At age 6, Reba Teran lost the ability to speak her language. Like many Indigenous students in the 20th century, she attended schools where any language other than English was forbidden.
For the past 22 years, Ms. Teran, an Eastern Shoshone Elder, has made it her “life’s work” to build a dictionary of her people’s language, one that includes audio recordings of people speaking the words. After six years of hearing the language, she started dreaming in Eastern Shoshone.
“And then one morning,” she explained, “I woke up and all of a sudden, I could talk.” She had regained the ability to both think and converse in the language.
Ms. Teran’s work on the dictionary continues, and now Eastern Shoshone words she helped document are being used for the name of a new prehistoric amphibian species. That animal once burrowed for safety in the land that is home to the Eastern Shoshone.
Scientists announced the ancient amphibian, which Ms. Teran named Ninumbeehan dookoodukah, in a paper published in October in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. It belonged to a primitive group called temnospondyls. And it was small, its skull fitting in the palm of a hand, with scores of tiny teeth lining its mouth. During the period in which it lived approximately 247 to 231 million years ago, it was exposed to devastating equatorial heat and megamonsoons.
The animals’ strategy was to dig deep into the ground and wait until things got better. As aquatic creatures, preventing desiccation would have been key to their survival. This led the team to hypothesize that Ninumbeehan remained within their burrows until it rained again, avoiding the lethal Triassic heat.
A key clue that Ninumbeehan was an aquatic amphibian was canals in the skull called lateral line sulci. Most fish today have those same canals, and they are lined with tiny cells with protruding hairs. “These hairs detect changes in the water,” said Cal So, an author of the study who is soon to begin a postdoctoral fellowship at the Field Museum in Chicago. That enables fish to quickly react to stimuli.
Anthony Martin, a paleontologist at Emory University who was not involved in the research, praised the study and said that finding fossil burrows with the burrowers actually inside them is “very rare.” He added that “to have so many of them in the same place is exceptional.”
The process of naming the fossilized amphibian began after a field trip to the fossil sites that included 7th-grade students of the same Fort Washakie School that Ms. Teran once attended (and where she now teaches a couple of days a week). They were joined by paleontologists and Eastern Shoshone Elders. This trip stemmed from remote discussions about paleontology organized by David Lovelace, an author on the paper and a paleontologist at the University of Wisconsin Geology Museum.
Ms. Teran proposed Ninumbee, who are Little People. She described them as spiritual beings in the physical world that can be “reclusive” and sometimes “naughty,” but who can help others “through spiritual ceremony.” Naming this new species after them was a way of honoring them.
“We know they existed and they still do,” she said. “Sometimes people talk about seeing them. And so that’s why I decided it would be nice if we could name them Ninumbee. Because it was found in their territory.”
The “han” of Ninumbeehan, she explained, is the possessive form. “What you’re saying is ‘Ninumbee’s’ dookoodukah” or ‘flesh-eater.’” She explained that dookoodukah is a nod to the “little sharp teeth,” because to Ms. Teran, this new amphibian “looks like a miniature T. rex.”
Words in Eastern Shoshone, said Amanda LeClair-Diaz, an author of the study and the Indian education coordinator in the Fremont County School District No. 21, don’t always have a direct translation in English. Eastern Shoshone is “more descriptive,” Dr. LeClair-Diaz said.
Thus, dookoodukah isn’t just a reference to the teeth, it’s also a way of referring to a pet. That’s how Ms. Teran envisioned this new species: Ninumbee’s pet.
Dr. LeClair-Diaz said that creating an Eastern Shoshone name and including students in the naming process is significant.
“There’s a lot of research out there that says if students are able to see themselves or see a part of themselves in curriculum, and they’re able to connect to that, that’s really important,” she said. Education, she added, “historically hasn’t been a welcoming place for Native language, identity or culture.”
Instead, Dr. LeClair-Diaz said, the goal has been to erase it. She is working to change that in her position at the school district.
“There’s a tendency to come into communities, do research, take the research, leave and then publish,” Dr. LeClair-Diaz said. But efforts such as those by Dr. Lovelace and his team are a step in the right direction. The relationship, she said, “doesn’t end with this publication.”
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