Elizabeth Penney Wilson sings in nimipuutímt

Article by Nicole Martin, PhD

"We were always more close to my mother, talking to her and she talking to us," Elizabeth Penney Wilson said in a 1970 interview. "'Ma ma mama,' we'd say in Indian, so we naturally just talked Indian."

nimipuutímt — the Nez Perce language — is a bridge to Nez Perce culture, and Elizabeth spent most of her life keeping that bridge standing.

Elizabeth soon after her return from the Carlisle Indian Boarding School, about 1910. NPS Collections, NEPE-HI-2931.

Two languages, taken and kept

She was born on 21 January 1882 near Kooskia, Idaho, on the middle fork of the Clearwater, to a Nez Perce mother, tukpé-me, and a white father, Benjamin Penney. She lived on the Nez Perce Reservation nearly all her life — except for the years 1902 to 1909, which she spent at the Carlisle Indian Boarding School, two thousand miles away in Pennsylvania.

She was forbidden to speak her own language there. She mastered English instead, and became an accomplished pianist.

What she carried afterwards was a double fluency that could cut both ways. Some of her peers did not see her as fully Nez Perce. She became, all the same, one of the community's foremost experts on its own culture — folklore, music, custom, the tanning of hides, the processing of camas root — learned from her mother and from other elders, and given on to her children, her community and eventually to strangers.

Why she agreed to be recorded

By the 1960s she was worried about the young people who could not speak nimipuutímt, and about what that would mean for the homeland. So between 1960 and 1972 she took part in a language study with Haruo Aoki, a linguist at UC Berkeley, and through that work was interviewed several times by Loran Olsen, an ethnomusicologist.

Those recordings are held today by
Nez Perce National Historical Park.

The hymn

In one of them Olsen asks what a particular hymn says. Elizabeth does not translate it. She sings it — in nimipuutímt, to the tune of Auld Lang Syne — so that he can hear what the words sound like.

She was ninety. The voice wavers and she knows every word. At the end of the first verse she asks:

"Now, that's the first verse, and another verse is — you want me to sing
that?"

and, without waiting for an answer, sings the second.

Refusing to translate is the point. Hearing it untranslated leaves the space to notice what an English-dominated country has already lost.

Elizabeth Penney Wilson, interviewed by Loran Olsen, 23 September 1971. Nez Perce Music Archive, National Park Service, Nez Perce National Historical Park, Lapwai, Idaho.

Sources

Written from Nicole Martin's article for the National Park Service, a work of the United States government in the public domain.