Many people have heard of the concept of dead languages often assuming that precontact Indigenous languages have been lost or forgotten in the wake of colonization and colonialism. However, as John L. Steckley demonstrates in Forty Narratives in the Wyandot Language, these languages are not dead but, rather, are asleep and waiting to be found in the sources of the past. Alongside other modern Wyandot language revitalization movements, he helps wake up the Wyandot language by compiling an extensive collection of forty narratives that help explain Wyandot history, stories, values, and ideals from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Indeed, as Steckley states, “the Wyandot language is a teacher” providing ways to understand Wyandot perspectives of the past surrounding relationships, social organization, and spiritual beliefs (8).
Steckley’s work uses Western-created source materials such as missionary dictionaries and anthropological studies by scholars like Pierre Potier and Marius Barbeau, who...
