![]() Saving the Comanche language and recording the stories help preserve the tribe’s history, Nott explains. Then I hope to air it on public access TV and distribute copies of it to the Comanche,” Nott says.Īlso in the works is a book of Comanche stories, illustrated by Comanche artist Leonard Riddles of Walters, Okla., and written by Red Elk’s sister, Carmelita Thomas of North Logan, Utah. “I hope to complete it in December, then present it to the language committee. ![]() They are now working on a television pilot showing Comanche children who are participating in the tribe’s preschool language immersion program, where fluent speakers teach the children. “Even though we make them child friendly, we hear that many adults are buying them for their Native American doll collections.” “In addition to raising money, the dolls make people aware of the authentic Comanche dress,” she said. The dolls have helped spread the committee’s word, Goodin said. “So we started calling them the two white girls.” ![]() “During one of their visits, I told them they were wearing their Comanche shawls the wrong way, the way white girls would wear them,” Goodin said. TWG stands for two white girls, nicknames given to Nott and Rennie by Barbara Goodin of Lawton, secretary-treasurer of the committee and chairwoman of the doll project. ![]() Nott and Rennie sell the dolls through their not-for-profit company, TWG Productions Ltd., and at Aurora University’s Schingoethe Center for Native American Cultures in Aurora and the Dream Catchers Gallery in Geneva. Now Comanche women make the dolls and we sell them in Illinois for $40 each, $20 to the dollmaker and $20 to the language committee.” So that led to a doll-making cottage industry. When I met Debbie halfway between our homes at restaurants to talk about the dolls, people saw them and offered to buy them. “They told us how to make them authentic. “We researched the clothing at museums, then made prototype dolls and sent them to the elders for critiquing,” Nott says. In 1996, Nott teamed with Debbie Rennie of Aurora, a friend from church, to make a doll wearing traditional Comanche dress for the Comanche children. To fund the projects, Nott has secured grants from Random House Inc., Naperville Community Television, the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, the Chicago Area Unitarian Universalist Council and the Lucent Telephone Pioneers. Since the film was made, several of the elders in the film have died. It aired at the Red Earth Film Festival in Oklahoma in the spring of 1997, where it won an honorable mention. In 1995, Nott recruited Chicago filmmaker Tina Marie Rucker to make a documentary of the elders speaking their native tongue. They, too, were snapped up by families eager to teach their children the language. Then Nott wrote a set of children’s reading books and a Comanche picture dictionary. They made 250 sets for a Comanche nation fair two weeks later,” she recalls. Six months after her call, Nott delivered a set of the cards to Lawton, where many of the 10,000 surviving Comanches live within a 25-mile radius. Then she used the software to write flash cards with pictures and Comanche words. Anderton’s alphabet is a combination of 16 English letters and two letters that represent sounds that don’t exist in English.Īs promised, Nott developed software that allows a keyboard typist to use the 18-character alphabet. Nott’s work began in 1993, when she read an article about the committee’s adoption of an alphabet developed by Alice Anderton, a linguist-anthropologist from the University of Oklahoma who recently left the school to become executive director of the Norman, Okla.-based Intertribal Wordpath Society, a not-for-profit group dedicated to the preservation of all Oklahoma Indian languages. “Randi is one of our major contributors, financially and in terms of ideas. “We’re very appreciative,” said committee president Ron Red Elk of Anadarko, Okla., who describes Nott as Taanumu Kasaraibo (our Comanche angel). Not bad for a white girl, say Comanche leaders. Working with the tribe’s Lawton, Okla.-based Comanche Language and Cultural Preservation Committee, Nott, who lives in Naperville, has produced flash cards, a picture dictionary, children’s reading books and a video. “Now, fewer than 100 people are fluent in the language, and most of them are elderly.” Louis to California and were known as great horsemen. “It’s a race against time as the elders are dying,” Randi Nott says of her volunteer efforts to preserve the language of the Comanche, a once-powerful tribe of Native Americans who dominated the West from the present location of St.
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