#cayuse

U.S. Army OH-6A Cayuse circa 1966

Apologies for the radio silence; I've been at the Oregon Outdoor Recreation Summit since Wednesday. It's been an incredible experience once again, with some superb programming, cool exhibitors, and getting to rub elbows with all sorts of amazing people in a wide variety of roles in the outdoor recreation arena (we miss our federal partners this year!) They've also fed us exceptionally well--that was worth the price of admission alone.

One of yesterday's highlights (among many) was an incredible talk by Charles Sams--yes, the director of the US National Parks System in the last administration. He's also from the Umatilla Reservation, which is just up the mountain pass from where we are in Pendleton. After his career in the Navy as an intelligence specialist, he put a lot of time into both indigenous and conservation efforts in the Pacific Northwest. And that's before he became the NPS director in 2021.

First of all, he's a really engaging speaker, weaving in personal stories with current events. He also, out of everyone in the room, almost certainly has the best firsthand understanding of the intricacies of the federal government, to include the military and the Department of the Interior. A lot of discussions during this summit, both formal and informal, concerned the many negative ways the current administration has affected public and private sectors in the outdoor recreation industry and beyond, and Sams didn't shy away from acknowledging that (though he was characteristically diplomatic.)

I appreciated how he wove in his experience as a Cayuse and Walla Walla man growing up within the Umatilla Reservation community. He explained the importance his community places on maintaining longtime relationships with the land and its denizens through responsible stewardship and how that informed his professional decisions over the years.

But what I will take with me most is his hope and optimism that things can turn around. There are so many people who are working to protect our public lands, sensitive species, and public access. During questions I asked him the same thing we were all asked in a previous session--what place brings him joy, especially when things get difficult. He told us about his connection to particular areas of the reservation and his roots there, and how that restores him just by being there.

Fossils of the massive feline were found in the 1950s on ancestral Weyíiletpuu (the name for Cayuse people in the Nez Perce language they later adopted) lands in today’s eastern Oregon, where the cat shared the earth with giant camels and giant sloths five to nine million years ago. Scientists only recently identified the fossils as a new species.

The full name of the new cat is Machairodus lahayishupup.

Cash Cash, who taught linguistics for 10 years at the University of Arizona, took on the task of finding a Cayuse name for the cat, searching through documents of the original language, looking for “any correlation to cat or cat species.”

He was able to compare Cayuse words from the earliest Smithsonian records in 1829 with later documents from 1888 containing similarities that allowed him to reconstruct a name.

The genus Machairodus comes from the Greek and Latin words for “dagger tooth.” The Cayuse words Lahayis Hupup (pronounced Leh-HIGH-ees-hoop-oop), translate to “ancient wild cat” or “old wild cat.” Taken together the full species name roughly translates to “ancient wild cat with dagger teeth.”

A ceremonial naming, a common tribal celebration in which a name in the Native/Indigenous language is given to an eligible tribal member, will be scheduled when COVID-19 protocols are eased for the community.

...

Since the 18th century, the norm has been to name new species using Greek or Latin, “but this cat didn’t live in Italy or Greece, and we wanted to give it a name in a language indigenous to the landscape in which it did live,” Orcutt said.

Working with Indigenous institutions like the Tamastslikt Cultural Institute, he said, is a way for paleontologists “to recognize the importance of that context and of including Indigenous voices in our field.”

“It means a lot to me to be able to collaborate with the tribes on whose traditional lands I do my field work and to be able to give this amazing animal a name with real local significance, rather than some phrase from the dead European language,” Orcutt wrote in an email. “On a larger scale, I think and certainly hope that this name is just one part of a larger pattern in our field of recognizing that the fossils we study come — unless you’re working in Antarctica — from someone’s native land.”

“Science names the world,” Cash Cash said. “Indigenous knowledge can make a contribution, even when it isn’t cataloged or documented, and that is profound. I think the opportunity exists for Indigenous groups to make contributions in this way. … It provides a rare opportunity not just for paleontology, but for the world of tribal people as well. To name it in the way we did allows us to express ourselves and be who we are.”

...

The Cayuse language was an isolate that had no words and speech patterns in common with other Northwest languages. Its last fluent speakers died in the 1940s. Over time, the Cayuse people started speaking Nez Perce.

Tribal dictionaries contain no more than 400 Cayuse words, said Bobbie Conner, director at Tamastslikt. However, some old Cayuse words are still used to describe places, and tribal members still carry Cayuse names.

“Naming the cat is an opportunity for us to keep the Cayuse language alive, but it also recognizes fossils collected from our homeland over six decades ago still have stories to be discovered,” Conner said.

Cash Cash, who prefers the term “dormant” to “extinct,” said the language will never be revived, but it also hasn’t faded away.

“The ability to use what is in these sparse records really is astonishing when you think about it, because Cayuse language has been classified as extinct for quite a long time,” Cash Cash said.

Connecting the Cayuse language to ancient history “is its own kind of blessing” because it sustains the language and “also ties us to the ancientness and the landscape of our past,” Conner said.

“This is a unique opportunity to make the world aware of not only the fossil, but of the language,” she added.

Said Cash Cash, “Even if you are alone and speaking withoutanother person present, the words still have meaning and the words still are heard by the world around us. It’s kind of like the elders tell us that names echo across the earth and when they echo across the earth, the earth receives that and recognizes that those names are being spoken. So, the land and earth hears when we speak the language.”