The Shared Sign Language of Martha's Vineyard

By the early 18th century, it was not uncommon for people in Martha's Vineyard to be deaf from birth. This had a profound effect on the culture of Martha's Vineyard - and one that went on to influence Deaf culture in the United States as a whole.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from works
dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy
Wilson and I'm Holly Frying bas podcast as a listener request.
That's actually when we've gotten a few times before, but
recently we got an email that was so compelling that

(00:21):
I basically stopped what I was doing and put it
at the top of the list after checking with you, Holly,
to make sure you were not doing the exact same thing.
My reaction in my head was actually, um, oh, that's
a really cool topic. Tracy would love to do that
one because I knew it was right in your wheelhouse. Well,
and when I say I literally stopped what I was doing,
I think I was looking at my email waiting in

(00:42):
line to get to security at the airport, and on
the other side of security, I was texting you about it.
That's that I did not text you about it while
literally going through the scanner. That would be a little much. Uh,
So we're gonna read that email at the end. Martha's
Vineyard is an island off the coast of Massachusetts. So
if you imagine the coast of Massachusetts is a big,

(01:03):
pointy fishook with that fishop being Cape Cod. Martha's Vineyard
is south of the very base of the Hook, where
it broadens out into the mainland. A town called chill
Mark was founded in Martha's Vineyard in sixteen forty, and
by the early eighteenth century, an increasing number of children
were being born there without the ability to hear, and
the neighboring town of West Tisbury showed a similar pattern

(01:24):
as well. Over those centuries, much of the western part
of Martha's Vineyard became home to a population in which
far more people were deaf from birth then in the
North American population as a whole, and this had a
profound effect on the culture of Martha's Vineyard, and one
that went on to influence deaf culture and the United
States later on, which is what we are going to
be talking about today. Prior to the arrival of colonists

(01:48):
from Europe, Martha's Vineyard was home to the Wampanog tribe,
which refers to the island as Nope. After the colonist's arrival,
the tribe's population dropped dramatically in the wake of introduced
diseases and being forced to move into progressively smaller parts
of their former territory. Both the mashp Wampanog Indian Tribal
Council and the Wampanog Tribe of Gayhead Aquinna are federally

(02:12):
recognized today, and the latter is headquartered in Aquinna on
the tip of the island, just to the west of
chill Mark. Before anyone writes, then, I have heard humans
pronounced fees as Wampanoag and Aquina. However, the far more
common pronunciation that I found, including people that I checked
with directly where Wampanog and Aquinna. So Martha's Vineyard was

(02:36):
home to a Native American population once chill Mark was founded,
although estimates really very dramatically in terms of exactly how
many were living on the island at the time, anywhere
from hundreds to three thousand. However, in terms of Europeans
and other European settlements, the western end of Martha's Vineyard
was really quite remote. It was basically a fishing village

(02:56):
without its own port and the roads between it and
other European sid moments on the island. We're just not good.
People stayed where they were for generations, and they generally
married other members of the community, not outsiders and not
Native Americans from the neighboring town of Aquinna. Jonathan Lambert
is often cited as being the first person with inherited
deafness in Martha's Vineyard. Jonathan was the son of Joshua

(03:19):
Lambert and Abigail Lennel, who had moved to the island
in sixteen ninety four. Jonathan was one of nine children,
and he had one other deaf sibling. Judge Samuel Sewell
of Boston visited the island in seventeen fourteen and described
Jonathan in his diary. This is the first written reference
that we have to a deaf person on Martha's Vineyard,

(03:40):
because he was the first deaf person in the written
record on Martha's Vineyard. A lot of sources described Jonathan
Lambert as being the source of this congenital deafness, but
that's not the case and later generations. All of Martha's
Vineyard's deaf community could trace their ancestry back to people
who settled on the island between sixteen forty two and
say sventeen ten, after which point immigration of Europeans from

(04:03):
the mainland virtually stopped, but they couldn't necessarily trace their
ancestry to Jonathan Lambert or his parents. In reality, three
different families, all of whom had had originated from the
wheeled in Kent, had settled in Situate, Massachusetts, which is
a coastal town thirty two miles which is fifty one
kilometers south of Boston. Their descendants had then settled later

(04:27):
on in Martha's Vineyard, often by way of other towns
they stopped in first. Since members of three different families
who all carried the same gene, we're all living together
on this relatively isolated location. After the early seventeen hundreds,
the population of people who were born deaf continued to grow.
Roughly equal numbers of boys and girls were born unable

(04:48):
to hear, but without any other traits that might be
considered disabling or pathological in nature. Often deaf children, including
multiple siblings in the same family, were born to hearing
parents who had a deaf family member further back in
the family tree, and sometimes it would skip multiple generations,
as many as six. Today we understand this is how

(05:09):
recessive jeans work, but to people who were living at
the time, it seems simultaneously inherited and random. There was
obviously a family connection, but people couldn't really tell who
or when someone would be born who couldn't hear. Some
people thought this was because the mother had been frightened
during her pregnancy. Alexander Graham Bell visited the island in

(05:29):
the eighteen eighties to try to figure out whether deafness
was genetic, and by then the ratio of deaf to
hearing persons on Martha's Vineyard was much higher than in
the rest of the United States, except perhaps an institutions
that had been set up specifically for deaf people. As
a side note, Alexander Graham Bell's involvement with deaf people
and deaf education is really controversial today because he was

(05:52):
one of the biggest proponents of the oralist method, that
is teaching deaf people to speak and read lips rather
than to sign. However, that's not the focus of the
podcast today, so we're not going into that into detail.
We just wanted to note it. Yet it seemed like
we would raise more questions than we answered if we
didn't say anything about it at all. In terms of
numbers of deaf people on Martha's Vineyard, the estimates are

(06:15):
all over the place, anywhere from one deaf person for
every one five hearing people to one in twenty and
eighteen fifty four, according to an eight article in the
Boston Sunday Harold, in some neighborhoods it was as high
as one in four. Nationally, the United States population averaged
one deaf person for every three thousand to five thousand

(06:36):
hearing people. Estimates on that really very Also, although Alexander
Graham Bell was not able to figure out why deaf
people were being born on Martha's Vineyard, and today we
understand that there are lots of different things that can
cause a person to be deaf, his records still do
exist today. Something that doesn't, though, is the sign language
that was actually being used on Martha's Vineyard, and we

(06:58):
will talk about it after a brief break for a
word from a sponsor. As we talked about before the break,
from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, European communities on
Martha's Vineyard were geographically very isolated. People tended to marry

(07:22):
and have children with other members of that same community.
Had a large population of people who were deaf from birth,
and that population existed and even grew over many generations.
That meant that Martha's Vineyard was primed to develop what's
known as a shared sign language, a sign language that
is used by both its hearing and deaf members of

(07:43):
its community, regardless of whether hearing members have close relationships
with anyone who is deaf. Essentially, any time a community
is geographically isolated, has a large population of people who
cannot hear, and continues to exhibit those first two traits
across multiple generation, it's likely to develop its own common
sign language that everyone learns. This has happened in communities

(08:06):
all over the world so well. While we are talking
specifically about Martha's Vineyard today, this was not unique to
Martha's Vineyard at all. Some other examples are Amami Oshima
Island in Japan, Bankala and Bali, Adama, Robi and Ghana,
Bancore and Thailand, and Providence Island off the coast of Colombia.
Some of these places are islands, which makes it makes

(08:28):
sense why they're very isolated. Some of them were just
particularly remote. Most of the documentation of what Martha's vineyard
was like comes from Nora Ellen Gross's book Everyone Here
Spoke Sign Language, which combines research in genetics, legal documents,
primary source records, and lots of oral history. The oral
histories were conducted in the nineteen eighties and are the

(08:50):
biggest source of information about what life was like on
Martha's Vineyard when everyone knew this shared sign language. The
history only goes back to about eighteen third, so there's
a period between the late sixteen hundreds and eighteen thirty
where we don't really know for sure how many people
knew sign language or how people in Martha's Vineyards deaf
community lived or were treated. Yeah, we basically we have

(09:14):
a lot of genealogy documentation from that point and records
that still exist in terms of wills and legal documents
and stuff like that. But the the oral history doesn't
stretch back farther than about eighteen thirty because at that
point the human memory is just too far removed from
the person who was being interviewed. So by the nineteenth century,
the entire hearing community up Island, or on the western

(09:37):
part of the island that includes Aquinna, hill Mark and
West Tisbury, everyone was bilingual in both English and Martha's
Vineyards sign language. The exception was really a Quinno, which
was a populated by Native Americans who really didn't have
a lot of ongoing contact with the other towns. Exactly
how far down island knowledge of sign language stretched and
by how many people and for how long is a

(09:58):
little bit of a mystery. Everyone learned sign language is children.
Deaf children who were born to hearing families with no
other deaf members were still exposed to lots of sign
language through daily routine. Both deaf and hearing parents also
taught their children to sign. This seems to be the
way the entire community became fluent, rather than through formal

(10:19):
instruction in the classroom. All communication between deaf and hearing
people also seems to have happened through sign language. People
who were interviewed for Gross's book didn't remember any deaf
members of the community reading lips or learning to speak orally,
and there's no evidence that Martha's Vineyards deaf community spoke
by writing notes for hearing people to read. However, in

(10:40):
the nineteenth century, both deaf and hearing children did learn
to read and write. It's not clear how much of
the community as a whole, deaf or hearing, was literate
before that point. At town meetings, anytime a hearing person
was speaking, a hearing person interpreted, and because the whole
hearing community was fluent. There was not one specific and
herpreter at church. Deaf people were allowed to stand at

(11:03):
the front of the church so everyone could see their
prayers and confessions. The sermons were usually interpreted by family
members and friends who could sign and sat with their
deaf loved ones, rather than having one interpreter for the
whole congregation. They're also oral history testimonies of hearing people
using sign language as well when there were no deaf
people present. Sometimes it was because the person they were

(11:24):
communicating with was too far away to be heard, Sometimes
it was because the place where they were was just
too loud, and sometimes it was just because they were
so accustomed to signing in their daily lives. The language
itself may have been influenced by a local sign language
used in the wheeled in Kent, where so many of
the carriers of this recessive gene originally came from. There's

(11:45):
some speculation that it also draws from signs used by
the Wampanog, but that seems less likely given that there
was not as much interaction between Martha's Vineyards white community
and their Wampanog community when the language was developing. They
also don't have a lot of documentation about the languages, vocabulary,
or structure. The last known person who have inherited this

(12:06):
inherited deafness was Katie West, who died in two By
this point, chill Mark and West Tisbury had become far
less isolated, the roads were a lot better, Tourism was
becoming a much bigger industry in Martha's Vineyard, and more
and more people were going away to school and then
meeting people and marrying them. Later on, when all of
those changes had started happening around the turn of the

(12:29):
twentieth century, an influx of outsiders to Martha's Vineyard brought
with them the prejudicial attitudes towards deafness and disability that
were pervasive elsewhere. Basically, the deafness carried a stigma and
that deaf people were inferior to hearing people. This whole
concept seems to have been completely foreign to Martha's Vineyard.
It's unlikely that these attitudes changed the perspective of locals,

(12:52):
but they did come to the island along with the newcomers.
All of this means that by the time researchers started
trying to document the language and the the nineteen seventies
and nineteen eighties. They were talking to hearing people who
hadn't used the language regularly in decades. The last members
of Martha's Vineyards deaf community had long since died, and
the perception that being deaf was just a facet of

(13:12):
the human experience had faded a bit. Most people interviewed
remembered only a few signs. We do know that some
of those signs are similar to those that are used
in American Sign Language, which will also see referred to
as a s L. One possible reason is that when
the American Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb, which was
the first school for the deaf in the United States,

(13:33):
opened in Hartford in eighteen seventeen, its largest single source
of students was Martha's Vineyard. After that year, all but
one deaf child in Martha's Vineyard went to school went
to the school for at least some period of time.
Many other students were from towns in Maine who were
related to the ones from Martha's Vineyard, and all these
students brought Martha's Vineyard sign language with them to the school.

(13:56):
The Asylum is also where the United States started to
develop its own standardized sign language. As we said earlier,
a s L. The school's founder, Thomas Hopkins Galladet, had
met Laurence Clerk in France and had brought him to
the United States to help teach deaf students. Most likely,
a s L draws from French Sign language, Martha's Vineyard
Sign Language, and other signs and sign languages that were

(14:18):
already known by students in the early eighteen hundreds when
they all came together to start learning at this school.
Martha's Vineyard Sign Language is definitely not the same as
a s L, though the people interviewed for Gross's books
that they couldn't understand a s L when they saw it.
After another brief sponsor break, we're going to talk about
how people look back on Martha's Vineyard and it's sign

(14:40):
language today. A lot of writing about hill Mark today
and really my Martha's Vineyard as a whole makes it
really I'm like this was some sort of idyllic, all

(15:02):
accepting community of love and support. And while it does
seem definitely to be true that virtually everyone in chill
Mark and other parts of Martha's Viniard did know and
use sign language all the time. Writing from outside of
the community makes it very clear that commonly held attitudes
about disability and the rest of the nation were applied
to Martha's Vineyard and chill Mark and West Tisbury as well.

(15:25):
For example, in s Millington Miller m d. Wrote an
article called the Ascent of Man published in the magazine
The Arena, edited by Bo Flower. This was a magazine
that for much of its history focused on social reform.
It's writers for the sorts of journalists who were referred
to during the progressive era as muckrakers, and the magazine

(15:46):
published articles about things like labor rights, the need to
end capital punishment, the need for kindergarten, and women's suffrage,
and also, in the case of chill Mark, eugenics. What
we're about to read is awful and there's words quote.
This community, isolated from the outside world, has not only
retained its primitive customs and manners, but the physical taint

(16:07):
in the original stock has also produced a plenteous harvest
of affliction. He goes on to write, quote chill Marth
that's his misspelling. With its quaintly tainted stock kept isolate
from the infusion of new blood by preference and by
environment is a sort of garden of affliction into its
loamy soil. The seed of the noxious weed of disease

(16:28):
was originally dropped by accident and not only grows unmolested
by the garden time among the flowers of health, but
year by year strangles and presses them out their place,
being taken by increasing crops of its own deadly species. So,
just to be clear, that was a doctor and a
progressive magazine describing deafness and also blindness, which wasn't actually

(16:48):
reported as being prevalent in Martha's Vineyard in any of
the research I did for this episode, as a deadly
species of plant crowding out the nice, healthy ones. He
goes on to write about deafness, blindness, and developmental disabilities
in terms that are just gross and horrifying by today's standards,
and also using a bunch of flower and plant metaphors
to advocate eugenics. But when we look at the history

(17:09):
from the residents of Martha's Vineyard, it's a really much
more positive story. We have lots of oral history from
those residents who remember the deaf community is being fully
integrated with the hearing community with no discrimination and no barriers.
Deaf and hearing children had equal access to education, and
in some cases, deaf children actually had better access to

(17:29):
education because the state would pay for up to ten
years of schooling at the School for the Deaf. Deaf
and hearing adults had equal access to things like jobs
and housing. There weren't specific jobs that were thought of
as as the only ones acceptable for deaf people. Deaf
adults had the same rights as hearing adults in terms
of things like vote voting and community involvement. Social events

(17:51):
were open to everyone, and the fact that deaf and
hearing people tended to enter Mary a lot more frequently
than they did in the United States at large suggest
that deaf and hearing people on Martha's vineyards didn't view
one another as different. Hearing members of the community basically
described the deaf community as not disabled at all. Being
deaf was no different from having a different eye color,

(18:12):
and some even went so far as to say things
like quote, oh, they weren't handicapped, they were just deaf.
Having a deaf child also wasn't viewed as a problem
or a tragedy, just something that happened. And this is
in some ways similar to deaf culture today, which does
not view being deaf as a disability at all, and
many of Martha's Vineyards hearing residents who were interviewed later

(18:34):
in their lives talked about believing that it was that
way everywhere. It was only after hearing people went away
to school that they realized there was anything different about
where they grew up. All of this played out at
a time when deaf people elsewhere in the US were often,
at best segregated from the rest of the community and
at worst institutionalized and facilities that were rife with neglect

(18:55):
and mistreatment and offered no opportunities for education. So it
does could seem like Martha's Vineyard was far more accepting
an egalitarian at least in terms of its deaf community.
What we really don't have, though, is any member of
Martha's Vineyards death community actually communicating for themselves. All of
the oral history that we have is from people who

(19:15):
could hear, and it was recorded much later. The hearing
community does seem to have genuinely believed that the deaf
community were treated in all ways as equals, but we
can't really say for sure whether a deaf person would
agree with that. Assessment. It definitely would not be the
first time in history that a majority population earnestly and
genuinely thought everything was fine, but a minority population didn't. Today,

(19:38):
Martha's Vineyard sign language is extinct. There are efforts underway
to preserve shared sign languages from other locations around the
world before they die out, as well as well as
a tradition of preserving a s L through video. There
are archives and a lot of historical writings on this
at the chill Mark Free Public Libraries website, but to
be very clear, a lot of it was more than

(20:00):
a hundred years ago. Some of it is extremely hurtful
and uh, basically disgusting and how it describes deafness and disability.
What we read today from that eugenics article is really
the tip of the iceberg in that regard, and even
the oral histories in everyone here spokes sign language. A
lot of them use language that was acceptable in the
nineteen eighties but is not today. So if you're if

(20:22):
you're getting ready to sit down and talk about all
those things with your kids, perhaps, uh, that is a
thing to keep in mind, that that there are things
in there that are genuinely hurtful and now, Tracy, well,
you read us the email that that inspired this episode.
Listener mails from Kate. Kate says, Hi, Tracy, and Holly,
I wanted to email the two of you with an

(20:42):
episode suggestion and let you know that I think two
of you are doing an amazing job. I started listening
to the show after I graduated college with my history
degree with you a few years ago and shows to
stay at home with my infant twins. I'm a pretty
extroverted person, so listening to your show has been a
lot to keep me from feeling isolated. I was feeling
pretty overwhelmed learning what it was to be apparent with
premi twins, and taking me time to listen to your

(21:04):
show helping me stay centered. Thank you for that. I
know a lot of people listen to y'all show just
waiting to swoop in to correct you or tell you
how to do it better. What's garbage? You guys are phenomenal.
I'm gonna take a break and say thanks, Kate. Thanks Kate.
Kate says, I'm currently in an m A program for
disability studies, and one of the chief things that we
study is the social model of disability. From your episodes

(21:25):
that cover disability history, it seems like you two are
aware of the social model of disability, But for the
sake of clarity, I'd like to give you a quick
and dirty explanation. Under the social model, disability is reframed
as a social construct that ultimately marginalizes and oppresses people simbolistically.
If an individual is socially marginalized due to a perceived
impairment or unable to physically navigate a space because of

(21:47):
a lack of access, they then become a quote disabled.
In this way, it is not the impairment that has
limited their choices and opportunities, but a given society's reaction
to that impairment. As to the episode suggestion, I'd like
to suggest the history of deaf individuals on Martha's Vineyard,
as studied by Nora Gross and everyone here spoke sign
language hereditary deafness on Martha's Vineyard. It is as outstanding

(22:10):
example of inclusion and acceptance and an otherwise pretty bleak
history of disability. Historically, Martha's Vineyard was a relatively isolated
island with the high rate of people who were deaf,
and uniquely, the hearing individuals all learned sign language to
include their deaf community members instead of excluding them. This
allowed people who were deaf to be full fledged participants
in the community because they did not face any significant

(22:33):
language barrier. I have found that when explaining the idea
that disability is a social constract of people, I'm often
met with a fair amount of skepticism. I like to
use the example of Martha's Vineyard to show how the
social model of disability works in actual practice. When society
removes barriers, individuals do not become disabled as they otherwise
would by perceived impairments. Keep up with the great work, ladies.

(22:55):
You're the best, Kate, I would like to say, you're
the best, Kate. I ocur. Yeah, we have gotten a
couple of suggestions to talk about this before, and uh,
as we often do, we just put things on the list,
which is hundreds of things long. Um, but Kate's email
grabbed my attention immediately. We have not talked about it

(23:18):
really on the show. But my mother is very significantly
disabled because she does not have access to things that
are basic. If she were able to access them, it
would be not so much regarded as disability. Like I
wear glasses, which by definition is a disability. My eyesight
is not good, but like society does not regard having

(23:40):
glasses as being disabled. Like that's the thing that's totally
except except in small children who bully each other. But
that's just being jerkes. So that's not even perceiving the
disabled versus not just you're slightly different from me, so
I'll be a jerk about it. Yeah, So thanks so
much Kate for sending this mail that that captured my attention,

(24:03):
both of our attention really for this particular story. We
will have lots of links to all the stuff in
the show notes if you would like to learn more
about it um and if you would like to write
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(24:25):
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(24:46):
looking for in the search bar lack of awesome articles there.
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(25:10):
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