Timucuan Amerindians Record Their Written Language

At the time of the Spanish discovery of the Americas, the Timucuan peoples were the largest linguistic group around modern Florida and Georgia, numbering about 200,000. They were not united peoples but lived in different groups, sometimes hunting and gathering, other times farming, but their culture was rich (see second image for Timucuan lands in Florida). Today the spoken language has disappeared, the Timucuan peoples dying out or fleeing after the Spanish occupation of the 16th century. The colonizers were the ones left to tell the Timucuan story, and of course their bias was Christian, and it suggested that the Indigenous Americans were passive recipients of Spanish culture. However, a recent breakthrough in Timucuan historical sources is showing a different story.

Historian Alejandra Dubcovsky and linguist Aaron Broadwell have been collaborating to translate Timucuan documents, which the Spanish taught the Timucuan peoples how to transcribe using the Roman alphabet. In fact, Timucuan was the first Native language within US borders ever transcribed.

By looking at parallel Spanish/Timucuan texts, like the one shown here, Dubcovsky and Broadwell have shown that the Timucuan took an active role in turning their spoken tongue into written texts. You can tell by the differences between parallel translations. For instance, where a Spanish line might translate: “Did you engage in the devilish practice of whistling to the wind to make the storm stop?”, the Timucuan would write: “Did you whistle to the wind to make it stop?”

Thus, the Spanish translations judge the Timucuan harshly, because they weren’t Christian. But the Timucuan texts don’t show this bias. For instance, when a Spanish asks “Have the man and woman been joined together in front of a priest?” to record whether two people were married, the Timucuan states “Did you and another person consent to be married?” Notice the role of gender is absent, as is the role of the priest. If the Spanish were transcribing the text into Timucuan, (which is what had been thought), they wouldn’t have left out these details.

I love when scholars can recover voices of the past.