1. For a summary of the most recent data on language survival, see Hinton's “Living California Indian Languages” in her book Flutes of Fire (1994a); map 5 generalizes some of the information in this article.

2. Unfortunately, language diversity is not celebrated in all quarters. Beginning with Senator S. I. Hayakawa, California has seen more than its share of “English-Only” referendums in recent years. See Hinton's “The Native American Languages Act” in Flutes of Fire (Hinton 1994a). For a wider discussion of such matters, see James Crawford's book Language Loyalties(1992) or visit his website (http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/JWCRAWFORD/). The University of Northern Arizona maintains a web-page on “Teaching Indigenous Languages” (http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~jar/TIL.html) that contains a variety of links and resources related to this topic as well.

3. William Shipley's essay, “Native Languages of California” (Shipley 1978), in the California volume of the Smithsonian's Handbook of North American Indians—an indispensable reference found in most libraries—is probably the most accessible and concise scholarly introduction to the language families of California. For those with some linguistic training, there are detailed chapters on California language families in Lyle Campbell and Marianne Mithun's The Languages of Native America (1979) and the Smithsonian's Handbook of North American Indians (volume 17: Languages, ed. by Ives Goddard, 1996). I merely provide a general orientation here.

4. The names for these superstocks are separately based on similarities for the number ‘two’ within the languages of the individual families. For instance, the Atsugewi word hoqi (compare Achumawi hak’, Shasta xokwa, Chimariko xok'u, Diegueño xawok, and Salinan hakic, all meaning ‘two’) gives rise to the term Hokan. (The phonetic letter [x] represents a velar fricative—the hard, h-like

5. Uto-Aztecan languages are found throughout the Great Basin and American Southwest (languages like Paiute, Shoshone, and Hopi) and in Mexico (Yaqui, Nahuatl, Huichol, and Pipil, to name a few). The main branch of Algic is Algonquian—a very large and widespread family of languages concentrated in the East (Delaware, Micmac, Abenaki, Passamaquoddy), the Midwest (Shawnee, Kickapoo, Fox, Potawatomi), and fanning west across Canada (Ojibwa and the great Cree continuum); the Ritwan languages, Wiyot and Yurok, are the two California representatives of this superstock. The large Athabascan family, part of the Na-Dené superstock (Haida, Tanaina, Koyukon, Carrier, Chilcotin, Dogrib, Chipewyan, and Umpqua, to name a few), is primarily concentrated in the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, and the Canadian North. Navajo and Apache are southwestern “walkabouts” of this same family.

6. And probably Chumashan as well, if Chumash proves to be unrelatable to other so-called Hokan languages. Yukian has long been chalked up as an isolate family, but Chumash, until recently, was presumed to be a member of the Hokan superstock. Current research, encouraged by a large-scale examination of Harrington's vast Chumash corpora now under way at the University of California, Santa Barbara, suggests that this long-standing assumption (going at least back to Sapir 1925) is becoming increasingly di‹cult to maintain (Foster 1996:86). Indeed, recent classifications (Ives Goddard 1996) do not include either Chumashan or Esselen within the proposed Hokan grouping. However, the dust has yet to settle on this reevaluation.

7. Foster's (1996) Handbook discussion of California linguistic prehistory, in “Language and the Culture History of North America,” is an extremely valuable overview of the field, and I have relied heavily on his synthesis of past and present scholarship in the account that follows. (See especially his sections on Yukian, Hokan, Penutian, and Uto-Aztecan, pp. 83–95.) Other useful resources include Shipley (1978), Wallace (1978a), Whistler (1977b), and Moratto (1984).

8. Should conclusive linguistic evidence for the Hokan grouping remain beyond the reach of our methodological grasp, the term Hokan may yet survive as a kind of shorthand for referring to some of these “Old California” languages and language families. Indeed, informed speculation (for example, Moratto 1984) associates ancestral Yukian and “Hokan” peoples with the ancient Western Fluted Point tradition, which dates to 9,000–10,000 b.p.

9. This model of Penutian southern expansion echoes what has come to be called the “Multiple Entry Hypothesis.” A great deal of new work has come out in the past couple of decades (see Foster 1996 for summary and orientation),

Furthermore, if Mike Nichols (1981) is correct, and the long and complex Pre-Uto-Aztecan dispersal can in fact be traced out of the Basin and Southwest, back through the Central Valley and Southern Sierra and north toward Oregon, then it may have been Pre-Uto-Aztecan peoples who actually pioneered the ancient Penutian route south out of Oregon, down through the river systems of northern California, and into the Central Valley and foothills of the Sierra, long before the ancestral Yokutsan, Utian, and Wintuan peoples, who by turns followed in their footsteps.

10. The southern distribution of Hokan, in the form of Yuman-family languages, continues down into the Baja peninsula with PaiPai and Kiliwa, and back into the Southwest with the other Yuman tribes (Havasupai, Walapai, Yavapai, and Maricopa). There are also distant “Hokan” languages in Mexico: for instance, Seri and Chontal-Oaxaca.

11. California Uto-Aztecan groups include Tataviam; Tübatulabal in the mountain foothills; the Takic group (Luiseño, Gabrielino, and Juaneño along the coast; Serrano, Kitanemuk, Cupeño, and Cahuilla inland); and the Numic group (Mono, Owens Valley Paiute, Panamint, Kawaiisu, Southern Paiute, and Chemehuevi) out in the Basin proper, beyond the boundaries of the California culture area per se. For discussions of California Uto-Aztecan prehistory, see Bean and Smith (1978), Nichols (1981), Moratto (1984), and Foster (1996).

12. The discussion here owes much to Johanna Nichol's pioneering work on the geographical aspects of linguistic diversity, Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time (1992).

13. In e ect, this tendency holds true even within California itself. The linguistically least diverse area of California—the desert territories of its closely related Uto-Aztecan tribes—is also the most inhospitable.

14. I would urge the interested reader to look for Robert Heizer's The Destruction of California Indians (1993), Robert H. Jackson and Edward Castillo's Indians, Franciscans, and Spanish Colonization: The Impact of the Mission System on California Indians (1995), Rupert and Jeannette Henry Costo's The Missions of California: A Legacy of Genocide (1987), and Albert Hurtado's Indian Survival on the California Frontier (1988), among other works on this subject.

15. This account is taken from Mauricio Mixco's “Kiliwa Texts.” The only editorial liberties I have taken—as this is not a technical publication—is to remove the brackets and clause numbers from Mixco's free translation and supply occasional punctuation marks where they seemed appropriate. The bracketted

16. Yee's narrative, which was brought to my attention by linguist Suzanne Wash, was collected in the 1930s by J. P. Harrington; it is unpublished, but may be found among Harrington's voluminous Barbareño fieldnotes at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. Asisara's account, collected in 1877 but dating to 1818, is reprinted in Malcolm Margolin's The Way We Lived.

17. Margolin reprints Benson's account in its entirety in The Way We Lived: California Indian Stories, Songs, and Reminiscences (1993).

18. True, many of the most disastrous Indian policies and programs were conceived with “the best of intentions.” It's just hard to understand, today, how a program that intentionally dismembers families can be seen in a humanitarian light. We are left with a historical view of a society so blinded by its own presuppositions and prejudices that up is seen as down, and a sow's ear is taken for a purse of gold. Let our forebears be a lesson to us today, where such reactionary and mean-spirited public policies as immigrant health-care bans or English Only movements are concerned, and examine our ethnic legislations with a true humanitarian eye.

19. See Hamley 1994 for a comprehensive treatment of the history and cultural e ects of the federal boarding school system.

20. News from Native California 4.1 (1989):40–41. The interview was conducted by Vic Bedoian and Roberta Llewellyn, and transcribed by Vera Mae Fredrickson.

21. Margolin, in a postscript to this interview as excerpted in The Way We Lived, writes: “Elsie Allen did have children, and true to her resolve she, like so many of her generation, did not teach them her Pomo language. She did, however, become a masterful weaver of baskets, and until her death in 1990 she was tremendously important in passing along traditional skills and knowledge to her children and to many others” (1993:183).

22. From an article published in News from Native California 8.4 (1994): 40.

23. This essay appeared in The Advocate (the newsletter of the Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival), published as an inset to News from Native California 7.1 (winter 1992–1993): 40–41.

24. See Lauren Teixeira's “California Indian Stories and the Spirit” in News from Native California 9.4 (1996).

25. See Leanne Hinton's “Breath of Life/Silent No More: The Native California Language Restoration Workshop” in News from Native California 10.1 (1996). Sixteen languages were represented: Rumsien, Mutsun, Awaswas, Coast Miwok, Patwin, Nomlaki, Nisenan, Central Pomo, Northern Pomo, Chimariko, Salinan, Ventureño Chumash, Tongva (Gabrielino), Ajachmem (Juaneño), Wiyot, and Mattole.