Speaking the Language | Saints & Strangers

You'll want them in my saucer.

II

Hello, catch! Working with the Aventa key language is a huge opportunity. It's something that I welcomed with open arms. It was something that I felt was a responsibility as a native actor.

And I can't come to me! I had to learn a whole new language for this role. We're learning Western Abenaki. It's tough, but we have a great teacher, great dialect coach, and he's really put in his all into it. Western Abenaki is an amalgamation, really, of all of the New England native languages from Massachusetts up into Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and parts of New York.

As people were displaced over about a 200-year period, different communities would come together, and different parts of the language kind of coalesced and created what we have today, which is still spoken language that's been passed down from one generation to the next. Very few people are still speaking, and there are now several dialects.

I have really relied, as an actor, very much on the language to allow my character to come forth. This particular language is quite amazing because, working with Jessie, we work not only in learning phonetics and then, of course, memorizing, but we also work with in breaking down all the sentences into syntax. Jessie's been really probably one of the most amazing language coaches that I've worked with.

A pronunciation came first was to get the pattern, the international pattern of the language down, and the cadence is solid. Musasa, we'd said of nasa's so it, which is the way we'd say it in English. So we worked that first. That was the first thing we did was get the musicality down of the language: phenom, one tina munim, one Kingdom moon in the moon.

The moon, we actually know what we're saying, and we constantly rehearse with one another to make sure that we are actually speaking to one another and understanding what we're saying to one another, not just waiting for a cue. It seemed impossible when I saw how much of this movie is going to be in the Abenaki language, but I'm just, every day, so pleasantly surprised. These guys are professionals.

Gotta pull the lock myself. So what see me! I had one line that was with demo. Ah Aliyah Hadid, "let's teach them how to farm here." It's not a literal translation; it's a different point of view. It literally means, "let us speak to them so they can know how to work the earth."

That's poetic, but aside from the beauty of it, it's a different perspective of what it means to farm. "Let us talk to them, not teach them; let us speak with them so that they know how to work the earth." That's profound because the language is a huge, huge part of an opportunity to really tell the story.

We're still surviving; our language is still surviving. That's the beautiful thing about this project. It makes me proud to be speaking the language, and you know, it's further for the young people. You know, we want the young people to see this and to be inspired to speak their own language.