Five weeks into the Kiowa language class at the University of Oklahoma have passed, and things are going well. There are familiar words in the language; still, it was always the conjugating of the pronouns and other language-specific traits in the Kiowa language I didn’t know. In my youth, I would spend the summers with my grandparents. Both were Kiowa; however, my grandfather was a full-blood Kiowa who spoke the language as a first language. My grandmother had a Czech father and a Kiowa mother; she too also spoke fluent Kiowa.
I would hear them talk fluently to each other, not uttering an English word for minutes at a time. I was intrigued and determined to learn the language.
It wasn’t until around the age of twenty-one, on a trip to Key West, Florida, for a wedding, that I realized the urgency to which I needed to fulfill my quest to learn Kiowa. At Captain Tony’s in Key West, Florida, I met a non-native friend of the groom. He had taken Begining Kiowa At OU and knew how to speak it well. It was then I realized that if this non-native man knew the language of my ancestors and I didn’t, that was an issue.
Fast Forward to 2022, and here I am, enrolled at the University of Oklahoma, completing my degree and learning my ancestral language in a scholarly effort. My Kohñ with his Kohñ (below).
