Native Americans spoke as many as 300 languages at one time in history. But centuries of conflict, forced removal and forced assimilation killed half of the languages. Bringing back a dead language is a big job, but making sure it survives is just as much work. Jessie Little Doe Baird is a co-founder of the Wopanaak Language Reclamation Project. The award-winning linguist is also a citizen of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe in the American state of Massachusetts. In the 1600s, Wopanaak, the language of her ancestors, was spoken by tens of thousands of people in southeastern New England. Baird said missionaries worked with the tribe to create written alphabets in order to translate the Bible and other books. She said the Wampanoag people welcomed the idea of writing and soon “used it as a tool to protect themselves” during land deals and other situations. “We have the largest collection of Native-written documents in North America,” she said. Baird said her organization has been working for about 25 years to bring back the language that died out a century ago. It has put together around 12,000 words from those early documents.