It's amazing, the things that can now be found online.
I have for a long time had a strong interest in Native American languages. In college, I studied Dakota (the Sioux language of Minnesota and Manitoba, and a close sibling of Lakota, the Sioux language of North and South Dakota), and later I studied Mapudungun (the language of the Mapuche people of western Patagonia, in south-central Chile and parts of western Argentina). I only remember a few phrases from each language, but I have occasionally even thought that, if I ever returned to graduate school, it would be in linguistics and that I would actively pursue various Native languages further.
Anyway, I was reading an online article at the GeoCurrents blog about the revitalization of some of the languages of northwestern California, including Hupa, Yurok and Karuk. I never studied those languages, but having grown up in those linguistic lands (California's Humboldt County, behind the redwood curtain), I have always had a strong curiosity about them. Some years ago, I had once even picked up a grammar, lexicon and story collection for Wiyot, another Humboldtian Native language that is, sadly, now extinct (i.e. it has no speakers remaining).
Apparently, there is a younger generation of enthusiasts for revitalizing the three fading languages, each of which have dwindled to less than 20 native speakers each. So the languages are being taught and studied in schools.
And then, I found this story, below, in the comments section for this article, in a comment by someone named Tim Upham. Cursory online research only explains that it's an "original composition" in Hupa – it's not clear whether by him or someone he knows or read about, but the same name "Tim Upham" has cited the story in other comments on other websites, online – it's the only online "presence" for the story.
But I like the story, and I like the fact that the original language is included – as a linguistics geek, that's half the fun. I can't really vouch for the Hupa as "real" Hupa – I played around with an online Hupa dictionary for a little bit, trying to figure out which of the words in the last line was "rain," but I failed. My best guess is that the first word of the last line "na'iya" bears a plausible inflectional or derivational relationship with the lexical entry "na:nyay" = rain. If anyone has any insights or thoughts on this, I'd be happy to hear from you.
A story in Hupa goes:
Xantehitaw ch'iqal.
Da:ywho' xontah ne:s sa'an.
Kehitsan xosing xa'k'iwhe inyektaw.
Xontak ch'ing xa:singya:wh.
Nahxa kilexich ya'ng'e'ti'.
Diydi hayde' hay tehmil?
Na'iya tehmil-me'q hay-yo:w la:yxw 'e:na:ng'?Coyote is walking.
There was a long house standing somewhere.
A bunch of girls are digging Indian potatoes. (They are an edible tuber, sometimes known as groundnuts.)
Come on up to the house.
Two boys were sitting there.
What is in that sack?
It is only Rain there in the sack.