Native American Linguist Jessie Little Doe Baird Gets $500,000 MacArthur Genius Grant

(Sept. 28) -- The man on the phone asked if she was sitting down. When she couldn't stop sobbing, he told her to write down what he was saying.

Jessie Little Doe Baird, a Native American linguist, was the recipient of a "genius grant" from The MacArthur Foundation. And she would receive $500,000.

"He might have said it a couple of times," Baird told AOL News today. "I was crying through most of it all. I'm glad he told me to get a pencil."

Baird, 46, is one of 23 grant winners announced today by the nonprofit foundation. For the past 17 years, outside the media spotlight shining on her today, she has resurrected the long-silent language of her Wampanoag tribe, once spoken by tens of thousands in southeastern New England.

"It's just such an honor for my nation, for my tribe. It's just such an honor for all of us," Baird said from her home in Mashpee, Mass., where her phone rang nonstop today. "It's pretty crazy around here," said the still-stunned linguist and teacher.

She is the program director of the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project, which has produced a 10,000-plus-word dictionary of the lapsed language spoken by her Algonquin ancestors until the mid-1800s, when it was overrun by English speakers. As far as she knows, her 6-year-old daughter is the only child since then raised from birth to speak Wampanoag (or Wôpanâak, as it is written in that language).

"Through painstaking research, dedicated teaching and contributions to other groups struggling with language preservation, Baird is reclaiming the rich linguistic traditions of indigenous peoples and preserving precious links to our nation's complex past," The MacArthur Foundation noted in announcing her grant.

Baird was sworn to secrecy after being notified by an out-of-the-blue phone call two weeks ago. "You can tell one person. I told my husband," she said. He didn't seem that surprised.

"He said, 'I've been telling you for years you're a genius,''' Baird recalled today. Then she told him how much money came with the award. "I thought he was going to die," she said, laughing.

Her program will use the funds to buy long-needed audio equipment, hire artists and complete other work put off for lack of money, she said. Baird plans to treat herself with a home improvement project.

"Now I can put insulation in my ceiling and have a warm house this winter,'' she said.

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To revive the spoken version of her native language, Baird studied linguistics and language pedagogy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she worked with the late Kenneth Hale, a scholar of indigenous languages. Together, they deciphered grammatical patterns and compiled vocabulary lists from archived Wampanoag documents.

She used similar Algonquin languages for help in pronunciation. Wampanoag is the first Native American language to develop an alphabetic writing system, according to her program's website.

"We didn't have any speakers of our language for 150 years," Baird said today. "I believe it's people's birthright to have their language. My tribe's been on the same land for 10,000 years.''