What a strange thing to see on HN. I am from Wasq'u tribe, and one of the very few people on the planet who has a dictionary for Kiksht Awawat, the dialect of u

What a strange thing to see on HN. I am from Wasq'u tribe, and one of the very few people on the planet who has a dictionary for Kiksht Awawat, the dialect of upper Chinook from which the Chinook Wawa borrows many words. There are perhaps 3 fluent or mostly-fluent speakers left. I am also one of the only descendants actively attempting to learn the language. I travel 5 hours down to the Warm Springs reservation Sunday to work remotely and learn the language, and commute back up on Wednesdays. There are many anthropologically interesting things about learning the language: - Languages die like people. The speakers have forgotten useful things, like "brown". - The language is well-tuned for a way of life that has been more or less obliterated. It is a river language, and the idioms/vocabulary/etc. are geared towards fishing. But the Dalles dam destroyed the fishing ground. The language will never be what it was. - The Kiksht dictionary would be very useful to the speakers of Chinook Wawa on the Grande Ronde reservation, but because the tribes dispute land, the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs won't give them the dictionary.