Mark Awakuni-Swetland, 1956 - 2015
Mark Swetland was born in 1956 to a Catholic family in Nebraska. With several brothers and sisters, he was a responsible middle child who was generally trusted by his parents to stay out of serious trouble. From an early age, he was fascinated by natural history and the outdoors. In scouting, he led a small faction that strove for greater authenticity in Indian lore.
While in high school, Mark discovered an Omaha language class taught by the elder Omaha speaker Elizabeth Stabler at the community center. About a dozen or so students were initially enrolled, but all the others dropped out after a few weeks as they came to realize that learning an Indian language was going to be hard work. Mark stayed. Meetings adjourned to the Stabler house. This entailed some initial culture shock, as a white boy had to learn to enter another family’s house without knocking, skirting a multi-generational household sprawled about the living room watching T.V., to pursue his language studies with the house matriarch in competition with the demands of screaming grandchildren.
Still new to the Omaha community, Mark was invited to a powwow by an Omaha couple he hardly knew. His parents let him depart on a road trip with the family. He found that everyone else at the powwow was Indian, and that he stood out as the only white person. Someone challenged him once, asking who he was, but was silenced by his host, who retorted, “He’s my nephew.” In fact, such “fictive” kinship relationships were perfectly normal, and depended only on mutual agreement. He was eventually adopted as their grandson by Charlie and Elizabeth Stabler, into the Iⁿkʰésabe clan, with the Omaha name of Ūthix̣ide, One-Who-Looks-Around. Mark took this relationship seriously, and was always careful to adhere to his clan’s duties and taboos for the rest of his life.
Starting in high school, Mark worked with Elizabeth Stabler for seven years, creating an Omaha language dictionary. At the time, he had no background in linguistics. Grandma Elizabeth had used the densely-packed anthropological resource The Omaha Tribe, by Alice C. Fletcher and Francis La Flesche, to teach her course, and they adopted its orthography. After entering the Omaha words recorded in this two-volume work, Mark adopted the strategy of eliciting Omaha words by working through an English dictionary, starting with ‘a’. The result was an English-to-Omaha corpus rather heavy on English words toward the beginning of the alphabet, before realizing the disadvantages of this approach. Mark was always especially tickled by numbers. He recalls himself as a boy one afternoon, having just mastered the Omaha numerical system, riding home on his bicycle and exulting: “I can count to a zillion!” The Umóⁿhoⁿ iye of Elizabeth Stabler, the first Omaha dictionary ever produced as a book, finally appeared in 1977 in English-to-Omaha format only, self-published with a small grant, a printer’s debt owed to his friend John Mangan, and otherwise at their own expense.
At the same time, Mark delved into Omaha customs and material culture, learning all manner of traditional crafts and mores. He learned to ask, respectfully, people who knew, and who had the right to teach their knowledge, and to properly make a gift of a bag of groceries to sweeten the request. He himself became a trove of knowledge of traditional Omaha handicrafts, and paid for it the rest of his life by being the go-to person to make things for people, a duty that kept him constantly busy. He learned, obeyed, and promoted the old-fashioned Omaha ethical rules of his adopted grandparents as well. Grandpa Charlie told him that he could teach whatever he knew, except for matters of Omaha religion, and for that he was to direct questioners to someone who had authority to speak about that. Mark took care to follow that injuction as well, and felt that it had kept him out of a lot of trouble.
After graduating from high school in May of 1974, Mark was able to participate in a year-long Student Exchange Program trip to Mexico, sponsored by his high school. His case was somewhat irregular. The rest of the class made it to Mexico City to study in a formal class with teachers. Mark was left with a family somewhere in the Mexican countryside where the locals spoke only Spanish and Nahuatl. Mark has always been a very chatty person, but for the first month in his new accommodations he was known as “The Clam”, because he could not speak. Yet he was adopted by a loose band of children, and under their tutelage his tongue was loosed. He was always rather fluent in Spanish after that, and by the end of the summer when he rejoined his class, he found he was much better in the language than his classmates who had received the formal training.
After that, Mark took one course at UNL, and then travelled extensively for a period in the west, including New Mexico, California and Hawaii. Later, he became a park ranger at Yosemite National Park in California, where he added to his fund of survivalist lore and made contacts with Pomo Indians. One of these, whom he met later through a co-worker, became his “Indian doctor”, whom he trusted as much as his Western doctors in coping with his later illness.
Grandma Elizabeth passed away, and later Grandpa Charlie. Mark maintained or renewed his connections with the Omaha community. During free periods in his life, he would hang out at the Macy Senior Center or do work for some of the old people there.
In the late 1980s, Mark made a trip to the Smithsonian Institute, which was partly funded by the Omaha scholar John Koontz. The object was to microfilm the slip files for an earlier Omaha dictionary project compiled in the late nineteenth century by the great Siouan linguist James Owen Dorsey. Dorsey had died unexpectedly of sickness at the young age of 47, and had never been able to complete the project. But he had left about twenty thousand Omaha or Ponca words on index cards that had been sitting untouched in the Smithsonian for almost a century. Koontz was aware of this treasure trove, and the two young men collaborated to get Mark to the Smithsonian, where he spent weeks carefully photographing these cards onto reels of microfilm. At their own expense and with Mark’s heroic labor, they both got copies of this material, and so did the Smithsonian.
In 1991, Mark revised the Umóⁿhoⁿ iye of Elizabeth Stabler, this time with an Omaha-to-English section included as well. Again, it was self-published with the help of John Mangan, in a run of about six hundred or so copies. It has remained the standard dictionary of the Omaha language to the present day, and the fact that it has been out of print since the initial run was distributed is much lamented.
Mark returned to Lincoln in the early 1990s to go to college at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where he pursued his interests in cultural anthropology, history, and the Great Plains. He graduated with his Bachelor’s degree in 1994, his Master’s degree in May 1996, and in August of 1996 entered a Ph.D. program at the University of Oklahoma, where he did fieldwork with the Kickapoos. During his travels in Hawaii, he met Donna Awakuni, the daughter of a Japanese/Okinawan family, and the two married on July 23, 1995. He merged his last name with hers as well, and the couple had two sons, Micah and Keali’i, in the late 1990s.
At this time, the UNL Anthropology department was looking to revive its Lakota language program, which had been taught since the 1970s until 1995 by James Gibson. They reached out to Mark, who was still completing his Ph.D. program in Oklahoma. Mark made the counter-proposal that he teach Omaha language instead. Omaha was fully Nebraskan, Omaha was what he knew, and Omaha had never been taught before at the university level. To be proper, he made a trip to Macy and presented his proposal to the Omaha Tribal Council. Two of his most loyal speakers, Alberta Canby and Emmaline Walker Sanchez, joined him soon after this to be part of his teaching team.
Mark came to UNL with a joint appointment in Anthropology and Ethnic Studies. The first Omaha language class began in the fall of 2000. Mark had high ideals for the class, and his approach was unorthodox. In his class, he emphasized Omaha ethics and culture as well as the language. Each student was required to attend and report on several Indian events each semester. Each semester included one material culture project, in which the students would each make a lady’s dancing shawl, do a beadwork project, or make a pair of moccasins. Each semester, Mark would usually host a potluck cookout at his home, where he and the speakers would teach their students the fine art of making frybread or cowboy bread. On Halloween, the lights in the classroom would be turned down, and the speakers would tell spooky tales from their tradition and experience. Mark even had a ghost story of his own. Usually, he would arrange at least one full-day class field trip to Macy with each cohort to visit Vida Stabler and her class and speakers at Umóⁿhoⁿ Nation Public Schools, and later to drive around the nearby countryside pointing out significant sites. At the end of the fourth semester, the class would put on a celebration handgame for the Omaha community, with all the weeks of preparations that this entailed. This level of cultural immersion that he created in the class was magic for the students, who came to be as family to the speakers.
Unfortunately, a shadow fell on this happy integration. In the fall of 2001, Mark complained of a strange illness, of constant tiredness and needing to sleep. He was diagnosed with the beginning stages of leukemia. The following spring term, the final semester of the first Omaha cohort, he had to be hospitalized in Omaha almost the entire semester. Under his remote direction, the class continued with one of its graduate students, Tamara Levi, serving as the instructor of record. Despite the difficulties, the appreciation handgame was arranged by the class as scheduled.
A year later, in early 2003, the leukemia returned, and I served as the substitute for most of that semester. After this second bout, and with another bone-marrow transplant from his younger brother and top-notch treatment at UNMC, the leukemia was in remission for ten years. However, Mark’s health remained fragile, and he needed to commute regularly to Omaha for continued treatments for the graft-versus-host issues that ensued. Through it all, he retained his humor, good cheer, and dignity.
In the fall of 2003, Mark completed his Ph.D. Until then, he had been simply “Mark” to his students. Starting with the third cohort, however, he wanted his students to address him with a higher degree of respect. In the fall of 2004, he became Wagōⁿze Ūthix̣ide to his class. “Wagōⁿze” means ‘teacher’, the closest we could come to ‘professor’ or ‘Dr.’, and he shared this title with the speakers. But most of his later students know him affectionately simply as “Wagōⁿze”.
Each Monday night throughout the school year, he would host the speakers and his assistant at his house, where he would serve us supper. After that, we would work on Omaha language research for the class, or simply gossip with the speakers, usually with a great deal of hilarity. Despite his medical problems, or because of them, he was always coming up with new projects. In the spring of 2006, he initiated the project to write and publish an Omaha textbook, to be completed that fall. Several of his former students are still working on that. In 2009, he hosted the annual Siouan and Caddoan Language Conference in the Anthropology Department area at UNL. His grandest project was to digitize the Dorsey slip file images and put them up on the web as a comprehensive Omaha dictionary that would be readily available to everyone. He was awarded an NSF-NEH Endangered Languages grant for that enterprise, with the linguist Catherine Rudin at Wayne State College as co-Principal Investigator. He assembled an expert team involving the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at Love Library under Co-Director Katherine Walter, and, with the long, meticulous photographing labor of his student Justin Hathaway, succeeded in getting the Omaha slip files online. Catherine recalls spending whole weekends holed up with him in his office, with snacks and a coffee pot brewing, punctuated only by a quick run to the local taco stand or a pho place, talking and laughing as they worked. Much editorial work remains to be done. Yet another project, urgently requested by Vida Stabler, is to republish his hard-copy dictionary of modern Omaha. Since the original suffers from minor errors and an inadequate orthography, he did not wish to do this until necessary updates and revisions were made. This revision has been in preparation for almost five years, and is nearing printability.
With the retirement of Peter Bleed in 2010, Mark took over the class on Artisan Technology (formerly “Primitive Technology”) that Peter had long taught. Again, he brought his full-spectrum learning philosophy to bear. Instead of studying materials in the classroom, Mark took his students into the woods for a seminar in primitive survival techniques. His students loved it, and the magic continued.
In December 2013, the leukemia returned. This time, it was not curable. His doctors gave him five months. He decided he would live two more years. By the following August, he was no longer able to work. He passed the textbook project on to several of his students, who hope to bring it to the University of Nebraska Press by the spring of 2016. In February 2015, fourteen months after the five-month prognosis, he passed away at his home. This ended a draining thirteen year struggle for himself and his family.
Mark Awakuni-Swetland was one of the toughest people I have ever known. He maintained a humble manner, and was always thoughtful, giving, and polite. He had a huge interest in all aspects of the world around him, and a correspondingly great store of knowledge and wisdom. His courage, dignity, persistence, and wry humor through the worst of troubles are an inspiration to me. He touched many lives in a good way, and will be greatly missed.
-- Rory Larson
(Wagáx̌thoⁿ)