A number of friends and colleagues have recently asked me how I’m going about learning Cayuga independently, so here’s a list of resources I’m using for learning the Cayuga language:
- Wadewayęstanih, 2nd edition with updated orthography, is my main textbook and source of dialogues. Audio was available on cayugalanguage.ca (now down; see below), but luckily it was captured by the Web Archive, so you can download a zip file with audio for the dialogues from all 36 chapters. The zip file includes a PDF with a transcript of all the dialogues, so they’re conceivably useful even without the textbook.
- A Cayuga language app published through Six Nations Polytechnic, for Apple and Android devices. In addition to vocabulary, the app also has a number of dialogues.
- A similar app is also available for Mohawk.
- An amazing comparative grammar of Oneida, Cayuga, and Mohawk published by Ontario’s Ministry of Education: A Support Document for the Teaching of Language Patterns
- An aside: when I visited Ottawa for the first time, I was super impressed with the amount of Ojibwe, written in Anishinaabe syllabics, scattered on monuments and banners throughout the city. Oh, how lovely it would be if indigenous languages similarly graced Washington, D.C. What a shame, though, that so many Algonquian languages once spoken on the East Coast and in the Chesapeake Bay region have gone extinct.
- The Course Package for a course taught by Dr. Carrie Dyck at the Memorial University of Newfoundland: LIN 6050 – Structure of Cayuga
- A Cayuga spelling manual from her course is also available online.
- CayugaDictionary.ca – This online dictionary is good, but the “Find” and “Partial Find” search options aren’t entirely reliable (or at least I haven’t figured out how exactly to use them yet). My recommendation is to search for snippets of words and see what happens.
- CayugaLanguage.ca has been down for a while, but snapshots of the former website are available via the Web Archive. If you dig around deep enough, there’s a downloadable Java version of the Cayuga dictionary.
- Here is a text file with all the words in that dictionary; if searching in the dictionary website gets frustrating, this is an easier way to search without having to worry about long vowels and glottal stops.
- The Phon online Cayuga grammar isn’t as comprehensive as the other grammar references, but is still a good resource to be aware of.
On a separate but related note, there’s an Indigenous Canada course on Coursera if you’re interested in broader native history and issues in North America. Dr. Timothy Shannon of Gettysburg College also has a very accessible and through book, Iroquois Diplomacy on the Early American Frontier, which is in and of itself both a magnificent read and a great resource for finding primary and secondary sources on early Iroquois/American contact in upstate New York.
The Ackademie 