30. Notes on Native California Languages
LANGUAGE FAMILIES
Kelp-beds, redwoods, desert scrub, oak savannah: from the coastal waters of the Pacific to the crest of the high Sierras, from the Sacramento Delta to the dry sands of the Baja Peninsula, California has always been a land of abundance. Most of us are aware of the extremes of habitat, the tremendous biological and geographic diversity that California embraces. Not so many are aware that this exuberance extends to its Native cultures and languages as well. Yet aboriginal California was one of the most linguistically diverse places on earth, and its great abundance helped support the single highest population density in North America (A. Kroeber 1939:153)—that is, until the Spanish, and later the new “Americans,” came and began to change the lives of its people forever, constraining their ways, restricting their freedoms, and dispossessing them of their lands. California was home to at least eighty to one hundred distinct languages—and probably more—at the time of European contact. (Each language reflects a cultural division, too; see map 2, p. 574.) As always, though, language is an early casualty in the forced assimilation of other cultures. It is a tribute to the tenacity of California Indians that some fifty of these languages are still spoken today.[1] The majority of these languages are severely endangered, however, and drastic measures need to be taken to ensure their survival into the next century.
Most of California's many languages were in turn spoken in different dialects as well, just as the English “accents” of Brooklyn, Atlanta, Dublin, Nairobi, Bombay, and Perth are di erent today. Our world
So when linguists cite a figure like the conservative “eighty to one hundred distinct languages” figure for pre-Contact California, astonishing though it may be, the reality was even more complex: there are layers of diversity within that overall diversity that the general figure doesn't even hint at. Finally, as if this complexity were not enough in itself, the stability and relatively small size of most California tribal territories (and the close contact with neighboring groups through trading and intermarriage that this implies) means that bilingualism and even trilingualism must have been a commonplace. California truly was a linguistic land of plenty—a proud trait that modern California, thanks to its surviving native languages and the multilingual constellations of its major cities, preserves to this day.[2]
Given their tremendous diversity, it's unsurprising that California's languages bear genetic resemblances among themselves. (By genetic resemblance we mean that the languages in question trace back to a common ancestor language, just as Spanish, French, and Italian have evolved or descended from Latin.) There are approximately twenty language families in California (see table 5).[3] Some, like Pomoan or Utian, are relatively large families of languages, having many sibling members (fifteen in the case of Utian); others, like Karuk or Washoe, are “only children” within their respective families.
In turn, these twenty or so California language families may ultimately descend from five superfamilies, or stocks. (In the same way, the
| YUKIAN |
Yukian Family
|
| CHUMASHAN |
Chumashan Family
|
HOKAN STOCK (PROPOSED)
|
Shastan Family
|
|
Pomoan Family
|
Salinan Family
|
Yuman Family
|
ESSELEN
|
| PENUTIAN STOCK (PROPOSED) |
Wintuan Family
|
Maiduan Family
|
Miwokan Family (Utian)
|
Costanoan Family (Utian)
|
― 548 ― |
Yokutsan Family
|
Plateau Penutian Family
|
UTO-AZTECAN STOCK
|
Takic Family
|
Numic Family
|
| ALGIC STOCK |
Ritwan Family
|
| NA-DENE STOCK |
Athapaskan Family
|
The prehistory of the California languages makes for a challenging study. Of Penutian, Michael Silverstein has written, “There is, first, tremendous linguistic diversity, equalling perhaps that of the entire continent, encompassed within the proposed ‘superstock’” (1979; italics mine). So much time has passed that the modern descendants of that original language—if we can even be sure there was but one such language—have metamorphosed dramatically. Yet, although Penutian is a venerable family in its own right (there are ten-thousand-year-old sites in southern Oregon, the presumed Penutian homeland, distributed along the shores of ancient lakes, that were probably Penutian sites), as a family presence in California proper it is not terribly old: on the order of fortyfive hundred years or more, dating from the first incursions of ProtoUtians into the Sacramento Valley. Hokan, in contrast—or anyway, the distinct language families that traditionally comprise this grouping—is much, much older in California, going back beyond our ability to calculate with any certainty. Its ancestral speakers are, along with ancestral Yukian speakers, if not the first, certainly among the oldest inhabitants of California. We must presume they were already here—long in residence, families of an old and already divergent stock—when the earliest Period II archaeological sites begin to enter the record, some eight thousand years ago.[7] If demonstrable as a language family or superstock, Hokan would be much older than Indo-European, perhaps even older than Penutian itself. A rough general consensus puts its time-depth at twelve thousand years old.[8]
The presence of the other three groups (though ancient in and of themselves)
We can start by imagining a time, some five thousand years ago—consistent with the linguistic evidence—when long-resident, already divergent Hokan-a‹liated peoples were spread pretty much across the coast and heartland of the Central California culture area, sharing parts of this territory with early Chumashan and Yukian peoples (and no doubt other groups as well, who have passed from the record without trace). Then, beginning around forty-five hundred years ago, Proto-Utian peoples—the Penutian ancestors of the Miwok and Costanoan families—began moving into California from the northeast along the great river-and-valley systems—first along the Klamath, then over to the Sacramento, following it all the way down into the Bay region and up its tributaries into the Sierra Nevada and south along the coast to Monterey—the very territories that they occupy today. As they went, they would have displaced some of the already-settled “Old California” peoples from these regions. The Utians were followed in time by ancestral Yokutsan peoples, who began their long move down into the Central Valley and southern Sierra foothills about thirty-five hundred years ago. Both these expansions into California would have taken place over the course of centuries, involving generations of geographic adaptation to new lands and the give-and take of cultural accommodation with new neighbors.
Later, beginning around two thousand years ago, ancestors of the Wintuan peoples, probably pushed by Athabascan groups still farther to the north, made their move into California, following the by-now well-worn Penutian migration routes down into the upper Sacramento Valley, spreading slowly south over the course of the next thousand years (Whistler 1977b). At about the same time the Wintuan groups were beginning their descent, around two thousand years ago, ancestral Maiduan people, who had been living in the Tahoe region from about 4000 b.p., began expanding into their present territories, at the expense of the Washoe and Yana. All these waves of Penutian migrations have greatly enriched the linguistic tapestry of California.[9]
Looking again at the modern distribution of Hokan and other Old
On the map, the Uto-Aztecan territory looks like nothing so much as a vast cultural and linguistic lava flow that has displaced or simply covered over the traces of whatever groups may have lain in its path. The Takic ancestors of modern-day California Uto-Aztecan peoples (the Serrano, Luiseño, Cupeño, Gabrielino, and others) began expanding westward into California from the southern Sierra Nevada about three thousand years ago, reaching the coast as early as 2500 b.p.[11] As they came, they would have pushed the resident Yuman groups out and away to the south and east, where they are found today. Behind them, and later, came Numic groups from further out in the Great Basin.
Following the many and staggered Penutian and Uto-Aztecan migrations, around one thousand years ago according to available evidence, the ancestors of the two Ritwan languages, Wiyot and Yurok, arrived (separately, it appears) to claim territory in the northwest—though how they came to be here, so far from their distant Algic relatives in the Algonquian family, is a mystery that may never be solved. Later still, as late as a. d. 900, the California Athabascan groups—the Tolowa, the Hupa/ChilulaWhilkut group, the Mattole, the Eel River cluster (Nongatl-SinkyoneLassik-Wailaki), and the Cahto—drifted down from Oregon, further displacing the descendant speakers of those original California language families.
Not many places on earth could sustain the diversity such repeated incursions have engendered in California.[12] In a di erent landscape—a
CALIFORNIA LANGUAGES
IN THE POST-CONTACT PERIOD
So what has become of this great diversity of tongues? Sadly, California's languages have been fighting for survival since the day the first Spanish mission was established in 1769 at what is now San Diego. Against all odds, some fifty ethnic groups still have active speakers of their native language (Hinton 1994a). Yet this situation, always a precarious one, is changing ever faster, as last speakers one by one pass on, taking their words and the music of their voices with them. (Map 5, based on a study reported in Leanne Hinton's Flutes of Fire, shows the areal distribution of these remaining speakers, by language.) Some of the losses have been recent indeed: for instance, when Laura Somersal, the last fluent speaker of Wappo, died in 1990, the Wappo language died with her. Of the fifty or so still-active languages, many are being taught to schoolchildren and young adults in the classroom, but not one is currently being passed on to the youngest generation of speakers, to be learned by children as their mother tongue, the language of home and family. How could this have
The story of California's holocaust has been told many times, though still the truth of it is not yet common knowledge.[14] Estimates of the preContact Native population of California range from a conservative 310,000 to nearly a million. By the end of the nineteenth century, that population had fallen to 20,000 or even less (Cook 1978). Even at the most conservative estimate, this represents a loss of more than 90 percent. (It takes a great deal of restraint to print a figure like this without an exclamation mark.) This catastrophic decline encompasses two main cycles or epicenters of destruction: one in the south from 1769 to about 1834, spreading inland and north along the coast with the expansion of the iniquitous Spanish mission system; the other in the north from 1848 (when gold was discovered at Sutter's Mill) to roughly 1865—the madness of the Gold Rush, which quickly spread throughout the mountainous regions of the state. The brief period between these cycles was no haven of recuperation. In addition to increased European-American encroachment on Indian lands amid the upheavals of the Mexican War, epidemics of malaria and smallpox decimated already stressed populations reeling from the onslaught of sustained contact begun a mere sixty years before. Cook (1978:92) mentions eyewitness reports of “entire villages of several hundred people being exterminated, of masses of skeletons found for years after.”
It would be comforting to all of us—not just for those who must come to terms with the dark underside of their forebears’ history of conquest, but also for those whose peoples have paid the price of that conquest—if we could believe that this waste and devastation was largely unintended, the sad but inevitable by-product of worlds in collision: microbial tragedies played out in the blood, ecological tragedies brought on by inexperience in a new environment, cultural tragedies kicked o by the discrepancy in medical and technological skills—all of which opened the way to a gradual abandonment of traditional ceremonies and crafts. Unfortunately, the reality of what happened between Indians and whites in California was not always so innocent. Genocide is a hard word but the only right one for what took place.
I don't mean to dwell on the issue here. This book is intended as a celebration, not a court-martial, still less a requiem. But certain facts must
The Mission period, whatever the intentions of the Franciscan padres, was not a benign one for the Native cultures scorched by their influence. Forced labor, starvation, disease, rape, slavery, incarceration, torture, execution—these were commonplaces of Mission life. The brutality of the padres and soldiery is well-documented, through both eyewitness reports and archaeological findings (see Jackson and Castillo 1995). Needless to say, Native memory of the Mission era runs deep. Quite a few autobiographical and oral-historical accounts have been collected over the years, some published, most probably not. Even today, many Indian families have stories, passed down through the generations to the present, that date back to this period.
The text that follows was narrated by Rufino Ochurte, and describes the slow but inexorable process of Spanish enculturation among the Kiliwa down in the Baja Peninsula.[15]
THE FRIARS AT KILIWA
There were “pagan” Indians in this land. They were in these mountains. There was a friar, [but] no one came near him. When they least expected it he would seize one or two people. That's how he used to do it.
All of the people he had done that to went in, and when they had become acquainted they didn't flee anymore. “Well, it's very good, I tell you,” they would report. In that manner one or two more would come in, and so it went until there were many people at the Mission.
The friars would make the people work. When they were disobedient, they whipped them. They gave them corn mush to drink so that they could work. They built houses. But they didn't earn anything. As for food, those with families they paid a sackful of corn. The others ate at the Mission. That's what they used to do. The disobedient ones were seized and beaten and dunked in water.
They used to baptize people. The friar would say, “What I am doing is a good thing. I’m going to do that to the others, also.” The Indians would say, “I don't know about that.” No one came near. It continued
― 555 ―that way. Slowly the friar began to get more people. Everyone knew the friar. Then they were all pacified. They came to the Mission—not many, [just] a few. In that way, people kept arriving.They saw what the friar did and spoke about it. Slowly, more people approached. So many came closer—[but still] not a large number. They would say, “This is queer.” “It's evil,” they said. “You never know,” they said. The people remained at a distance, spread out; the friar pacified them.
Some understood a little Spanish.They translated [for those who didn't]: “He says ‘such-and-such’.” They told the others [about] what the friars did and what they said to those who did not understand. They began understanding one or two words.
The friars would sponsor the unbaptized as godparents. They gathered the non-Christians together.
It seems to me that they should have taught them something. If they had, these people would now be educated. They didn't do that; they just baptized everyone. They deceived these people. They didn't do anything good for them at all.
As this and numerous similar narratives show, even the most dispassionate and even-handed recollections of Spanish encroachment and coercion reveal the essential blindness and insensitivity at the heart of the Mission enterprise, even where large-scale atrocities did not occur.
Of course, California Indians did not take the Spanish assaults on their societies and sovereignty lying down. There must have been active resistance movements and renegade bands all up and down the California coast during the Mission period. Indians did lash back at their oppressors from time to time, though their e orts to control the Spanish were futile in the end. Native accounts of retaliation, like Mary Yee's Barbareño Chumash story of the 1824 Santa Barbara uprising or Lorenzo Asisara's account of the death, in 1812, of Father Quintana at Mission Santa Cruz, are relatively rare.[16] Yet these narratives paint a chilling picture of the prevailing mood of suspicion, threat, and violence that the warped Mission societies induced for everyone involved, Spaniard and Indian alike. Fear, stymied anger, paranoia—and something almost like a continuing disbelief that the Spanish could really commit the kinds of atrocities they did in fact, again and again, commit—these kept the Indians in check just as surely as the Spanish militias did with their muskets, swords, and cannon.
Less than a hundred years after the mission system began spreading
As if these o enses to civil liberties and human rights weren't bad enough, the legislature also allocated huge sums of money to fund military and paramilitary campaigns against Indian communities. The newspapers of the time are full of reports, both pro and con, of the socalled Indian wars. But the term war is misleading: the carnage of these vigilante campaigns was truly bestial in nature, shocking sometimes even to the citizenry they hypocritically claimed to “defend.” Though often decried by reporters, scholars, federal agents, and a few righteous voices among the white community, the state nevertheless saw fit to sponsor them. According to Castillo (1978:108), “Almost any White man could raise a volunteer company, outfit it with guns, ammunition, horses, and supplies, and be reasonably sure that the state government would honor its vouchers.” One of the most infamous of these many actions took place at Clear Lake in 1850 and became known as the Stone and Kelsey Massacre.
Most accounts of hostilities, even when sympathetic to the Indian plight, come from the reports of whites; rarely do we glimpse how the same events looked from an Indian point of view. The Stone and Kelsey Massacre is a notable exception. William Ralganal Benson, an Eastern Pomo man and narrator of the myth of “Creation” (#16) presented earlier in this volume, was born in 1862, some thirteen years after the killings that sparked the massacre, but he knew men who had taken part in the killings, su ered through the retaliation, and survived to tell the tale. To bear their witness, he wrote a detailed account based on their firsthand
one day the lake watchers saw a boat come around the point, som news coming they said to each others. two of the men went to the landing. to see what the news were. they were told that the white warriors had came to kill all the indians around the lake. so hide the best you can. the whites are making boats and with that they are coming up the lake. so they had two men go up on top of uncle sam mountain. the north peak. from there they watch the lower lake. for three days they watch the lake. one morning they saw a long boat came up the lake with pole on the bow with red cloth. and several of them came. every one of the boats had ten to fifteen men. the smoke signal was given by the two watchmen. every indian around the lake knew the soldiers were coming up the lake. and how many of them. and those who were watching the trail saw the infantrys coming over the hill from the lower lake. these two men were watching from ash hill. they went to stones and kelseys house. from there the horsemen went down torge the lake and the soldiers went across the valley torge lakeport. they went on to scotts valley. shoot a few shoots with their big gun and went on to upper lake and camped on Emmerson hill. from there they saw the indian camp on the island. the next morning the white warriors went across in their long dugouts. the indians said they would meet them in peace. so when the whites landed the indians went to wellcome them. but the white man was determined to kill them. Ge-We-Lih said
― 558 ―he threw up his hands and said no harm me good man. but the white man fired and shoot him in the arm and another shoot came and hit a man staning along side of him and was killed. so they had to run and fight back; as they ran back in the tules and hed under the water; four or five of them gave alittle battle and another man was shoot in the shoulder. some of them jumped in the water and hed in the tuleys. many women and children were killed on around this island. one old lady a (indian) told about what she saw while hiding under abank, in under aover hanging tuleys. she said she saw two white man coming with their guns up in the air and on their guns hung a little girl. they brought it to the creek and threw it in the water. and alittle while later, two more men came in the same manner. this time they had alittle boy on the end of their guns and also threw it in the water. alittle ways from her she, said layed awoman shoot through the shoulder. she held her little baby in her arms. two white men came running torge the woman and baby, they stabed the woman and the baby and, and threw both of them over the bank in to the water. she said she heared the woman say, O my baby; she said when they gathered the dead, they found all the little ones were killed by being stabed, and many of the women were also killed stabing. she said it took them four or five days to gather up the dead. and the dead were all burnt on the east side the creek. they called it the siland creek. (Ba-Don-Bi-DaMeh). this old lady also told about the whites hung aman on Emerson siland this indian was met by the soldiers while marching from scotts valley to upper lake. the indian was hung and alarge fire built under the hanging indian. and another indian was caught near Emerson hill. this one was tied to atree and burnt to death.the next morning the solders started for mendocino county. and there killed many indians. the camp was on the ranch now known as Ed Howell ranch. the solders made camp a little ways below, bout one half mile from the indian camp. the indians wanted to surrender, but the solders did not give them time, the solders went in the camp and shoot them down as tho they were dogs. som of them escaped by going down a little creek leading to the river. and som of them hed in the brush. and those who hed in the brush most of them were killed. and those who hed in the water was over looked. they killed mostly women and children.
More than 135 Indians (60 at the island, another 75 along the Russian River) were indiscriminately killed in this campaign, according to the army's own report (Castillo 1978:108). Tribe after tribe during these bad California years came to know what it was like to be hunted down, and
By the 1880s this kind of direct physical assault, this war on Indian peoples and territories, had become more sporadic. In its place came more insidious modes of assault, directed at the languages and cultures themselves. We may think that the recent hysteria over “family values” is a new phenomenon in our public and political discourse. But the American people (that is to say, their legislators, policymakers, educators, and social critics, on their behalf) have long understood the importance of the family in the continuity of culture and preservation of ethnic identity. Unfortunately, this insight has all too often been used for ill as well as good: to disadvantage families—through politically motivated withholding of funds for key social programs in endangered communities, for instance—as well as to help them. The strategy is not new. One of the most devastating (and, sadly, e ective) social policies this country has ever known was aimed at the heart of the Indian family—devised and implemented expressly to ensure its destruction.[18] I refer to the establishment of the federal Indian boarding school system in 1887, the year of the Dawes Act, which mandated the educational model pioneered by Richard Pratt at the Carlisle Industrial Training School in Pennsylvania.[19]
Carlisle-style boarding schools came to California in 1881 with the opening of a school on the Tule River Reservation in Tulare County. Numerous other schools followed over the course of the next twenty years. Given the high value Americans have always placed on education, at least until recently, it may be di‹cult to see the establishment of an Indian educational system as a destructive act. But when you consider that Indian children, by decree of state and federal law, were taken from their families (sometimes forcibly) and sent o to distant boarding schools where they were forbidden to speak their languages under penalty of physical punishment, where local white households could buy their labor as domestic servants for a pittance (Pratt 1964), and where the integrity of their Native culture was systematically demeaned—well, it's not so hard to see the destructive potential of such a program. Imagine, too, what it felt like for helpless parents to see their children taken from them, as if into custody, though they'd done no wrong; or what it felt like for the children themselves, frightened and homesick, stolen from their families and put down in a barracks with strange bunkmates far from home, to be whip-taught an alien standard by teachers who too often considered
What the boarding schools were most e ective at killing was not the spirit of Native peoples—though the toll was heavy, the spirit survived—but their languages. As with a flame, as with a species, all it takes to extinguish a language forever is an interruption, however brief—just one broken link in the chain of transmission. And so it was that the generation “attending” the boarding schools during the first decades of the twentieth century turned out to be the last generation of speakers for hundreds of native languages across the United States. What may come as a surprise, though, is the conscious role this generation of parents took in the demise. The following personal reminiscence shows how the schoolinstilled psychology of persecution and humiliation could have brought this about. Few recollections could spell out the connection between language extinction and the boarding school experience as clearly as this one does. Elsie Allen, the narrator and a renowned Central Pomo basketmaker, was born in 1899 and got sent to Covelo Indian School in 1911. Her account, taken from an interview published in News from Native California in 1989, demonstrates just how successful the boarding schools were at alienating Indian children from their own cultures, especially their languages.[20]
BOARDING SCHOOL
When I went to school at that time [to the boarding school at Covelo,] there were three girls there from Hopland. I already knew some of their
― 561 ―language, it's a di erent dialect from mine. I couldn't talk the English language in the school at Covelo, so I hollered at them when we lined up. Then one of the girls that was in my line reported me. They took me and strapped the heck out of me with a big leather strap. I didn't know what I got strapped for. Three days later those girls told me it was for talking the Indian language on the grounds, which I’m not supposed to do.I was eleven years old [when I went to Covelo], and every night I cried and then I’d lay awake and think and think and think. I’d think to myself, “If I ever get married and have children I’ll never teach my children the language or all the Indian things that I know. I’ll never teach them that, I don't want my children to be treated like they treated me.” That's the way I raised my children. Everybody couldn't understand that, they always asked me about it in later years. My husband has a di erent language. He can't understand me, but I learned his language much faster. I can talk it too, but I never taught my children. That's why they don't know. [My daughter] can understand it, but she can't speak the language.
In later years I found lots of ways they could have taught me in school but they didn't. They just put me in a corner and gave me a card with a lot of holes in it and a needle and yarn. They didn't say, “This is a needle.” I would if I was teaching, if the child didn't know. Nobody said that. Well, I guess they just thought I was dumb or deaf or something. They treated me just like I was deaf and dumb. I was eleven years old, I wasn't a little kid, a baby. It should be easy to teach a person like that, but they didn't.
How I got to school in Covelo was every year the agent of the government school came around in the fall of the year and gathered the children to take them to the school. My mother signed a paper for me to go up there. In the morning [after a two-day trip to Covelo by wagon, flatbed railroad car, stage coach, and gravel wagon with six other children from the Hopland/Ukiah area], I just kind of stood around and watched the other girls, what they were doing and where to go. I didn't know what to say. I think I only knew two words of English, “yes” and “no.” I never got to ask my mother why she sent me like that when I didn't know the English language.
I was scared, I had no one to talk to [because no one spoke my dialect]. That was sure hard. I felt that if I said something or fought against how we were treated, they might kill me. I cried every night. I couldn't talk to anybody or ask anybody anything because I didn't know how to. I was so dumb, that's the way I felt. They knew that I couldn't understand, so nobody talked to me. I was the only one that had my language.
― 562 ―California, because of its great diversity of languages, was perhaps especially a ected by the federal program, as Elsie Allen's story suggests. Her experience—of doing time in communicative solitary confinement, not knowing anyone who shared her mother tongue—must have been a common one in California's gagged but polyglot boarding schools.[21]
In the end, though, governments and would-be conquistadores always underestimate the capacity of the human spirit to endure. Despite these two centuries and more of persecution and cultural devastation, California Indians have survived, their cultures strained and changed, but with the heart intact.
REVIVAL: A CALIFORNIA RENAISSANCE
Today in California, Native people and their cultures are experiencing a revival, a renaissance. Language is often at the center of the new interest, seen in some ways as the “book” in which the deep patterns of a culture, the life and heart's blood, are written. In language lies continuity with the past. It holds the keys to religion, ritual and ceremony, philosophy, art, song and story, healing, traditional crafts, and, through placenames, a centuries-deep sense of place. After all the decades of scorn and disparagement—and in the boarding schools, of active suppression—by white civilization, Indians are once again looking to their languages with pride. The turn has come not a moment too soon (and indeed, too late for real recovery in all too many cases). In the remainder of this essay, I will try as much as possible to allow those most closely involved in this revival to speak for themselves.
At a conference on Pomoan languages held in 1994, Edna Guerrero, a Northern Pomo elder, tells of her frustration and her commitment to the cause of language preservation:[22]
My language is the thing that has always meant a lot to me. I became interested in it more and more because I resented the remarks made by (what we say) the white man. They say we grunted and nothing else; there were no words. And I thought to myself, “How can you [the white man] say that these people grunt, when there's an entire conversation being carried on in words that they [the Indians] understand!”
― 563 ―But now people are running around trying to find the languages … [S]o much of it is gone and will never be recovered … It's tragic. I think the young people are just beginning to realize what a tragedy it is. A wellknown philosopher once said that when people lose their language, they lose their identity. You're nobody. And this is very true because the majority do not speak their language … What can be done about it? Where are you going to find the people that speak the language? There's no one left anymore. …
It's all that's interested me and I’ve done my best to preserve my share of it, and I hope that someone will benefit from it … I hope they continue … I don't know … That's all I can say. I’ve done the best I can; it's up to the rest.
Edna Guerrero speaks for many California elders, past and present, who have felt the same sense of loss and mystified resentment and have dedicated their energies to doing what they can to preserve their languages. More and more younger people have been taking up her challenge, following in these elders’ footsteps. Nancy Richardson, in a 1992 essay, “The State of Our Languages,” describes the dire situation this current generation of revivalists face, now that the torch is being passed:[23]
Since the first contact between the indigenous people of California and the western world, the original language and culture of this land have been endangered. Language has declined in a rapid, downward spiral from the very onset of that first contact. In my own experience, I have watched this painful loss of language in my tribe, the Karuk. In the early’ 70s, I began an optimistic journey of language work, recognizing and valuing the beauty and uniqueness found within my language. Twenty years ago, I kept hearing the language must be saved for the future. With 150 strong, fluent, tenacious Karuk elders in the background in those days, the urgency was not so apparent.
As I paid my last respects to my elders, one after another, as they crossed over to the next world, I began to directly feel the impact and the loss. I remember in 1981, how angry I was when Daisy Jacobs, 111, passed away. I thought, “How dare she die at one hundred and eleven. My work is not finished! I have so much still to learn from her.” Then a few years later, when my teacher and the medicine man of the tribe, Shan Davis, passed away at a relatively early age, I was forced to come to terms with the reality of the situation. The details of this reality were simple, in that the death of each elder, each fluent speaker, was the death of my language.
― 564 ―The death of our language was inevitable and terminal … without new birth.
[The] Karuk language is considered by linguists and anthropologists as one of the oldest languages in California, spoken for many thousands of years, belonging to one particular place and one particular people. It is at the brink of extinction in the very immediate future, if drastic measures are not taken to reverse this trend. Currently there are 12 elderly fluent speakers of the Karuk language and approximately 40 more semi-fluent speakers at varying levels of speech competency. The Karuk language has reached a critical state. All of the languages in California have reached a similar state of language loss or passed beyond it.
Without immediate and proactive intervention, the majority of California's surviving native languages are doomed to extinction within the next twenty years. Richardson, along with dozens of other language activists, is keenly aware of this threat, but has taken it as a challenge, not a fait accompli. Her essay concludes with her hopes for the future:
In California, the children that are being born today are the seventh generation since first European contact. From out of this seventh generation will come the next fluent speakers of the indigenous languages of California. The number may be great or small; one alone is invaluable. But this e ort will not be easy—it will involve a lot of work, commitment as well as courage and faith. It is a grim situation, that we as the indigenous people of California must face head on, yet I have no sadness, only faith. I look forward optimistically to the innovative challenges and the unknown possibilities.
One of the most promising of recent e orts to turn things around is California's own Master/Apprentice Language Learning Program. (The MALLP is conducted and administered by the Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival [AICLS], which is an affiliate of the Seventh Generation Fund, an important umbrella organization for a number of Native American activist groups.) Nancy Richardson was one of the program's founding forces, along with people like Ray Baldy (Hupa), Mark Macarro (Luiseño), L. Frank Manriquez (Tongva/ Acagchme), Parris Butler (Mojave), Darlene Franco (Wukchumni), Leanne Hinton, and others. Since its first season in 1993, the Master/ Apprentice program has initiated training sessions for more than seventy
The AICLS, part of a larger revival that includes the California Indian Basketweavers Association and the California Indian Storytelling Association,[24] has initiated a number of other projects as well. One of these is the “Breath of Life” Native California Language Restoration Workshop, first held in 1996 at Berkeley and targeted at languages that now exist only in “fieldnote form.”[25] The workshop answers a problem that the Master/ Apprentice program, which presumes the existence of elders who still speak the language, cannot address. The problem is that not all tribal communities are lucky enough to have any native speakers left, and those who seek their languages must rely on the fieldnotes, recordings, and publications of the linguists who worked with the last generation of fluent elders. There are thirty or so such languages in California, languages that are sometimes described as “merely sleeping” (Hinton 1996). With this kind of proactive involvement, intelligence, and determination driving the California language revival movement, there is once again hope for the future of California's Native tongues.
There is still a long, long way to go, however, and California's remaining indigenous languages are not out of danger, by any stretch of the imagination. In truth, many of these flickering flames will yet be extinguished, despite the best e orts of Native communities and scholars combined. But the all-important start has been made, and at this point, it is only the road that matters. The people, programs, and communities fighting for their linguistic and cultural survival need all the help, understanding, and encouragement they can get. Which languages will survive and which pass into memory? No one knows. With the struggle for revival just enjoined, it is too soon to write the final chapter on California native languages. And with cooperation, faith, and hard work, that chapter will never need to be written. Here, in California at the beginning of the twenty-first century, in the seventh generation since European contact, we can find a new and thankful—if unintended—meaning in Villiana Calac Hyde's lovely translation of the Luiseño “Chalááwaat Song”:
| Tásmomaytal nevétiqankwa, | |
| táá$utal chulúpiqankwa. | |
| ’áá, temét nóó nevétqankwa, | |
| temét nóó chulúpiqankwa. |
| I suppose I’ve survived the first little month, | |
| I suppose I’ve survived the first big month. | |
| Oh, I am surviving through the days, | |
| I am surviving through the days. |
NOTES
1. For a summary of the most recent data on language survival, see Hinton's “Living California Indian Languages” in her book Flutes of Fire (1994a); map 5 generalizes some of the information in this article.
2. Unfortunately, language diversity is not celebrated in all quarters. Beginning with Senator S. I. Hayakawa, California has seen more than its share of “English-Only” referendums in recent years. See Hinton's “The Native American Languages Act” in Flutes of Fire (Hinton 1994a). For a wider discussion of such matters, see James Crawford's book Language Loyalties(1992) or visit his website (http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/JWCRAWFORD/). The University of Northern Arizona maintains a web-page on “Teaching Indigenous Languages” (http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~jar/TIL.html) that contains a variety of links and resources related to this topic as well.
3. William Shipley's essay, “Native Languages of California” (Shipley 1978), in the California volume of the Smithsonian's Handbook of North American Indians—an indispensable reference found in most libraries—is probably the most accessible and concise scholarly introduction to the language families of California. For those with some linguistic training, there are detailed chapters on California language families in Lyle Campbell and Marianne Mithun's The Languages of Native America (1979) and the Smithsonian's Handbook of North American Indians (volume 17: Languages, ed. by Ives Goddard, 1996). I merely provide a general orientation here.
4. The names for these superstocks are separately based on similarities for the number ‘two’ within the languages of the individual families. For instance, the Atsugewi word hoqi (compare Achumawi hak’, Shasta xokwa, Chimariko xok'u, Diegueño xawok, and Salinan hakic, all meaning ‘two’) gives rise to the term Hokan. (The phonetic letter [x] represents a velar fricative—the hard, h-like
5. Uto-Aztecan languages are found throughout the Great Basin and American Southwest (languages like Paiute, Shoshone, and Hopi) and in Mexico (Yaqui, Nahuatl, Huichol, and Pipil, to name a few). The main branch of Algic is Algonquian—a very large and widespread family of languages concentrated in the East (Delaware, Micmac, Abenaki, Passamaquoddy), the Midwest (Shawnee, Kickapoo, Fox, Potawatomi), and fanning west across Canada (Ojibwa and the great Cree continuum); the Ritwan languages, Wiyot and Yurok, are the two California representatives of this superstock. The large Athabascan family, part of the Na-Dené superstock (Haida, Tanaina, Koyukon, Carrier, Chilcotin, Dogrib, Chipewyan, and Umpqua, to name a few), is primarily concentrated in the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, and the Canadian North. Navajo and Apache are southwestern “walkabouts” of this same family.
6. And probably Chumashan as well, if Chumash proves to be unrelatable to other so-called Hokan languages. Yukian has long been chalked up as an isolate family, but Chumash, until recently, was presumed to be a member of the Hokan superstock. Current research, encouraged by a large-scale examination of Harrington's vast Chumash corpora now under way at the University of California, Santa Barbara, suggests that this long-standing assumption (going at least back to Sapir 1925) is becoming increasingly di‹cult to maintain (Foster 1996:86). Indeed, recent classifications (Ives Goddard 1996) do not include either Chumashan or Esselen within the proposed Hokan grouping. However, the dust has yet to settle on this reevaluation.
7. Foster's (1996) Handbook discussion of California linguistic prehistory, in “Language and the Culture History of North America,” is an extremely valuable overview of the field, and I have relied heavily on his synthesis of past and present scholarship in the account that follows. (See especially his sections on Yukian, Hokan, Penutian, and Uto-Aztecan, pp. 83–95.) Other useful resources include Shipley (1978), Wallace (1978a), Whistler (1977b), and Moratto (1984).
8. Should conclusive linguistic evidence for the Hokan grouping remain beyond the reach of our methodological grasp, the term Hokan may yet survive as a kind of shorthand for referring to some of these “Old California” languages and language families. Indeed, informed speculation (for example, Moratto 1984) associates ancestral Yukian and “Hokan” peoples with the ancient Western Fluted Point tradition, which dates to 9,000–10,000 b.p.
9. This model of Penutian southern expansion echoes what has come to be called the “Multiple Entry Hypothesis.” A great deal of new work has come out in the past couple of decades (see Foster 1996 for summary and orientation),
Furthermore, if Mike Nichols (1981) is correct, and the long and complex Pre-Uto-Aztecan dispersal can in fact be traced out of the Basin and Southwest, back through the Central Valley and Southern Sierra and north toward Oregon, then it may have been Pre-Uto-Aztecan peoples who actually pioneered the ancient Penutian route south out of Oregon, down through the river systems of northern California, and into the Central Valley and foothills of the Sierra, long before the ancestral Yokutsan, Utian, and Wintuan peoples, who by turns followed in their footsteps.
10. The southern distribution of Hokan, in the form of Yuman-family languages, continues down into the Baja peninsula with PaiPai and Kiliwa, and back into the Southwest with the other Yuman tribes (Havasupai, Walapai, Yavapai, and Maricopa). There are also distant “Hokan” languages in Mexico: for instance, Seri and Chontal-Oaxaca.
11. California Uto-Aztecan groups include Tataviam; Tübatulabal in the mountain foothills; the Takic group (Luiseño, Gabrielino, and Juaneño along the coast; Serrano, Kitanemuk, Cupeño, and Cahuilla inland); and the Numic group (Mono, Owens Valley Paiute, Panamint, Kawaiisu, Southern Paiute, and Chemehuevi) out in the Basin proper, beyond the boundaries of the California culture area per se. For discussions of California Uto-Aztecan prehistory, see Bean and Smith (1978), Nichols (1981), Moratto (1984), and Foster (1996).
12. The discussion here owes much to Johanna Nichol's pioneering work on the geographical aspects of linguistic diversity, Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time (1992).
13. In e ect, this tendency holds true even within California itself. The linguistically least diverse area of California—the desert territories of its closely related Uto-Aztecan tribes—is also the most inhospitable.
14. I would urge the interested reader to look for Robert Heizer's The Destruction of California Indians (1993), Robert H. Jackson and Edward Castillo's Indians, Franciscans, and Spanish Colonization: The Impact of the Mission System on California Indians (1995), Rupert and Jeannette Henry Costo's The Missions of California: A Legacy of Genocide (1987), and Albert Hurtado's Indian Survival on the California Frontier (1988), among other works on this subject.
15. This account is taken from Mauricio Mixco's “Kiliwa Texts.” The only editorial liberties I have taken—as this is not a technical publication—is to remove the brackets and clause numbers from Mixco's free translation and supply occasional punctuation marks where they seemed appropriate. The bracketted
16. Yee's narrative, which was brought to my attention by linguist Suzanne Wash, was collected in the 1930s by J. P. Harrington; it is unpublished, but may be found among Harrington's voluminous Barbareño fieldnotes at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. Asisara's account, collected in 1877 but dating to 1818, is reprinted in Malcolm Margolin's The Way We Lived.
17. Margolin reprints Benson's account in its entirety in The Way We Lived: California Indian Stories, Songs, and Reminiscences (1993).
18. True, many of the most disastrous Indian policies and programs were conceived with “the best of intentions.” It's just hard to understand, today, how a program that intentionally dismembers families can be seen in a humanitarian light. We are left with a historical view of a society so blinded by its own presuppositions and prejudices that up is seen as down, and a sow's ear is taken for a purse of gold. Let our forebears be a lesson to us today, where such reactionary and mean-spirited public policies as immigrant health-care bans or English Only movements are concerned, and examine our ethnic legislations with a true humanitarian eye.
19. See Hamley 1994 for a comprehensive treatment of the history and cultural e ects of the federal boarding school system.
20. News from Native California 4.1 (1989):40–41. The interview was conducted by Vic Bedoian and Roberta Llewellyn, and transcribed by Vera Mae Fredrickson.
21. Margolin, in a postscript to this interview as excerpted in The Way We Lived, writes: “Elsie Allen did have children, and true to her resolve she, like so many of her generation, did not teach them her Pomo language. She did, however, become a masterful weaver of baskets, and until her death in 1990 she was tremendously important in passing along traditional skills and knowledge to her children and to many others” (1993:183).
22. From an article published in News from Native California 8.4 (1994): 40.
23. This essay appeared in The Advocate (the newsletter of the Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival), published as an inset to News from Native California 7.1 (winter 1992–1993): 40–41.
24. See Lauren Teixeira's “California Indian Stories and the Spirit” in News from Native California 9.4 (1996).
25. See Leanne Hinton's “Breath of Life/Silent No More: The Native California Language Restoration Workshop” in News from Native California 10.1 (1996). Sixteen languages were represented: Rumsien, Mutsun, Awaswas, Coast Miwok, Patwin, Nomlaki, Nisenan, Central Pomo, Northern Pomo, Chimariko, Salinan, Ventureño Chumash, Tongva (Gabrielino), Ajachmem (Juaneño), Wiyot, and Mattole.