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2. ESSAYS ON NATIVE CALIFORNIA LANGUAGES AND ORAL LITERATURES

	The acorns come down from heaven.
	I plant the short acorns in the valley,
	I plant the long acorns in the valley,
	I sprout:
	I, the black-oak acorn, sprout—
	I sprout.

Ceremonial acorn song, Maidu Stephen Powers, Tribes of California

 

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WHEN I HAVE DONNED MY CREST OF STARS

	The deeds of the people,
	the way they were,
	the people who spoke those things are heard no longer.
	This will surely be the end of all that.
	Those things that were said are no longer heard.
	None have lasted beyond.
	Those who continue beyond into the future
	will surely say the same about me,
	when I have gone o wearing my crest of stars.
	Nevertheless,
	what I’ve said and the way I have been
	will remain in this land.

Kiliwa, Rufino Ochurte, 1969 Mauricio Mixco, Kiliwa Texts

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28. A Brief History of Collection

SALVAGE

In October of 1914, James Alden Mason, an anthropologist at the University of California at Berkeley, made a brief fieldtrip down to the Santa Cruz area in an e ort to locate speakers of Costanoan, a group of closely related languages spoken, at the time of European contact, roughly from the San Francisco Bay down to Big Sur along the coast and coastal foothills. He was hoping to find fluent speakers who still used the language in everyday life and who could provide him with wordlists and grammatical information and texts—information that could help him answer questions about the structure of the language and the nature of its relationship to neighboring languages and develop a better picture of Costanoan mythology and culture. It wasn't much of an expedition—more of an overnight trip, really—but its outcome speaks volumes about the critical condition of California's native languages, both then and now, and provides insight into the imperatives of the collecting endeavor itself. When Mason returned from his trip, he filed the following report with his department head, A. L. Kroeber.^[1]

REPORT

Reached San Juan in early evening. In morning had a talk with priest of mission and several other oldest inhabitants of the place. All agreed that there were no Indians remaining in San Juan, that the few remaining ones had sold their lands and moved to Gilroy where land seemed to be a little cheaper. Consequently decided to go to Gilroy. Reached there

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about 2.00 and hunted up Acension Solorsan, an elderly Indian woman.^[2] She claimed to know absolutely nothing but referred me to a very old woman, Josefa Velasquez in Watsonville. As prospects seemed a little better there, went to Watsonville and arrived there in early evening.

Wednesday morning went out to see Dona Josefa. She lives out East Lake St. about a half hour's walk out on the road to Morgan Hill, at the first horse trough. Is an old woman born at Santa Cruz in 1833 but reared in the ranches around Watsonville. A stay of several days with her might reveal many important points of interest but she remembers very little and very slowly. Spoke the San Juan dialect originally but has had no one to talk to for many years so forgets most of it. Verified many of de la Cuesta's words which are surprisingly accurate and got a few sentences and other words but very little. Also got a myth herewith included. After several hours of work she professed to know many myths, songs, dances, etc. Returned in the afternoon and, while she continued to insist that she knew many myths, etc., she was unable to recall one all afternoon. I got a few more words, phrases and two Yokuts gambling songs from María Gomez who lives with her. I am inclined to think that with a few days[’] experience the old woman could be induced to tell many myths and songs, possibly in text, but they came so slowly at the beginning I decided it was not worth while trying again.

She insisted that Acension in Gilroy knew more than she, but claimed, like all others, that these two [herself and Acension] were the only living persons who remembered anything of the language and customs. Refugio Castello spoke it well, and so did Barbara Solarsan, the mother of Acension, but these two died no more than three years ago. I could learn of no other old or middle-aged Indian in the whole country.

So Thursday morning I returned to Gilroy to see Acension again. She was born in San Juan in 1855 and her mother, who died only a few years ago[,] spoke the language well. But she [Acension] never knew it well and has not spoken it for years. With di‹culty I got from her a few phrases and sentences, words[,] and corroboration of many of de la Cuesta's words[,] but as she remembered very little, I decided the result was not worth the while and took the afternoon train home. With practice she might be taught to give texts but she undoubtedly remembers very little. She knows much less than Josefa, though her memory is a little better. Jacinta Gonzales died a few years ago.

Attached to this sad report were approximately two pages of elicitation labeled “San Juan words and phrases.” The wordlist was followed by two

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Yokuts gambling songs and a page of desultory ethnological notes—precious little return for the hours spent in gleaning them.

Mason's dejected, disappointed tone is impossible to mistake. Yet what modern reader will not be dismayed that he did not stay with Doña Josefa for as long as it took to rekindle her memory and revive her former fluency? She was one of the last speakers of her language. Whatever myths and legends she might have been helped to recall, whatever songs she might have resurrected, whatever poetry she might have spun from reminiscences long locked away in her rusty native tongue, they are gone now, completely. “Later” is not a reliable option when your best consultant is eighty-one years of age. Surely he gave up too easily.

But when the house is afire, to use J. P. Harrington's famous metaphor, you have to rescue what can best be saved.^[3] Mason judged that his limited time and energies were best spent elsewhere, working with other languages, other consultants, where the knowledge lay closer to the surface. In 1914 in California, a mere sixty-some years—a single life-span, in fact—after the ethnic catastrophe of the Gold Rush, fieldwork was too often an exercise in linguistic and cultural triage.^[4] It is no less true today, and will be again tomorrow: the last, best generation of elders is always just passing through their children's hands.

So Mason returned to San Francisco disappointed in his slim pickings and no doubt depressed at finding yet another age-old California culture in such dire straits. In the midst of his notes, though, lies a scrap of text recorded in the form of a mock letter, unremarked at the time but for an oblique reference to “a few sentences” in the second paragraph of his report. I present the text just as it appears in Mason's report, surrounded by a portion of the wordlist it was embedded in.

kanŝa' wi	I sing
wa' ti$$ ka	I am going
aru·' ta kawa' ti$$	tomorrow I will go
wak$i$ŝaŝ	coyote
u'mu$$	wolf
wa' ti$$ ka u' rŝi$$ kaniŝ e'kwe ni'pa	I am going because you will not teach me
e'kwe kahi' nŝu	I don't know
hi¯nue e'kwe kahi' n∘u	when I don't know
hi' nua kamŝit haiwe'	when will I see you?
e'kwe kamiŝie' te oiŝu hai' we	I will not see you again

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mi' ŝmin noŝo' miŝho'ke hose'fa ko$$' men.e'kwe Dear heart, thee sends Josefa. Says thou not

pe'ŝio hose'fa ŝe katawa·'k haiput$$u'hiŝ remember Josefa of as she every day.

hi' nuakŝe wakiat$$’a'kan miŝ hai'weni Some day she will come, thee to see

kutceke'kwe se'mon a'ram miŝminsire' mensi'tnumak if not dies. Give thy regards thy children.

hu' mit$$ tapu'r	give me wood!
ŝu' nesteka	I am hungry
a' maix
ŝu' nieŝteka	Ah! how I love
hi' nuame t$$a' kan	when will you come?
e´kwe ka meŝ hole nipa	I cannot teach you
ni ekwe semon mumuri	here the flies won't die
xutceknis	dog
ekwe ka pe' sio kanri·'tca	I don't remember my language

A free translation of Doña Josefa's long-lost message runs as follows:^[5]

	Dear heart,
	Josefa sends this to you!
	She says you don't remember her, Josefa,
	as she is every day.
	When will she come to see you—
	before she dies?
	Give me good wishes,
	you and your children!

What prompted Josefa Velasquez to compose this “letter” we'll never know. Probably Mason, in a desperate attempt to jump-start her dormant fluency, had asked Doña Josefa what she would say to family and friends if he were to carry back the message in Costanoan.^[6] Whatever he

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was hoping for, he got a brief, emotional burst from the heart, straight from the ragbag of an old woman's worries and cares. It wasn't much, as texts go, and I’m sure Mason would have regarded his attempt as a failure. But today this little text has acquired such a force of eloquence, of poignancy, over the long years it has lain forgotten in the archives, that it fairly cracked open my brain like a nut when I stumbled across it—a voice from the past, leaping out from the detritus of a musty wordlist's bits and shards. Because it's all there was, and because it rings true, a kind of greatness is thrust upon it, the unintended plainsong of an old woman's words.

California has a rich and spectacular oral-literary heritage, as this book attests. But sometimes literature is simply where you find it, or when. Indeed, in the absence of any form of text at all, the wordlists themselves—mother, father, acorn, sun—take on an importance, a luminosity, well beyond their original mundane intention: they are the atoms of lost poetics.

WORKERS IN THE VINEYARD

Men and women, J. A. Mason among them, have been collecting and analyzing California myth, song, and ceremony for nearly two centuries in an eort to preserve the traditions before they are gone forever.^[7] Yet I don't mean to give the wrong impression in stating this fact. Though commonplace in the discourse of Native American studies, such pronouncements throw the spotlight always onto the role of the fieldworker, the local historian, the interested amateur collector—an “outsider” role typically played by whites of European descent. Such statements tend to ignore the role of the performers themselves, who gave them the songs and stories in the first place. The performers, too, have dedicated their lives to preserving their traditions—but their eorts go back, ultimately, more than ten millennia in California: a hundred centuries of listening, learning, practicing, performing—and yes, refining, forgetting, adapting, and composing anew—the traditions that have passed from one generation to the next across the long reaches of time.

It is a mistake, and a bad one, to think that the act of recording in any way marks the culmination or fulfillment, much less the validation, of any given song or story. The arrival of a folklorist with microphone

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or notebook is not the “moment it's been waiting for”—as if, once it is written down, the people whose culture it portrays can breathe a sigh of relief and turn their attentions to something else. Writing a story down merely makes a record of its passing, like a single line of footprints tracked in the sand along a shore.^[8] We all know just how much and how little that track can teach us. Nevertheless, without the collectors and their passion for writing things down, students of language and oral literature the world over—Native Californians included—would have less to marvel at, take pleasure in, draw wisdom from, and find beauty in.

Prior to the establishment of the University of California's Museum and Department of Anthropology at Berkeley in 1901, there was no systematic program of ethnographic research or collection in California—only a handful of men over the years who, driven by their interests, tried to record the folklore and verbal art of California narrators, and to do so faithfully (at least within the dictates of their era and training) rather than interpretively. Among the most important of these early works are Father Geronimo Boscana's record of Juaneño myth and religious ceremony, Chinigchinich (1933 [1846]); Alexander Taylor's enthusiastic but somewhat erratic series of articles on “Indianology” between 1860 and 1863 in The California Farmer and Journal of Useful Arts (an early California periodical conveniently owned by his father-in-law); Stephen Powers's important, indefatigable early work in Northern California during the 1870s, which culminated in his now badly dated Tribes of California(1877); and Jeremiah Curtin's large collection of Wintu and Yana myths in English (1898). Aside from these few mostly amateur collectors, prior to 1900 we have little but the passing anecdotal reports of travelers, settlers, and journalists, the occasional words and place-names recorded by early explorers (nautical expeditions by Cabrillo in 1542–1543 and Drake in 1579; overland explorations by Portolá in 1769, Frémont in 1846, and others), and the vocabularies and grammars compiled by Franciscan missionaries (for instance, de la Cuesta's early Salinan vocabulary [1825], or the later Costanoan materials [1861–1862] mentioned above in Mason's report).

With the dawn of the twentieth century, we enter a new stage in the documentation of California's native oral literature. Kroeber's Department of Anthropology was founded in 1901 with the specific goal of focusing and accelerating research on California cultures and languages—a goal that matured rapidly and with resounding success.^[9] The next few

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decades saw a great explosion of scholars, students, and independent fieldworkers who contributed significantly to the corpus of California oral literature. In addition to Kroeber himself, these included such nowlegendary collectors as Pliny Earl Goddard, Roland B. Dixon, Samuel Barrett, C. Hart Merriam, John Peabody Harrington, Carobeth Laird, Edward Sapir, Constance Du Bois, Edward W. Gi ord, T. T. Waterman, Paul Radin, James A. Mason, Helen R. Roberts, Jaime de Angulo, L. S. Freeland, Susan Brandenstein Park, Dorothy Demetracopoulou, Anna Gayton, Stanley Newman, Gladys Reichard, Hans J⊘rgen Uldall, C. F. Voegelin, and Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin. A search through the published (and unpublished) work of any one of these researchers will lead the reader directly to important primary sources of California myth, song, and storytelling.

What distinguishes the work of these collectors from those who came before, and from the sundry amateur collectors who have tried their hand at presenting Indian stories in memoirs and magazines, is their attention to the actual words, not merely the gist, of the performances they recorded. All aspired to rigorous Boasian principles of textual documentation, and most had the phonetic training to take down texts in the original language, word-for-word as the narrator pronounced them. As a result of this care, this teneted belief in the primacy of the spoken word, the texts they later published from their fieldnotes are accurate records of actual narrative performances, not ex post facto re-creations of remembered events.^[10] When it comes to the translations, of course, these are subject, like all translations the world over, to the whims of personal and period style—compare, say, Edward Sapir's translations from the Yana, made in 1910, with Jaime de Angulo's translations of Eastern Pomo (#16), made just twenty-five years later. But the texts themselves, the true legacy, stand always in testament to, or judgment of, their translators.^[11]

Most of this early authoritative work was done by hand, laboriously, by taking manual dictation, a process that has stylistic consequences for the performance thus recorded. (See table 2 in the “General Introduction” for a list of the selections in this volume that were recorded by this and other methods.) A few researchers, notably J. P. Harrington, experimented with the early sound-recording technology, such as wax or wire cylinders and aluminum phonograph discs. Because of the awkwardness of the devices themselves—they were expensive, heavy, finicky, fragile,

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limited in capacity, and low in fidelity—machine recording was the exception rather than the rule. Kroeber and his colleagues at Berkeley made a great many recordings at the university, but the early machines were seldom practicable for use in the field (though Jack Marr, one of Harrington's intrepid young assistants, tells some hair-raising tales of trying to backpack phonographs and heavy cartons of aluminum discs across swaying rope bridges in the mountains of Northern California, on assignment from Harrington to reach important narrators).

The side e ects of manual dictation on style are easy to predict: the pen, being slower by far than the voice, forces delivery to a crawl; at this slower pace, it is easy for narrators to lose the thread of their composition; longer, more complex sentence patterns may not be ventured, being rejected in favor of shorter, more direct phrasings that better suit the dribs-and-drabs progress of the dictation; and because it takes so long, there is a strong tendency toward truncation, so that the elaborate rhetorical patterns of episodic and incremental repetition that often characterize oral poetics are suppressed in the interests of economy. (The approach of evening after a grueling day of dictation must have hastened many a grand tale to a premature conclusion.) Time and again, though, in the earlier decades of this century, California's tribal narrators, answering the call of posterity, somehow managed to adjust to the limitations and artificiality of the work, minimizing its deleterious e ects, and to deliver performances that transcended the special circumstances of their recording. In this volume, Jo Bender's “Loon Woman” (#12), William Benson's “Creation” (#16), and Johnny LaMarr's “Naponoha” (#9) all illustrate narrators who rose magnificently above the limitations of the collection methods of the time (though it remains true: we can still never know what performances they might have delivered had they been working with a tape recorder instead of dictation).

Later, when portable recording equipment became widely available, the dictation problem was e ectively eliminated. But comparison of dictated and tape-recorded texts reveals that there is still an enormous range and diversity of style and helps validate the essential (if not the particular) stylistic integrity of the older texts. For instance, Minnie Reeves's crisply told “The Boy Who Grew Up at Ta'k’imilding” (#6a) and James Knight's wonderfully loose, rambling version of “The Dead People's Home” (#19) are both from tape-recorded texts. Similarly, Margaret Harrie's blunt “Coyote and Old Woman Bullhead” (#4) and Joe Homer's

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densely detailed “An Account of Origins” (#27) are both from dictated texts.

Nevertheless, the advent of tape recording ushered in a new era in the collection of California oral literature. Under Mary Haas's direction of Berkeley's new Department of Linguistics, inaugurated in 1953, a new

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generation of researchers, trained in anthropological linguistics, began working the field. The tape recording of texts became the rule rather than the exception. (Nowadays, of course, videotaping is gradually becoming the new standard of documentation.) In 1951 Haas and Murray Emeneau founded the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages (initially as “The Survey of California Indian Languages”), which has sponsored research and archived tapes, fieldnotes, and other linguistic materials through the present day.^[12] Inspired directly or indirectly by Haas and her colleagues and successors, dozens of students and scholars have made a vocation of California languages—among them Richard Applegate, Thomas Blackburn, William Bright, Sylvia Broadbent, Catherine Callaghan, James Crawford, Jon Dayley, Geo Gamble, Victor Golla, Abe Halpern, Jane Hill, Ken Hill, Leanne Hinton, William Jacobsen, Richard Keeling, Martha Kendall, Kathryn Klar, Sidney Lamb, Margaret Langdon, Sally McLendon, Wick Miller, Mauricio Mixco, Julius Moshinsky, Pamela Munro, Mike Nichols, Mark Okrand, Robert Oswalt, Harvey Pitkin, R. H. Robins, Alice Shepherd, Hans Jacob Seiler, William Shipley, Shirley Silver, Len Talmy, Karl Teeter, Russell Ultan, and Ken Whistler.^[13] Most of these scholars, in trying to honor Haas's demanding documentational goal of “grammar, texts, and dictionary,” have made it a point to collect and publish oral-literary texts.

In the end, this storehouse of work recalls for us the hundreds of California singers and storytellers (without whom, nothing) who have dedicated their time and services—their personal repertoires, their cultural insight, their performing skills, and (perhaps above all) their patience—to the program of documentation over the last hundred years and more. Some were undoubtedly attracted to the idea initially by the pay, since it is customary for fieldworkers to compensate their consultants with a modest hourly wage. But truth be known, most would have carried on the work regardless. All too many elders have looked around to find themselves increasingly alone in language, among the last native speakers of their tribes, and they become as anxious as their linguists to help document its richness and repertoire before they themselves pass on.

Most language consultants, young or old, have a keen sense of posterity when it comes to the work they do. As James Knight observed, speaking “through” the tape in an aside while telling “The Dead People's Home” (#19), he had a compelling reason for recording his stories:

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	Because that's how it was,
	that's how they taught me.
	Since they explained it to me that way,
	here's what I’m telling you now.
	Now I’m putting what they told me a long time ago onto the tape.
	So it [the tape] is telling you this.
	My friends and relatives can listen and say,
	“Yes, this is true.”

Besides, singers and storytellers like to sing and tell stories. And the work they do with their field researchers often gives them the opportunity to focus on their art in a new way. Many also enjoy the intellectual pursuit of glossing and explicating their texts once they are recorded, and excel at this kind of linguistic work; others find the “drudge” work of analysis a burden to be avoided if possible. Of course, the sense of posterity “looking over your shoulder” that comes with making a permanent record of a song or story puts a special pressure on the performers. Jean Perry, in her introduction to “The Young Man from Serper” (#3), details the way Florence Shaughnessy would fret about getting her stories just right, reviewing her own work with a critical ear, knowing that the versions she taped were “for the record.” She was not alone in feeling this way.

Unfortunately, we don't always know the identity of the singers and narrators of California's recorded literature. It wasn't always considered important information, owing to an early and flawed theory of folklore that viewed individual singers and narrators as passive and faceless “passers-on” of their traditions rather than as active and potentially idiosyncratic “shapers” of the traditional materials in their personal repertoires. Even so, fieldworkers always had a keen sense of their consultants as individuals, as personalities. Often the information is there, buried in the archived fieldnotes or correspondence of the linguist or anthropologist who collected the materials for publication. We know the names of many, many of the men and women who took the time to dictate or record their best work for the generations to come—names that we should hold in honor. The list is an amazingly long one—and openended, because the work is still going on—but a few among those who have contributed substantial bodies of their own art to the canon of California oral literature are Sam Batwi (Yana), Jo Bender (Wintu), William Ralganal Benson (Eastern Pomo), Annie Burke (Southern Pomo), Ted

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Couro (Iipay Diegueño), Hanc'ibyjim (Maidu), Joe Homer (Quechan), Villiana Calac Hyde (Luiseño), Ishi (Yahi), Killeli (Yosemite Miwok), James Knight (Lake Miwok), George Laird (Chemehuevi), Fernando Librado (Ventureño Chumash), Harry and Sadie Marsh (Wintu), Mabel McKay (Pomo), Grace McKibbin (Wintu), Mike Miranda (Tübatulabal), Rufino Ochurte (PaiPai/Kiliwa), Lela Rhoades (Achumawi), Florence Shaughnessy (Yurok), María Solares (Ineseño Chumash), Robert Spott (Yurok), Tom Stone (Owens Valley Paiute), Lucy Thompson (Yurok), Lame Billy of Weitspus (Yurok), and Mary Yee (Barbareño Chumash).

Individually, each of the people named here, scholars and Indians alike, and so many unnamed others besides, have made significant contributions to the field of California oral literature. Collectively, the combined impact of their labors is enormous, and the value of their legacy, beyond measure.

NOTES

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WOMEN'S BRUSH DANCE SONG

	The owl cries out to me,
	the hawk cries out to me as death approaches.

	The killdeer, the mountain bird,
	cry out to me as death approaches.

	The black rattler, the red rattler,
	cry out to me as death approaches.

	The red racer, the gartersnake,
	cry out to me as death approaches.

	A large frog, a little frog,
	cry out to me as death approaches.

	An eagle, a condor,
	cry out to me as death approaches.

Ceremonial song, Luiseño Helen H. Roberts, Form in Primitive Music (version by Brian Swann, Song of the Sky)

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29. Notes on Native California Oral Literatures

INTRODUCTION

No detailed, comprehensive survey of California's oral literature has ever been done. Accessible recent overviews include William Wallace's “Comparative Literature” (1978c) and William Bright's “Oral Literature of California and the Intermountain Region” (1994b), which the reader is urged to consult, along with Robert Heizer's “Mythology: Regional Patterns and History of Research” (1978b). Edward Gi ord and Gwendoline Block's lengthy introduction to their California Indian Nights Entertainments(1930) still makes, even after seventy years, a reliable layperson's entry into California culture patterns, oral-literary genres, and storytelling customs.^[1]

Most California cultures had no restrictions on who could perform verbal art. Men and women alike sang songs, recited myths, and told stories. (Though I’m aware of very few instances of speeches recorded from female orators, that doesn't mean—particularly when the record is so spotty and incomplete—that women never made speeches.) There does seem to have been an overall tendency for men to be the performers on the more public and formal occasions—to recount the stories of creation in the roundhouse at night when everyone is gathered, to conduct the ceremonies and dances, to make the public announcements, and so forth (Gi ord and Block 1930:43). But in many cultures, women were involved in ceremonies as well, and curing rituals, and storytelling sessions. The pages of California's many text collections (this one included)

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attest to the great significance of women as bearers of their oral traditions and to their skill as narrators.

Songs by and large are closely tied to their occasions—that is, you wouldn't normally sing a hunting song except in the proper context of hunting, or a ceremonial song apart from its attendant ceremony—but there are so many di erent kinds of songs and song contexts, that few aspects of life are devoid of the opportunity for singing them. Myths, in contrast, at least the more serious ones, were typically restricted to the winter cold-rainy season, when they helped to pass the time during the long nights and spells of bad weather. (In a great many California cultures, telling a myth out of season, in summertime, tempted fate by aggravating Rattlesnake.)

Like songs, stories are performed in a great variety of settings and contexts, both public and private, from the most weighty and formal of ceremonies to the most lighthearted of entertainments. They are told in connection with dances and ceremonies, religious initiations, rainy days, moral instruction, and funeral rites, as well as parties, family gatherings, and children's bedtimes. They are told to a‹rm the deepest cultural verities, to conserve knowledge, to explain the world, to interpret human and animal behavior, to illustrate points in public or private debate—or just to pass the time, to get a laugh or make people think, to sound a warning or sugarcoat friendly advice. In short, they perform all the functions that stories, from Bible stories to fairy tales to personal narratives to traveling salesman jokes, perform in Western cultures—and every other culture, for that matter.

In terms of genre, it is customary to recognize at least three broad categories or oral-literary phyla—narrative, song, and oratory, each of which is eager for further subdivision. In the remainder of this essay, I take up each of these genres in turn, hoping to give the reader a general “lay of the land” for each broad category.

NARRATIVE

Narrative itself might be further subdivided into myths, tales, legends, and personal reminiscences, along with various minor genres. Scholars tend to draw more distinctions than do ordinary people—the “folk” themselves. Still, most cultures draw at least a loose distinction between

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myth and tale, myths being stories that relate the actions of the First People in the world before human beings came into existence, and tales being stories dealing with human beings and their doings. (Note that this is not a distinction between supernatural and realistic stories, because tales are often just as fantastical as their mythic counterparts.) Often, too, the distinction between the two is a blurry one.

Beginning with Alfred Kroeber's “Indian Myths of South Central California” (1907b), later refined and expanded by Anna Gayton's “Areal A‹liations of California Folktales” (1935), California's oral literatures have typically been classified loosely according to the pattern of their creation myths. These rough “mythological zones” correspond by and large to the main culture areas agreed on by anthropologists: that is, allowing for exceptions, we find a Northwestern California creation pattern, a Southern California creation pattern, and a Central California creation pattern (itself often divided into North-Central and SouthCentral subareas).

Briefly, in Central California we tend to find a variation of the “Earthdiver” motif, where the Creator, assisted by a handful of other original beings (Coyote among them, as a rule), manages to procure a little bit of mud or sand brought up by a helper from the bottom of the primordial ocean they find themselves in, and stretches it out to make the earth. One of the most powerful yet lyrical examples of this type in the California canon was narrated in 1902 or 1903 by a brilliant Maidu storyteller named Hánc'ibyjim. In William Shipley's fine translation (1991:19–20), this portion of the creation myth runs as follows:

	And then, they say, Earthmaker sang.
	“Where are you, my great mountain ranges?
	O, mountains of my world, where are you?”

	Coyote tried. He kept on singing.
	“If, indeed, we two shall see nothing at all,
	traveling about the world,
	then, perhaps,
	there may be no misty mountain ranges there!”

	Earthmaker said:
	“If I could but see a little bit of land
	I might do something very good with it.”

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	Floating along, then,
	they saw something like a bird's nest.
	Earthmaker said:
	“It really is small.
	It would be good if it were a little bigger,
	but it really is small.
	I wonder if I might stretch it apart a little.
	What would be good to do?
	In what way can I make it a little bigger?”

As he talked, he transformed it.

	He stretched it out to where the day breaks;
	he stretched it out to the south;
	he stretched it out to the place where the sun goes down;
	he stretched it out to the North Country;
	he stretched it out to the rim of the world;
	he stretched it out!

	When Earthmaker had stretched it out,
	he said, “Good!
	You who saw of old this earth, this mud,
	and made this nest, sing!
	Telling old tales, humans will say of you:
	‘In ancient times, the being who was Meadowlark,
	making the land and sticking it together in just that way,
	built the nest from which the world was made.’”

	Then Meadowlark sang—
	sang a beautiful song about Earthmaker's creation.

In Hánc'ibyjim's version, there is no diving, and a floating scrap of bird'snest takes the place of mud, but the basic design of the myth is the same. In this collection, Darryl Wilson's Atsugewi creation myth, “Kwaw Labors to Form a World” (#1), lies closest to this pattern, drawing on this notion of stretching or “kneading” out the earth from a small dollop of initial substance (in Wilson's case, mist). Similarly, in William Benson's Eastern Pomo “Creation” (#16), two brothers—the creator Kuksu and his brother-helper Marumda (one of Coyote's many mythical names)—create the world from a ball of “armpit wax” (whatever that might be) and hair, by singing and dreaming it into being.^[2]

In the South-Central literatures, the role played by a nonhuman,

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nonanimal creator or “Earthmaker” figure in the northern myths is often filled by Eagle. Sometimes, even, Coyote himself is in charge of the creation, as in certain Pomo, Patwin, and Miwok traditions (A. Kroeber 1907b:195; Gayton 1935:584). Usually, though, Coyote is just a helper—and a bumbling, contrary one at that, who is more apt to tamper with the Creator's e orts, spoiling them, than to follow directions.

In contrast, the Northwestern literary complex is characterized by its technical absence of creation myths (A. Kroeber 1925). Instead, the world is seen as having always been in existence (though humans were not among the race of First People). The annual World Renewal ceremonies of the Yurok, Karuk, Hupa, Tolowa, and others were, and still are, conducted to ensure the proper continuance of this eternal world.^[3] The following passage comes from Francis Davis's account of the Karuk version of the ceremony performed in 1938:^[4]

Between Yusarnimanimas and the mouth of Clear Creek I take a swim in the Klamath River.

When I get into the water so it runs over my head, I pray.

I think the prayer, I do not say it aloud.

When I sink my head into the water, the world will recognize me and awaken everyone to a realization that it is the beginning of irahiv.

When I pray, I pray for all to have luck.

When I get out of the water, I put my shorts on again and go down the west bank of the river to a bedrock flat.

As I walk along, I pray that all people who believe will walk as easily as I walk along this rough place.

The ixkareya animas walked over this in mythical times. As I walk over it, I tramp it down, I make room for everyone to live well and for there to be no sickness in the world.

Near Yusarnimanimas the people have placed a stone, which has lain there for long years. With my hands I rotate it slightly to make it sit more solidly, so that the world will be solid too.

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Everyone, when I move it around, will have the same power that ixkareya animas has. Then I sit on the stone.

While I sit on the stone, people come to see me. All who come to see me will be lucky. Besides[,] I pray for everyone else. Then the ipnipavan paints me while I sit on the stone.

In Northwestern California, in place of creation myths per se, what we find is a body of “institution myths” (so-called by Kroeber), which relate the story of how various customs and ceremonies were first established for humankind by the Spirit People. Minnie Reeves's account of the “The Boy Who Grew Up at Ta'k’imilding” (#6a) is an example of this type of myth from the Hupa.

In Southern California, too, a very di erent creation pattern is found. In some traditions (summarizing Gayton 1935), an Earth Mother figure and her brother-lover, together with their dying son, create the sun and moon and other features of the physical universe, including people, to whom they give customs and cultural institutions, instructing them in the conduct of proper human lives. In other traditions, two brothers take the place of the divine brother and sister and emerge, quarreling, from a primordial ocean to complete the work of creation. In the process, one of the brothers dies, thereby introducing death to the world. Either way, the story of this “dying god,” of his death and burial, serves as a focus of cathartic grief for the people of the cultures that worship him.

The collector Paul Faye took down a small set of creation and burial songs in 1920 from a Cupeño singer named Salvadora Valenzuela (coincidentally the narrator of one of the two “Hawk Feather” episodes translated by Jane Hill in selection #25), songs that dwell on the themes and characters of this creation. Two of these songs may be found on page 57, where they serve to open part 1 of this book. The remaining songs in this set are presented below.^[5] (The reference to “hell” in the second song should not be taken as a reference to the Hell of Christian theology, although there may be a degree of cultural overlay involved, but to the traditional Cupeño underworld or land of the dead.)

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DEATH SONG OF MUKAT

	Far away they died,
	Mukat, Tamayowet,
	Mukat, Tamayowet.

	Their hair they cut,
	Their hair they banged,
	Red-Bird, Roadrunner.

BURIAL SONG

	My heart gives out,
	gives out, My heart turns over, turns over.

	My heart goes down to hell,
	My heart goes down to hell.

	My heart goes to the ocean,
	My heart goes to the ocean.

More recently, Villiana Calac Hyde, the late, lamented Luiseño tradition-bearer and educator, saw fit to record a great many of her own store of songs before she died, including several long and profoundly moving funerary songs. (These songs have since been published in Hyde and Elliott 1994.) Taken as a whole, the creation and burial songs point to the key intermingling of two griefs that is so characteristic of the Southern California culture area: a religious grief felt for the death of the god in the story and a personal grief for one's own mortality and the very real death of family and friends. In the lines of the Luiseño mourning song that follows (Hyde and Elliott 1994: #175), we can see this intermingling made explicit:^[6]

POPÍ’MUKVOY NÓÓNKWA PÍ’MUKQA SONG

	I am dying his death
	I am dying his death
	I am dying his death
	I am dying his death
	His death is my death

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	The death of the Moon
	It became foggy at the time of his death
	It was foggy when he expired
	I am dying his death
	I am dying his death
	His death, hóó, hóó, hóó, amen …

Some of Mrs. Hyde's less culturally sensitive songs are presented in “A Harvest of Songs” (#24), this volume.

There are two Southern California creation myths included in this volume: Joe Homer's “An Account of Origins” (#27) and the Serrano “Creation” told by Sarah Martin (#23). The stylistic contrast in the two narrators’ handling of the same basic myth-type is profound: where Homer is formal and detached, Martin is emotional and immediate; where Homer is profuse of detail, Martin is sparing, even stark at times; where Homer is complex, Martin is simplicity itself.^[7] Yet both are expressions of the same essential pattern.

But creation myths are not the be-all and end-all of a literary tradition. Besides creation myths specifically, there is a whole constellation of stories set in this myth-time of creation, before the race of human beings came to dwell upon the earth—stories like “Theft of Fire,” “Origin of Death” (blame Coyote), “Theft of the Sun,” and the many versions of the “Pleiades” myth.

Perhaps the most significant and extensive genre or body of traditional stories in California centers on the mythic persona of Coyote. Actually, it's probably wrong to label the Coyote story as a narrative genre in its own right, because Coyote stories run the gamut from core cosmological myths and creation elegies, through just-so stories and picaresque adventure yarns, all the way to tall tales and the cultural equivalent of the raunchy joke. You name it, and Coyote has poked his nose into it somewhere. In any case, there's no question that Coyote is a favorite subject of Native California's narrators and audiences alike. As readers will come to see as they explore the contents of this volume alone (see table 1 in the “General Introduction”), Coyote is a complex and multivarious personality: now hero, now fool, now trickster, now lech, now spoiler, now all of these things rolled up in one.^[8]

Myths are often distinguished from legends and other narrative genres by literary and linguistic features. The Karuk story “Coyote and Old

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Woman Bullhead” (#4) is a myth not just because it happens to be set in the time of the Ikxaréeyav, the ‘Spirit People’, but because its special opening and closing formulas—“Uknîii” and “Kupánakanakana”—declare it to be a myth. Myths are also very often marked as such by the presence of a special grammatical element, usually referred to as a remote-past “quotative.” In Yana, a Hokan language of Northern California, this element takes the form of a verbal su‹x, -n’^th(i), and indicates that the actions being related took place long ago, outside the direct experience of the narrator.^[9] The use of this quotative (highlighted in boldface) is demonstrated in the following excerpt taken from a Northern Yana myth, “Coyote, Heron, and Lizard,” narrated by Betty Brown in 1907 (Sapir 1910). In this passage, Coyote is seeking revenge on Heron Woman and all her companions for cuckolding him at a dance and for not sharing food with him.^[10]

	Sáadipsitdin'th
	They were all sleeping now, they say—

	ayji ‘iwílsapc’i,
	[all] across one another,

	sáadipsiyaw,
	all sleeping,

	petgáa'ayaw.
	all snoring.

	Púllay'atdin'th ay míc’i,
	Now Coyote smeared pitch on it, they say,

	aygi wátguruw.
	on the sweat house.

	Púllayjiban'th aykh lalúuw ki,
	He smeared pitch all over their feet, they say,

	púulayn'th aygich yàa.
	He smeared pitch on the people, they say.

	“Kúuyawgummagath bátdiduwálsa'a’!”
	“May you not run out and save yourselves!”

	Wáyru,
	Now then,

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	híiramn'th ay míc’i.
	Coyote ran out of the house, they say.

	Yámh jatdin'th aych yàa,
	Now the people all burned up, they say,

	wátguruw.
	the sweat house [too].

	“Túuma'ninj ayje asinj míik’áy’i.
	“I have always done like this when I was angry.

	“Wáyru,
	“Now then,

	ditbílpaw’ ayji c’áxaa'ays.
	cook for your loved one!

	“K’un c’úps,
	“So it's good,

	ayji túuyawna,”
	this doing of mine,”

	tíin'th.
	they say he said.

The passage shows how this su‹x (translated as ‘they say’ or ‘it is said’) is typically attached only to the verbs in narrative clauses—that is, those statements the narrator is personally responsible for, which negotiate the temporal distance that separates myth-time from the present world—and not to the verbs in dialogue, which are made by the characters and are seen as statements belonging to that time.^[11] In contrast, personal reminiscences, which relate events that the narrators themselves have been witness to, will not involve the use of a quotative, except perhaps incidentally. Many California traditions observe loose genre distinctions where the classification correlates with the appearance of a quotative element.

There are a great many narrative subgenres, both localized and widespread. Many Southern California repertoires reveal a great interest in legends of “witches” or sorcerers. Among the Northwest cultures, stories about the antics of Indian “devils,” like “The Devil Who Died Laughing” (#5) and “It Was Scratching” (#6d), are a favorite genre. In

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Central California, the Pomo stand out—even against a broader cultural background where birds like Falcon, Condor, Loon, Eagle, and Meadowlark are frequent and important characters in the mythic dramatis personae—as having an especial fondness for songs and stories featuring birds; Annie Burke's “The Trials of Young Hawk” (#17) is an example from Southern Pomo.

In contrast, so-called monster stories may be found pretty much everywhere; tales like “Mad Bat” (#15) and “Condor Steals Falcon's Wife” (#20b) are instances in this volume.^[12] In the same way, most tribes tell stories about a culture hero—di erently conceived for each group, it seems—who personifies the moral and physical ideals of his society. The Central Yana tale of “Flint Boy” (Sapir 1910) makes as good a template as any: a common outline might include the birth or arrival of a baby (often under supernatural circumstances, such as springing up from the ground like a plant, or from a clot of blood or spittle on the floor) who grows to maturity in a matter of days or weeks and sets o to right outstanding wrongs or kill monsters (marauding Grizzly Bear women in Flint Boy's case) or fight wars, rescuing his people by virtue of his physical prowess, cunning, and moral single-mindedness. Jane Hill's translation of episodes “From ‘The Life of Hawk Feather’” (#25) provides an example of this genre here.

The distribution of tale-types can also make for interesting study. Some stories, like the “Grizzly Bear and Deer” myth, are known in the northern half of the state but not in the southern half, while others, like the “Visit to the Land of the Dead” myth (#20a), have the reverse distribution. Both stories are widespread favorites in their respective areas of California, yet are well-known outside the state as well. The “Loon Woman” myth (#12), in contrast, is unique to the North-Central region of California. Readers interested in such regional patterns should consult Gayton's “Areal A‹liations of California Folktales” (1935).

A final type of narrative, common in the primary literature but not represented formally in this collection, is the ethnographic text. It is an artificial genre, because these texts have been elicited in response to a direct question from the collector, usually an anthropologist or linguist seeking information about some aspect of culture: “What was an Indian funeral like?”—“How did people used to make acorn mush?”—“Describe a typical puberty ceremony”—and so on. Such narratives don't conform to any traditional genre; they would have no natural context in the Native culture, in which the answers are simply part of the fabric of life,

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and by and large they would never have been produced but for the inquisitiveness of the collector (though it's easy to imagine children asking their grandparents questions like “What games did kids play when you were growing up?” and getting what amounts to an ethnographically rich personal reminiscence in response).

Sometimes these ethnographic texts amount to little more than verbal descriptions of traditional activities, such as basketmaking or acorn preparation—activities that are better documented visually, language being rather a poor medium for this sort of task. (Try explaining how to tie a shoe over the phone.) Typically, such descriptions have been collected, in the untimely absence of a camera, purely for the sake of documentation, but often linguists will elicit them for reasons that have little to do with the nominal subject matter itself. Asking a consultant to describe in words some such procedure as arrow-making is a little like administering a stress test to the language itself: the unusual demands placed on the syntax and lexicon often reap unsuspected grammatical constructions and vocabulary items that might otherwise never have been observed in hours of conventional narrative or conversation. But even in scenarios like this, narrators will occasionally produce texts that manage to transcend their utilitarian origins. In the following passage, linguist Judith Crawford has asked Robert Martin, a Mojave, to describe the making of a cradleboard:^[13]

CRADLEBOARD

I’m going to make a baby cradle now.

I go, I go, I look for mesquite root, mesquite root, mesquite root.

I dig anywhere up in the valley and I’ll stay until I get one—if I’m lucky, if the tree “gives it to you.”

If it is straight lying in the ground, then I take it. I bring it home, I bend it, I lay it down until it is dry, and in one week or so, I’ll put the crosspieces on.

I’ll go after some arrowweeds and put the crosspieces on, and I do it and then I finish.

Then I finish, then, I’m going again, after the [things for tying] on the cradle. I peel mesquite bark and I bring it home. That's all.

I tie it up and finish. Then that's all.

Then I finish the baby cradle. I finish in one week or so. That is a baby cradle, and that's the way I make them, and that's all.

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Martin's account may not give much in the way of detail regarding the actual techniques of manufacture—no one could make a cradleboard on the strength of his description alone—but it does convey a nice sense of the speaker's state of mind as he goes about his imagined way, gathering his materials and working them. There's a personality here that shines through, despite the unlikely context and subject matter.

Artificial or not, these texts can often be quite interesting from a literary standpoint, as well, even apart from the cultural information they contain. The linguist Robert Oswalt recorded the following ethnographic “textlet” from Essie Parrish in 1959, one of many he collected in the course of his extensive work with Kashaya Pomo speakers. Mrs. Parrish would have o ered it in response to queries from Oswalt regarding food preparation techniques (it is one of several such texts she contributed to Kashaya Texts).^[14]

PRESERVING SHELLFISH

In the old days we could keep food without it rotting.

When winter came and the sea ran high, the Indians could not go to gather food along the coast for long periods. Before the water had already become rough, the leader would command, “Store away your food.” Having had him say when [to go], they went up to the gravel beach, pried o mussels, gathered turban snails, packed them up the coastal cli s, dug holes, poured the shellfish in there, packed up gravel, poured it on top, and poured ocean water over all that.

Then even when it rained, the mussels were still good and unspoiled for several days or even one week—turban snails they kept the same way. Because they did that, the old time people did not die o from starvation.

That is all there is of that.

Though this account may seem to be o -hand, the information conveyed is in fact quite carefully organized. It opens with a formulaic reference to “the old days,” thereby situating the text in the realm of memory (paragraph 1), then moves into that time-frame for a sparse but detailed description of the season, social context, harvested species, physical setting, and steps involved in preserving shellfish (paragraph 2). She then closes the window she has opened into the past, returns us to the present with her reference once again to the “old time” people, and—storyteller that

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she is—finishes up with a “moral” about survival and the importance of diligence and know-how (paragraph 3), before terminating the topic at hand (paragraph 4). The sense of literary form and closure, even in so short a discourse, is unmistakable.

Indeed, sometimes narrators can deliver goods that far exceed the relatively narrow, prosaic expectations of the genre. Betty Brown, the Northern Yana consultant Edward Sapir worked with in 1907, dictated a series of ethnographic texts—ethnographic vignettes might be a better description—that soar far above most other texts of their kind. In this excerpt, from a much longer text Sapir called “Indian MedicineMen,” a frantic husband has just called in a powerful shaman to try to save his dying wife.^[15]

NARRATOR: [The medicine-man] has arrived.

DOCTOR: “Put some water down on the ground!”

NARRATOR: He oered him round white shell beads as payment, he oered him dentalia.

HUSBAND, TO HIMSELF: “He will be glad because of these, when he sees them.”

DOCTOR: “I don't like these trinkets here—I like p'aléhsi shell beads.”

HUSBAND: “So you will doctor her! Doctor her during the night—perhaps she will recover.”

DOCTOR: “Oh, I am not afraid of doctoring the one who is sick.

Why should I be afraid? I am a medicine-man! She will not cry. She will yet eat her own food.”

HUSBAND: “Go forth from the house! Shout! Call upon your dream-spirit! That's what a medicine-man always does.”

DOCTOR: “She will recover—I dreamed it.

Pray speak to the spring of water, my dream tells me.

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Pray do not eat! Go ahead and eat tomorrow when the sun is overhead. You shall go to the spring to bathe.

[Thus] I dreamt.

Pray pass the night on the mountain!

Now then,

I shall return in the night. Wake up the people. They will help to sing. I am a great medicine-man.

Pray ask the rocks!

Ask the trees! Ask the logs! Go about twice, and the owl will talk, and the yellowhammer [too], and pray roll tobacco between your hands and smoke it! Eat nothing!

Pick up the round luck-stones!

Thus did I dream. She will recover.”

Rather than responding to Sapir's requests with the critically detached descriptions of the practiced cultural interpreter, she throws herself into the scene, re-creating not so much the details but the life and spirit of the occasion.^[16] Her re-creation is so vivid and emotional, so immediate, that it essentially takes the form of a drama. Describe an Indian burial? Describe a curing ceremony? Betty Brown did that and more.

SONG

Songs were an integral part of life in Native California, and still are today. There were curing songs, love songs, dance songs, power songs, gambling songs, hunting songs, mourning songs, ritual songs, luck songs, dream songs, work songs, and traveling songs, to name just a few. Songs were sung publicly, to accompany dances, ceremonies, and games, or in smaller settings, to be shared with friends and family. The girls’ puberty

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songs of the Wintu (#11), for instance, were public songs, sung by visiting parties as they entered the village where a puberty celebration was being held. Their dream songs, in contrast, typically would have been sung first for a more intimate audience—though once debuted, they could then be sung to accompany dances. Of course, songs were also sung privately, to help the singer think, pray, or focus an emotion. The Wintu cry song that Grace McKibbin sings—“Which trail should I take to go over the hill? I guess I’ll take the south trail over the hill” (#13)—is an example of a song that originated as a private song, composed by her grandfather while traveling, and later was passed down through the singer's family as part of its oral tradition.

Songs are frequently incorporated into stories and myths. Four of the selections in this volume demonstrate this characteristic: William Benson's “Creation” (#16) from Eastern Pomo (sadly, the songs accompanying this myth were not preserved); the Chumash story of “The Dog Girl” (#22), told by María Solares; the older of the two Cupeño “Hawk Feather” episodes (#25b), dictated by Salvadora Valenzuela; and Joe Homer's “An Account of Origins” (#27). As this sampling suggests, myths and other sacred narratives are perhaps more likely than other genres to have a significant component of song, just as hymns and liturgical music form an integral part of Western (and other) religious ceremonial traditions. But the example of “The Dog Girl,” a secular tale if there ever was one, shows that song may be associated with other genres as well.^[17]

Leanne Hinton has observed, for Yuman storytelling traditions, that the songs often create key interludes of emotionality, which are set o like jewels against an essentially neutral or reportorial narrative background. Where the narrative portions of Yuman stories are invariably told from a third-person, remote-past quotative point of view, the songs tend to be first-person expressions of what the protagonist is feeling at that point in the story, giving the audience a view directly from the story's heart, its emotional core. Though Hinton's observations were originally made for Havasupai, they clearly have a wider application: for instance, it is easy to see exactly this same stylistic pattern—of inner versus outer experience, the subjective emotionality of song against the objective reportage of narration—at work in the Chumash story of “The Dog Girl.”

Songs can vary greatly in terms of content, as well. A lot of California songs are actually wordless—that is, they consist entirely of nonsense syllables or vocables,^[18] much like the Irish lilting tradition, or the burdens

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of so many English and Celtic folk songs (hey-nonny-nonny, fol la diddle dido, down-a-down hey down-a-down, and the like). For instance, one of the many Miwok gambling songs consists of the vocable phrases Wa ni ni ni, wa ah ha, yo wa ha sung in litany, over and over, until the singer's gambling turn is over (Angulo 1976a:85). It is not accurate, however, to call these vocable songs “meaningless.” Although they may not have explicit lexical content, they carry an emotional weight and often tap into their true meaning by association with a particular ritual or story.

At the other extreme are the long, verbally complex song cycles of many Southern California tribes. For the most part these songs are connected with religious ceremonies. The following example, taken from the Quechan “Lightning Song” as sung by William Wilson (Halpern 1984), presents a sampling of eight song texts drawn almost at random from within the longer cycle. Each song, probably interwoven by strings of vocables, would be sung a specified number of times—or simply over and over until its particular segment of the ceremony was concluded. It took all night to sing the complete cycle.

	He stands and looks from afar
	He looks from afar and sees
	He looks from afar and describes

	He sees the quivering foggy cloud
	He describes the quivering foggy cloud
	He sees the cloud passing
	He describes the cloud passing
	He is looking at the clouds as they turn this way and that
	He describes the clouds turning this way and that

	He sees lightning
	Lightning flashes in the darkness
	He describes lightning

	He sees its impossibility
	He describes its impossibility

	He clumps it together
	He takes darkness and clumps it together
	He describes taking darkness and clumping it together

	You have mistaken it
	He sees you mistake it

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	Coyote is there describing dawn
	He describes you mistaking it

	Stars pass overhead
	Stars wandering overhead
	Stars pass overhead
	Stars trail across the sky
	Stars trail across the sky
	He describes stars sitting in the sky

	He sees sunrise
	He describes sunrise

The Luiseño songs of Villiana Calac Hyde, some of which are presented in this volume (#24), likewise illustrate this more elaborate lyric tradition. In Northern California, the Karuk “Evening Star” songs, too, can be quite involved, verging on a quasi-narrative form.^[19]

The vast majority of known California songs are considerably less complex, at least as far as their explicit verbal content is concerned. They tend to consist of a few lines—often just one or two—of verse sung in alternation with lines of vocables. Grace McKibbin's songs (#13) are good examples of this most typical California pattern and have the advantage of representing complete performances, including repetitions and vocables, rather than just the abstract of the words alone. Hinton's presentation gives us the full text of one particular performance—a bit di erent each time the song is sung—as words and vocables intertwine.

Usually, though, the verbal abstract is all that is presented of a song; the vocables are ignored, and the organic cycle of repetitions eliminated.^[20] What we see of a song then is merely the distillation of its verbal essence. It doesn't mean that the song's text is not authentic—just a bit diminished, removed still further from its spontaneous musical and performance context. Here are some examples, striking nonetheless, drawn from a variety of sources and singing traditions:^[21]

	Who is like me!
	My plumes are flying—
	They will come to rest in an unknown region
	Above where the banners are flying.

Chumash song, from a story

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	Listen to what I am about to sing.
	Listen to my breathing on high.
	Listen to my stamping, I tear the ground up.
	Listen to my groaning.
	I am done.
	I-ha-ya-a-ha-hu-ha!
	I-ya-ka-mi-ha-mi!

Bear Dance song (Santa Rosa Island)

	Jumping echoes of the rock;
	Squirrels turning somersaults;
	Green leaves, dancing in the air;
	Fishes, white as money-shells,
	Running in the water: green, deep, and still.
	Hi-ho, hi-ho, hi-hay!
	Hi-ho, hi-ho, hi-hay!

Modoc puberty song

	I am traveling—me, me, me!
	I go around the world—me, me!
	I cause the mist—me, me!
	When I climb the mountaintops
	I cause [the] clouds,
	I cause the rain.
	Long live Coyote!
	He will always be.

Coyote's song while traveling (Chumash)

	Going along singing,
	Following the deer trail,
	Hunting deer,
	Going along singing,
	Going along singing.

Yahi mouth-bow song

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In this more common, stripped-down mode of presentation, California songs tend to resemble Japanese haiku more than anything—indeed, it's an obvious and striking connection to make. Consider these examples, again drawn from a variety of sources and singing traditions:^[22]

	The dawn is dawning,
	a shadow—
	I come home, I come home.

Achumawi waking song

	Where we used to make love,
	the grass is grown up high now.

Hupa brush dance song

	I am the only one, the only one left—
	An old man, I carry the gambling board,
	An old man, I sing the gambling song.

Costanoan gambling song

	Come! Come!
	I mean you
	With the brown hat …

Costanoan love song (post-Contact)

Dancing on the brink of the world …

Costanoan dance song

	Jump, salmon, jump!
	So you may see your uncle dance!

Coyote's song to catch salmon (Chumash)

In truth, many of the songs do resemble haiku in terms of their imagery, as well as in their perceptual and emotional immediacy, the “here and

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now” of their subject matter. But, when we recall that these songs are typically sung over and over again, the words being repeated many times over, we see that they share some of the characteristics of the mantra, as well.

Because of their essential textual brevity, songs tend to be highly elliptical and allusive. It is often impossible to draw the true meaning of a song merely from its words alone. The impression of understanding that someone outside the tradition gets can well be a mistaken one: we only think we get it, because we are able to respond to the surface of the words as we do to any poetic image.^[23] But songs presented this way are isolated from their context, and their context is often the primary place where their deepest meaning resides. Take this Tachi Yokuts song, “Dawis Sapagay's Song,” recorded from Leon Manuel by James Hatch in 1957:

	Where will I go in?
	I will go in
	where green scum is on the pool.

Even knowing that Dawis Sapagay was a well-known Tachi shaman and that this was his personal power song does not take us very far along the path to understanding. Still, we form an impression, and after a while, feel that we have established some sort of connection with the song. What we don't know is that the song refers to a story, the story of how Sapagay received his doctor's power to cure sickness. Manuel told Sapagay's story this way:

Looking for a doctor who would teach him curing power, Sapagay went to the edge of Wood Lake to find the underwater entrance to the place where the doctor lived. He dove in (at the place where the green scum is), and came up in a cave in which he met the guardians of the doctor. There was a man-sized spider with voracious jaws, and, afterward, a rattlesnake coiled ready to strike. Last, there was a puma and a bear who tore men to pieces. Sapagay used a kingsnake charm against the spider and the rattlesnake (kingsnakes eat spiders and rattlesnakes), while against the puma and the bear he used a weasel charm which made him small and agile. He thus passed them by.

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― 534 ―

At length he came to the end of the cave. It was a new and strange land which he had not seen before. After looking around, he came upon the doctor sitting steadfast as a stone and looking straight at him. After a time the doctor looked up and asked Sapagay, “What are you doing here? How did you get in? You must have some sort of power to get past my guardians.” Sapagay told him of the charms he had used and the doctor approved of them. They were the right charms for the man who wanted doctor power.

Sapagay looked about and saw that there was no one around. He said, “This must be a very lonely place; there are no other people here.” The doctor replied, “You don't seem to like it here; why did you come?” And he continued, “I will show you the people who live here.” So he called, and a long line of deer came out of the black mountain to the west. Sapagay thought to himself, “These aren't real people, but just deer from the woods.” But the deer came and formed a circle about him and lost their horns and hooves, and turned into beautiful girls dressed in string aprons, beads, and clamshell ornaments. The doctor then addressed the girls, “Now give him your songs, that he may have doctor power among his people.” And the girls taught Sapagay their songs so that he could use their secret power.

When Sapagay learned all that he could, he asked the doctor how he could get back to his people. The doctor told him that the guardians would be asleep when he returned through the tunnel. And then Sapagay returned to his people and became a famous doctor who was called to all parts of California to cure the sick.

Without knowing the story, we can only aspire to the most superficial appreciation for the song—its words, perhaps, but not its meaning. Once we do know the story, we see just how far o -base our understanding really was. So much is implied here, that the song itself is merely an allusion. To be sure, there is a clear image captured in these words, the image of algae floating on the surface of a pond. But this image is actually a bit like the green scum in the song itself—its true meaning lies beneath it: the pool itself, and what was down there.

Examples like the Sapagay song serve as cautionary tales, warning us not to be too confident that we can ever fully understand the meaning of a song—even if it seems laid out before us in crystalline form. The words of a song are the looking-glass through which we, as readers, enter the world of the song—but they themselves are not that world, just

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its signifiers. When seen in this light, it is clear that a song composed mostly or even entirely of vocables will be as rich in meaning as a song composed with many verses of words.

ORATORY

This category, which variously includes prayers, eulogies, sermons, morning speeches (in some cultures given daily by the chief from atop the assembly house), public announcements, and instructional lectures, among other genres, is little documented in California and can only be touched on here. The print literature provides us with very few reliable examples (too often the content of the speeches has merely been paraphrased or summarized), and discussions of the topic therefore tend to draw from the same few published sources: Edward Gi ord's “Central Miwok Ceremonies” (1955), Philip Sparkman's “Culture of the Luiseño Indians” (1908), C. Darryl Forde's “Ethnography of the Yuma Indians” (1931), Samuel Barrett's “Wintun Hesi Ceremony” (1919), and perhaps a few others. Further examples will yet turn up in private and archival collections of unpublished fieldnotes, as these are box-by-box uncovered. As if in proof of this belief, a careful examination of Richard Keeling's Guide to Early Field Recordings (1900–1949) at the Lowie Museum of Anthropology (1991) suggests that a considerable store of potentially retrievable oratory on wax cylinder and aluminum disc may lie waiting in the vaults.

Most of the oratory that has been published consists of either prayers or public speeches. Here and there may be found examples of other genres, though. The following passage forms the conclusion of the lengthy lecture or “counsel” given to initiates at the Yuninish, the girls’ puberty ceremony of the Luiseño (Sparkman 1908:226):

	See,
	these old men and women,
	these are those who paid attention to this counsel,
	which is of the grown-up people,
	and they have already reached old age.

	Do not forget this that I am telling you,
	pay heed to this speech,

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	and when you are old like these old people,
	you will counsel your sons and daughters in like manner,
	and you will die old.

	And your spirit will rise northwards to the sky,
	like the stars, moon, and sun.

	Perhaps they will speak of you
	and will blow three times
	and thereby cause to rise your spirit and soul to the sky.

The dynamics of setting can contribute nearly as much to the structure of an oration as its content does. Numerous observers have commented on the peculiar vocal and rhythmic characteristics of public speaking as delivered by California orators. In Northern California, the Yana, like most people, even had a specific word, gaac'an'i ‘to talk like a chief’, to refer to this speaking style. Forde, describing the special e ects of a Quechan funeral speech, noted that “normal word order is changed. Words are omitted and others repeated to produce the rhythm of the speech. They are sometimes abbreviated, sometimes expanded by the addition of consonants to increase the staccato of the speech” (1931:212). This example, from a Patwin Hesi oration, was described as being “delivered in very high voice and jerky phrases” (A. Kroeber 1925:389), and illustrates some of the features of this type of address:^[24]

	Be like this!
	Be like this!
	Be good!
	Be good, good!
	Be glad of it!
	Rejoice in it!
	Rejoice in this speech!
	Rejoice in this!
	Rejoice in these roses!
	Rejoice in these healthy roses [you're wearing]!
	Say yes!
	Say yes!
	We come approving!
	We come approving!
	We shall do it like that!

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	We shall approve!
	We shall be glad!
	Father will be glad!
	Mother's brother will be glad!
	Older brother will be glad!
	When we gather like this!
	When we gather like this!
	We shall rejoice, therefore!
	Our speech!
	Our speech!
	Be glad, therefore!
	I was glad, was glad!
	I rejoiced!
	Rejoice and approve!
	Rejoice and be glad!
	Approve of it!
	Rejoice in it!

It is easy to see how the economics of breath constrains the form of this oration. As everyone who has ever hollered at a friend or called a child to supper knows, the louder you shout, the less you can say on your lungful of air. The need to be heard, to broadcast the voice across the widest area, often to a dispersed audience, has certain predictable consequences for the shape of the message. We should expect to find short, jerky phrases and repetitions (for the sake of both emphasis and of euphony), distorted vocal qualities, and a powerful rhythmic drive. Most of the recorded examples of California public oratory exhibit these or similar signs. Indeed, when these features are less in evidence, it often turns out that the speech has been re-created “in the studio,” as it were. Then again, it may simply represent a less bombastic genre appropriate to a smaller or more intimate or indoor audience—for instance, the girls’ puberty lecture quoted earlier. Add to these physical constraints the purely stylistic tropes and quirks, embellishments and deviations, that accumulate in an art form with the most ancient of roots, and it's no wonder these examples command our attention.

What has survived of California oratory presents a tantalizing picture. But I look forward to a time when more examples of these marvelous verbal art forms have been found and brought to light, and we can begin at last to appreciate their multiplexity and discern something of their

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poetics. Still more, I look forward to the minting of new examples, to hearing how the living generations of California Indians have carried these traditions into modern life.

Indeed, that should make a fine “best hope” for the future of California's oral-literary heritage at large—the whole constellation of its indigenous verbal arts, of myth and song, chant and celebration—as this new century gets under way. In the meantime, let us “rejoice in these roses” that have come down, by some of the hardest paths imaginable, into the hands of posterity.

NOTES

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[Song]

	Oh, people!
	Our hearts are good and strong!
	We can work all day!
	This sickness does go away, I know it!

	I go o by myself.
	Alone in the house, I lie down on the bed
	And forget everything.
	All this fades away.

	All the people!
	All our sick hearts will change!
	This day is passing away,
	Passing [away] from here.
	We are all together.
	Now will we think well,
	Now will we think in this place,
	Now that we are all together.

	I tell you, when we lose a strong man,
	Our hearts cannot be good—but now,
	We must not think about it.

I will end right now, I will end [it] well.

We [must] think now, about being here all together now.

	People!
	It will be good when this day has passed,
	[That's what] we are thinking here.
	I will find our strength, I will find our good.
	It used to be that my body [felt bad],

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	When I lay down alone.
	On that I rely:
	We trust our sick hearts will change.
	I rely on that!

	I will finish.
	Rightly we are thinking good things.

Quechan funeral speech C. Darryl Forde, Ethnography of the Yuma Indians

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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

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Englishes, though, have only been developing for a few hundred years, whereas California's languages have been rooted and changing, many of them, for thousands of years—and thus the dialect di erences within a language can be quite profound. The three attested dialects of Yana, for instance—Northern, Central, and Yahi—vary from each other about as much as do the Romance languages, say Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian, which are themselves really just the modern descendants of medieval Latin dialects. (In truth, the Yanan dialects are not excessively di erentiated. There are much greater di erences to be found among the various Shastan and Chumashan “dialects,” which are more properly classified as distinct languages than as dialects.) It is easy to see that the distinction between language and dialect is not always a straightforward one: sometimes it's just a matter of convention or historical accident or politics whether two related forms of speech are labeled as dialects or as separate languages.

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

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Table 5. Language Families: California Languages and Genetic Affiliations

YUKIAN

Yukian Family Yuki (Yuki/Coast Yuki/Huchnom) Wappo

CHUMASHAN

Chumashan Family Obispeño Purisimeño Ineseño Barbareño Ventureño Island Chumash

HOKAN STOCK (PROPOSED) Karuk Chimariko Yana (N. Yana/C. Yana/Yahi) Washoe

Shastan Family Shasta Konomihu New River Shasta Okwanuchu Palaihnihan Family

Achumawi Atsugewi

Pomoan Family Northern Pomo Central Pomo Northeastern Pomo Eastern Pomo Southeastern Pomo Southern Pomo Kashaya (Southwestern Pomo)

Salinan Family Antoniaño Migueleño

Yuman Family Ipai (Northern Diegueño) Tipai (Mexican Diegueño) Kumeyaay (Southern Diegueño) Mojave Halchidhoma (Maricopa) Quechan (Yuma)

ESSELEN Esselen

PENUTIAN STOCK (PROPOSED)

Wintuan Family Wintu (Wintu/Nomlaki) Patwin (Hill Patwin/River Patwin/ Southern Patwin)

Maiduan Family Maidu Konkow Nisenan

Miwokan Family (Utian) Coast Miwok (Bodega/Marin) Lake Miwok Saclan (Bay Miwok) Plains Miwok Northern Sierra Miwok Central Sierra Miwok Southern Sierra Miwok

Costanoan Family (Utian) Karkin Chochenyo Ramaytush Tamyen Awaswas Chalon Rumsen Mutsun

― 548 ―

Yokutsan Family Valley Yokuts Far Northern (Yachikumne [Chulamni]/Lower San Joaquin/LakisamniTawalimni) Northern Valley (Nopchinchi/ Chawchila/ Chukchansi/Merced/ Kechayi-Dumna) Southern Valley (Wechihit/Nutunutu-Tachi/Chunut/Wo'lasiChoynok/KoyetiYowlumni) Buena Vista (Tulamni/Hometwoli) Gashowu Kings River (Chukaymina/ Michahay/Ayticha/ Choynimni) Tule-Kaweah (Wikchamni/Yawdanchi) Palewyami

Plateau Penutian Family Modoc

UTO-AZTECAN STOCK Tübatulabal

Takic Family Kitanemuk Tongva (Gabrielino/Fernandeño) Serrano Luiseño (Luiseño/Ajachmem [Juaneño]) Cupeño Cahuilla Tataviam

Numic Family Northern Paiute Mono (Monache/Owens Valley Paiute) Panamint (California Shoshone) Kawaiisu Chemehuevi (dialect of Ute)

ALGIC STOCK

Ritwan Family Yurok Wiyot

NA-DENE STOCK

Athapaskan Family Tolowa (Tolowa/Chetco) Hupa (Hupa/Chilula-Whilkut) Mattole (Mattole/Bear River) Eel River (Nongatl/Lassik/ Sinkyone/Wailaki) Cahto

Germanic family—which includes English, Dutch, German, and the Scandinavian languages—is itself a member of the Indo-European superfamily of languages, a stock that incorporates such seemingly disparate languages as French, Armenian, Greek, Croatian, and Hindi under its umbrella.) Two of the five stocks, Penutian and Hokan, are closely or quintessentially associated with California and are so ancient that the resemblances among their constituent language families are barely discernible. Indeed, the resemblances are so hard to pin down, and the time

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depth involved is so profound, that many linguists believe them to be chimerical. We may catch a glimmer here and there, as in the various words for ‘two’, but their interrelationships are deeply buried in time.^[4] The other three stocks—Algic, Na-Dené, and Uto-Aztecan—are well accepted and have their primary distributions outside the California region.^[5] In addition, there is one “family isolate” that can't be plausibly linked up with any of the other stocks: Yukian, which includes the Yuki, Coast Yuki, and Huchnom dialects of Yuki proper, together with the remotely related Wappo.^[6] (Isolates are languages, like Basque in Europe, that have no known genetic a‹liation to any other language groups.) Like the Hokan language families, Yukian represents an ancient presence in California. Map 3, page 575, shows the geographic distribution of these stocks and families.

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)

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in California is much more recent. Indeed, by taking a closer look at the family-and-stock map (map 3) of California, we can get a glimpse of its linguistic past. Like the residue of waves fossilized in the rippled sediments of an ancient shoreline, the contemporary language map of California (map 5, p. 573) reveals a tracery of ages-old patterns of migration. But first we have to learn to see that map as if in motion.

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

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California families (see map 4, p. 576), you will see them displaced in clumps and islands along the periphery of cartographic California, pressed outward in a great, broken ring around the central region of the state, beginning with Karuk, Chimariko, and Shasta in the northwest, over to Achumawi, Atsugewi, and Yana, and skipping down to Washoe in the east. Then comes a big gap in that ring, where Uto-Aztecan tribes from the interior much later flowed out of the Great Basin or southeastern Sierra into southern California, eventually reaching all the way to the Pacific. The pieces of the ring pick up again, hundreds of miles further on, with the Yuman tribes far to the south: Mojave, Halchidhoma, Quechan, Cocopa, and Tipai-Ipai.^[10] Fragments of the great ring can be seen scattered northward along the coast, as well: beyond the Chumash we find Salinan and Esselen, and finally, north of the Penutian expansions into the San Francisco and Monterey Bay areas, the Pomoan languages and languages of the Yukian stock.

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

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land of more limited resources, of harsher climate, of less rugged and varied terrain—there would have been insu‹cient room, ecologically speaking, for new populations. In a more pitched competition for resources, the newcomers would have been repulsed, or the incumbents vanquished, else both groups would have risked starvation. In hostile environments—say, the Arctic or Great Basin regions of North America—human populations must be highly nomadic, requiring large territories to provide more than the meagerest sustenance of life. True to expectation, the linguistic and cultural diversity in both those regions is relatively minimal. From Alaska to Greenland, we find but a single language, Inupiaq, spoken in a long chain of dialects across the entire circumpolar region. A similar dialect continuum of closely related Numic languages (Northern Paiute, Mono, Shoshoni, Comanche, Southern Paiute, Chemehuevi, and Kawaiisu) spreads through the Great Basin from Wyoming and Montana in the north down through Utah and Nevada, all the way to Mexico.^[13] But California's geography and rich ecology have a orded it an extraordinary carrying capacity for human cultures and the languages they bear with them.

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

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happened? How could so many languages have fallen silent? In the end, the history of languages is inseparable from the history of the people who speak them.

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

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be faced squarely in order to understand the odds against any of the cultures represented here surviving into the twentieth century, let alone the twenty-first, with some semblance of their languages and traditions intact. Rather than attempt to cover this history discursively, I will take a testimonial approach, using the particulars of three short narratives to suggest the type and existence of more general conditions.

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

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― 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

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in the south came the Gold Rush. If the devastation of the missions swept through the Southern and South-Central California cultures like a fire, the Gold Rush hit the Northern cultures like an atom bomb. Some of the most shameful passages in United States history took place in California during the decades immediately following the Gold Rush of 1849. Basic human rights, as far as Indians were concerned, were nonexistent. De facto slavery was institutionalized by the California legislature under the auspices of a variety of labor and indenture laws, such as an 1850 vagrancy law that allowed any white man, without burden of proof, to declare any Indian a “vagrant.” Once so declared, Indians could be incarcerated, and the rights to their labor—up to four months without pay (Castillo 1978:108)—auctioned o to the highest bidder. The kidnapping of children and young girls for purposes of domestic and sexual servitude was also legally sanctioned and widely practiced (Cook 1943).

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

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descriptions of what had transpired. Benson's account, originally published in 1932 in the California Historical Society Quarterly, begins: “The Facts Of Stone and Kelsey Massacre. in Lake County California. As it was stated to me by the five indians who went to stone and kelseys house purpose to kill the two white men. after debateing all night.” (Benson, an extraordinary individual and something of a renaissance man, did not learn English until he was a young man and, without benefit of schooling, taught himself to read and write.) The first, and longer, portion of his account documents the brutal conditions on the Stone-Kelsey ranch—the starvation, whippings, torture, and executions—that motivated the killings; gives an account of the all-night debate that ultimately authorized the attack; and graphically details the killing itself. The remainder of his account describes what happened next: the inevitable retaliation, when government troops and vigilante militias “avenged” the killing of Stone and Kelsey. The following excerpt is taken from this latter section and is presented verbatim, without editorial change, in Benson's own words:^[17]

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

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― 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

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su ered crippling population losses to large-and small-scale “military” actions, as well as to disease and starvation.

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

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them barbarians. For that's what the boarding school system was, at its worst; and at its best, it was not much better—just less brutal. The federal Indian boarding school system was, and still is, a textbook illustration of how you break the spine of another culture. It's simple: remove its children from their families and home communities and keep them away long enough that they come back (if they do come back) something like strangers to their own people and traditions, to their own pasts, and to their own new futures. Fortunately, more liberal and humane heads prevailed, and critics eventually called a halt to the system before Native American cultures and communities were entirely flat-lined. But the reprieve came too late for all too many cultures. The damage done has proved immeasurable. And hardest hit were the languages—which is why the schools have garnered so much attention here.

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

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― 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.

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― 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!”

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― 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.

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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

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master/apprentice pairs, involving (at the time of writing) twentyfive languages—most of them down to their last handful of fluent speakers—with more being added every year. Its success and the enthusiasm it generates have made it a model for similar programs around the country and abroad.

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”:

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	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