SIPAYIK — When Gail Dana reflects on the status of the Passamaquoddy language, she can’t help but speak in oceanic analogies.
“We know we can’t turn the tide. We see that every single day,” she said, gazing over the bay into New Brunswick from a chair outside the meal site where elders gather on the Passamaquoddy Reservation at Sipayik (Pleasant Point). “That doesn’t mean that we can’t go out with the tide and come back in and be stronger every time.”
The language encourages speakers to view the world in relational terms; it compels them to recognize the life in everything around them and communicate by evoking vivid images.
As the keepers of that language — and the worldview woven into it — are growing old and dying, efforts to preserve it have become more urgent.
There are around 3,400 enrolled Passamaquoddy tribal members. According to an internal survey conducted last year, less than 7% of tribal members speak the language fluently, and the numbers have dropped significantly from 300 fluent speakers surveyed in 2008. Of the fluent speakers surveyed last year, 80% were aged 70 or older in communities where the average life expectancy is 49.
More than 10 fluent speakers died in 2025.
“They’re dying faster than we can keep up,” said Brianna “Sipsis” Smith, 36, who is at the forefront of the revitalization effort. “Every time someone dies and you have no choice but to wonder what they took with them that no one else has to share.”
The creep of colonization
When Darrell Newell, 67, was growing up on the Passamaquoddy Reservation at Motahkomikuk (Indian Township), where he would later serve one term as vice chief, it was, in his words, an Indian reservation.
“I believe we’re effectively assimilated to where we’re kind of just like any other community (in Maine),” he said.
It’s not clear exactly how many Indigenous languages were once spoken in North America, or how many remain. According to PBS, an estimated 300 languages were once spoken and 170 remain, although most are endangered. Among them is Passamaquoddy, which is closely related to Maliseet; the two are sometimes lumped together as Peskotomuhkati-Wolastoqey. The Algonquin language was once spoken across northern Maine and part of New Brunswick.
These languages are not lost, says Dwayne Tomah, director and curator of the Passamaquoddy tribal museum in Sipayik. They were systematically taken through colonization.
Tomah oozes cultural pride. He sports coiffed hair and beaded regalia as he bounces from exhibit to exhibit in the packed museum space. At 60, he is the youngest fluent Passamaquoddy speaker.
It was also his first language. He was immersed in it at home, where he was raised by his grandparents. Its sounds were abundant in Motahkomikuk.
Newell had little use for English until he attended a Catholic school for first grade. From that point on, English crept into the dominant spot. He sees it as a manifestation of colonization — a pervasive force with deceiving momentum.
“It’s kind of like you don’t even notice it,” Newell said of colonization and assimilation. “It just happens.”
After many elders died during the COVID-19 pandemic, the tribal communities have been cloaked with a heavy atmosphere of loss.
“It’s just been death after death, like so much death, you can’t even process it before the next one comes,” Smith said.
“Somewhere in all of that grief is also the realization that, with that, they take so much knowledge with them, and you can’t get that back once it’s gone,” she continued.
The gap between the oldest fluent speakers and the youngest ones keeps shrinking as elders die and children are raised learning English. That worries Kendra D. Sockabasin, 33, the daughter of Dana and language champion Allen Sockabasin.
“We’re just watching it go off the timeline if we don’t put something on the other side of it,” she said.
A map to who we are
To communicate in Passamaquoddy, speakers describe relationships and connectivity. The language shirks the hierarchy-establishing norms of English construction.
“English is a noun-based language — everything is a thing that you can obtain or hold superiority over,” Smith said. “Our language doesn’t really have that too much. Most of our words are descriptive, explaining relationships or connections or responsibilities to our world view.”
To speak of the moon in Passamaquoddy, one might use the word “nipawset.”
But “nipawset” does not exactly mean moon. It translates to something moving along at night, or night-walker. The word provides an image of movement, Dana emphasizes.
“If the language that you’re speaking tells you that there’s life to everything here, then your thought process is different,” she said.
Smith, Sockabasin and Jodi Socobasin are all among a generation that did not grow up speaking Passamaquoddy fluently, but can comprehend it, speak it to a degree and see it as a vital tie to their identity.
Socobasin, who lives in Sipayik, attends weekly online classes and tries to speak the language as much as she can. She uses it frequently in cultural ceremonies and song
“It’s a map back to who we are,” she said. “Our language tells us who we are and how we are supposed to be.”
Make Passamaquoddy ‘unavoidable’
Margaret “Dolly” Apt, 76, greets Tomah at the tribal museum in Passamaquoddy last month. She doesn’t strain for words as they chat in the foyer.
“It is my language, so I feel comfortable with it,” she said.
Apt, who is Smith’s grandmother, helped collect entries beginning in 1996 for an 18,000-word Passamaquoddy-Maliseet dictionary published in 2008. A second edition is awaiting publication. Her work is now also enshrined online.
Smith fears, however, what will happen if future generations can only learn Passamaquoddy that has been translated from English, and thereby filtered through a colonial lens.
Although there are numerous people who describe themselves as “comprehenders,“ few people are willing to say they are fluent. Within the generation of Passamaquoddy “comprehenders,” there’s an urgent effort to create immersive spaces to try and change that.
Smith, who recently took the helm of a revitalization nonprofit called Speaking Place, is one of the leaders focusing those efforts. The organization is preserving the language in video recordings but also creating intergenerational immersive spaces for speakers of all levels.
In October, Smith organized a weekend-long “English fast,” where over half a dozen people spent two days under one roof speaking Passamaquoddy.
“We need to be so immersed in it and have so many opportunities for immersion that it’s unavoidable,” she said. “It needs to be in our communities everywhere, so that people can’t help but to learn it.”
Students in the Sipayik elementary school receive some weekly instruction in Passamaquoddy, and a certificate in Wabanaki language is available through the University of Maine system. But none of that is sufficient, immersion proponents agree.
Instead, people like Smith, Dana and Tomah say the Passamaquoddy need community spaces where the language grows organically. Case studies, such as the efforts beginning in early 1980s to save the Indigenous Hawaiian language, show that immersion is critical.
Tomah estimates that community members need to spend 30% of their time together to bring the language back to the tips of their tongues.
Tribal government is also taking action. Prevalence of distinct language is one of the cultural patterns that can be used to assess whether a tribe qualifies for federal recognition, and officials view language preservation as an important element of retaining that status.
To that end, Sipayik tribal government recently secured nearly $3.5 million in federal grant funding to support language revitalization.
“We’re Indigenous. That’s who we are, and that’s how we think,” Sockabasin said. “I think there’s no clear path to abandon those colonial systems that currently exist, as much as we might want to, but it’s collectively working with all of our relatives, not just Indigenous relatives, for better solutions of how to live on this world together.”
Reuben M. Schafir is a Report for America corps member who writes about Indigenous communities for the Portland Press Herald. This story was originally published by the Maine Trust for Local News. Reuben Schafir can be reached at rschafir@pressherald.com.