Men were more likely to be pulled into wage labor, military service, and English-speaking work environments during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Women, particularly grandmothers and elder aunties, were more often in the home and in the community, speaking the language with children and with each other. When the boarding school era forcibly removed children and punished them for speaking their languages, the women who stayed behind — or who returned — carried the words that survived.

There's also a dimension of care work. Language transmission happens in intimate settings — lullabies, cooking, storytelling, daily instruction. That labor fell disproportionately to women in most of these communities. When the transmission chain was broken by colonization, the last links that held were often the women's links.

So when Hinton writes that introduction, she’s drawing heavily on precisely those figures — the women who hosted her at their kitchen tables, corrected her pronunciations, and decided which stories could even be spoken aloud to a white linguist with a tape recorder. It’s not that men weren’t around; it’s that the role of “language elder” had, by that time, become gendered.

There’s also a quieter thing under all this: in communities where institutions, governments, and churches were overwhelmingly run by men, the “counter-institutions” of memory often formed around women. You saw a version of that at BAAITS — the auntie in the wheelchair whose blessing gave you permission to photograph. She’s not just one person; she stands in for an entire pattern: the ones who sit close to the drum, who know which songs go where, who decide what can be shared and what stays in the circle.