the language better than others.

After Benson - and may he live a long, long time - no one will speak it naturally in the words and cadence that came from the throats and minds of men in a distant past.

Benson knows the old history of the Mandan and he lived through his own history, when the Missouri River was flooded and the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara were forced off the river up onto far less hospitable land on the reservation.

"When I was young, sadness never bothered me so much, until the dam came. We were forced out and I lost my language. I can't use it. That's my sadness in my life and I'll never get over that loss," he said.

(Reach reporter Lauren Donovan at 888-303-5511 or lauren@;westriv.com.)