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By Kerry Tremain Sheila Guzman had no idea she’d one day write a song in a language that hadn’t been spoken in 70 years. The song, “Ten Coyotes” (sung to the tune of “Ten Little Indians”), has become a favorite of her tribe--a tribe she didn’t know she belonged to until she tracked down her father’s origins a few years ago. A respiratory therapist in Turlock and a mother of two children, she also hadn’t planned on spending her evenings and weekends learning phonetic alphabets and poring over an eccentric linguist’s scribbled notes from the 1920s. Despite the difficulties, she calls this turn of events “a blessing.” Sheila Guzman is one of many California Indians who, with support from the University’s linguistics department, are working against the odds to revitalize their lost or dying languages. That the languages survive at all is attributable to earlier generations of Native Americans and linguists--and a few lucky accidents. The linguist that Guzman studies, John Peabody Harrington, spent 40 years seeking out the surviving speakers of California native languages. His native “informants” explained as many words and stories as they could to him, sometimes just months before they died. Near the East Bay town of Dublin, Harrington found the two remaining speakers from Guzman’s tribe, a band of Ohlone called the Muwekma (pronounced moo-WECK-mah). Much of the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay, including the land now occupied by the Berkeley campus, was home to the Muwekma before the Spanish arrived in the 1700s. The tribe spoke a language called Chochenyo. Harrington made a wax cylinder recording of one of the speakers--who turned out to be the last--and created 500 pages of notes that comprise the principal lexicon for Chochenyo. Harrington left those poorly labeled notebooks among a group of boxes that mysteriously turned up at the University after he died in 1961. A year later, Berkeley graduate student Catherine Callaghan ’54, Ph.D. ’63, discovered the notes. She didn’t know what they were, but devoted herself to their study. Forty years later, Jon Rodney, another graduate student, used Callaghan’s research to translate the voice on the wax cylinder. He happened to offer the Muwekma tribe his translation just after they’d formed a group to study their language but hadn’t yet located source materials. As a result, in July 2003, Rodney and professor Juliette Blevins began meeting regularly with a group of five Muwekma women, all working professionals with families, who had been selected by the tribe to learn Chochenyo. A similar series of fortuitous events led Sheila Guzman to the Muwekma and ultimately to their language study group. Guzman, in her mid-thirties, has warm eyes, brushes her dark hair back from her forehead, and, like many Muwekma women, often wears an abalone necklace. But she didn’t grow up thinking of herself as Native American. After both her parents died, her mother’s large Irish/English Baptist family raised her. When she had her own first child, in 1994, she felt the urge to learn more about her ancestors. One day she nonchalantly asked a friend’s husband, who had a small business tracking down missing estate heirs, if he’d mind looking into her father’s family. Her dad had called himself Hispanic, but once told her that his own father had been a “Mission Indian”--a reference to the natives forced to work and live in California’s Spanish missions. And on her dad’s birth certificate, a clerk had listed her grandfather as “Red (Indian).” The friend’s husband located a 1910 California Indian census. By that time, the Muwekma-Ohlone had been reduced to a small band that lived and worked near Pleasanton on an estate built by George and Phoebe Apperson Hearst. (Despite the Muwekma’s appearance on this document, in the 1920s a corrupt Indian agent left them off a list of recognized tribes he sent to Washington; the tribe has been fighting ever since to regain federal recognition.) Based on the census, Guzman researched her family on the Internet. She found the Muwekma’s website and a description of the historical lineage of the tribe.
Guzman remembers the first thing that Cambra said at her induction ceremony: Welcome home. “With my parents gone so long and being an only child, that’s exactly what it felt like,” she says. As a gift, Cambra gave her a cassette tape made from Harrington’s wax cylinder. On it, the last speaker of Chochenyo sang stories passed down through generations of his family. At the time of her ceremony, Shelia Guzman hadn’t yet learned any of the singer’s words. What she had learned, and what still overwhelms her each time she plays the fuzzy recording, was that the man singing was her great-grandfather, José Guzman. Language death is accelerating throughout the world, but in few places more rapidly than in California--largely because there were once about a hundred languages spoken here. Such language differentiation may be tied to ecological differentiation. In this view, people adapted their words to the ecological niches they occupied, and California’s highly varied ecology encouraged its linguistic diversity. The theory is supported by maps indicating that areas with greater numbers of animal and plant species also have greater numbers of languages. In many areas of the world, species and language loss are proceeding apace and, as with species, the broad implications of these language losses for the future are not entirely clear. What does seem clear is that today’s losses largely result from past efforts to suppress California languages and the people who spoke them. As part of the many efforts to assimilate Native Americans, they were punished in missions and boarding schools for speaking their languages. In other cases, whole tribes died from disease or homicide. This legacy coupled with the rapid spread of English as the lingua franca tend to doom native languages. Linguists describe a language as “moribund” if children aren’t learning it, and today there are no children growing up speaking any of the remaining languages in California. But in the last 20 years, these losses have energized California tribes to sustain or revitalize their languages, often with assistance from the Berkeley linguistics department. Although there are a few cases of resurrected languages--Hawaiian and Hebrew are the outstanding examples--restoring fluency in dormant and moribund languages has a poor record. For the tribes and the linguists working with them, their efforts are a leap of faith as great as those taken by scholars, like Harrington, who earlier recorded vanishing languages with no idea if anyone in the future would learn them. Catherine Callaghan’s research, which became an important bridge between older and newer generations of California linguists, was a similar act of faith. When she discovered Harrington’s surviving notes in a folder marked “CHOCH,” no one even knew what “CHOCH” meant or where the notes had been recorded. Recognizing the language family, she ultimately translated most of them and discovered that Harrington’s principle Muwekma informants were José Guzman and his live-in companion, Maria de los Angeles Colos. They lived in Sunol in the 1920s, when the town consisted of a grocery story, a butcher shop, and a burned-down hotel. In their house with an abalone shell hanging from the front porch, Harrington made the wax cylinder recording of Guzman singing. Harrington was more concerned with collecting notes than organizing them, and was jealous of other linguists. He stashed boxes of materials in warehouses, attics, and chicken coops throughout the state. Most were eventually sent to the Smithsonian, his employer. Callaghan also went through hundreds of the boxes there, some containing his dirty clothes or rotting birds with name bands attached to their legs, written in an Indian language. (His handwriting was atrocious.) But these boxes contained crucial records on over 125 western languages. Leanne Hinton, the chair of the linguistics department at Berkeley, is both a natural successor and a contrast to Harrington. Where he was driven and pushy, her warm, patient demeanor is well adapted to the new difficulties of California language restoration,
“The linguistic profession has come full circle,” Hinton says. “In the days of [Berkeley anthropologist Alfred] Kroeber, the major cause in American linguistics was to document endangered languages.” During the last half of the twentieth century, she says, academic interest shifted to theorists like Noam Chomsky, who elaborated underlying structures of language. Recently, many linguists have returned to the field with their tape recorders. “In the old days, field work was done for the sake of linguistic science. Now it’s much more of a partnership between the indigenous communities and the linguistics profession to restore the language,” she says. It’s a race against time. “When you lose the language, you lose songs,” Hinton says. “You lose most of the lore. Some people can still tell a few of the stories in English, but what’s left tends to be very small and very hollow.” To stem the loss, she advocates and assists master-apprentice programs, where an elder teaches a young person the language. And, every two years, she brings California natives together in Berkeley to share ideas and experiences in a series of language workshops called “Breath of Life.” The Muwekma and a dozen other tribes participated this year. Linguists coach tribal members and introduce them to resources at the Hearst Museum of Anthropology, the Bancroft Library, the linguistic department’s Survey of California Languages, and the Berkeley Language Center, all of which hold many of the documents and recordings that form the practical basis for language revitalization. Daryl Baldwin, a Miami Indian who taught himself the language from texts (since no recordings of Miami survive), is fluent as very few new speakers are. Baldwin, a teacher in this summer’s Breath of Life workshops, has been particularly successful with a mentoring approach within his own family. He has been using the language at home since the early 1990s, when two of his children were toddlers. He advocates the use of the language in cultural contexts like pow-wows, where its meanings can be recovered, and hopes to establish an immersion school on tribal land in Oklahoma. The difficulties of teaching native languages are enormous, not least because nearly all were oral, not written. Wesley Leonard, a Berkeley graduate student whose grandfather is chief of the Miami, is studying the Baldwin family’s experience as the basis for his thesis. In a presentation at Breath of Life, Leonard described one thorny problem--there often aren’t enough surviving words. Sometimes 200 or fewer words have survived; some native languages originally had hundreds of thousands. New words must be borrowed from similar languages or English, or invented by extending or combining other words. (The Muwekma have decided not to borrow words, even from nearby tribes, and therefore must construct new words from the few left them.) A sense of humor helps. For the word “raisin,” the Baldwins chose waapan wa mooyi--the Miami phrase for rabbit pellets. When Native Americans explain why they undertake the difficult and sometimes fruitless task of learning a dormant language, the theme of obligation to the past recurs. Descendants of the losing side of a historical tragedy often feel a sense of responsibility toward their ancestors. The director of a language center for the Makah tribe explained, “We’re not willing to give up. The elders gave so much, and there’s so much embodied in the language, there’s no way we can.” Sheila Guzman, like other Muwekma, has multiple heritages and therefore a multiplicity of ethnic identities to choose from--her known relatives are Protestant and Catholic, Irish, English, and Hispanic as well as Indian (and José Guzman seems to have been of more than one tribe). Her husband’s relatives add German and Italian to the mix for her children. Guzman’s experience is the rule rather than the exception among California Native Americans. They intermarried when Spanish and Americans amalgamated bands in missions and on reservations and dissipated them in conquest. And many, like Guzman’s father, chose to de-emphasize their Indian ancestry, usually to avoid racial stigmas. Guzman says she educates her children about their other traditions, but she and the children are clearly more enthused about their Muwekma heritage.
Anger over cultural and political losses also sometimes motivates tribal language restoration. “They stole our land and our way of life,” said one woman at the Breath of Life conference. “All we have left is our language.” That anger can translate into possessiveness over who should be allowed access to historical records or to speak a language. The same woman said she didn’t want “pseudo-Indians” using her tribe’s documents. And Muwekma officials complained about University linguists helping a young Indian woman learn Chochenyo because its council hadn’t approved her to study the language. Gerald Vizenor, a professor of American Studies who has helped to start native language revitalization programs, finds that attitude in contradiction to the nature of language. “I can understand protection of sacred or religious speech,” he says. “But languages are open, not private business. We’re doomed if we don’t engage openly and creatively.” Still, an optimistic spirit infuses most language revitalization efforts--it must, given the odds against it. “Learning a native language is exhilarating,” says Vizenor, who studied Anishinaabe, the language of his Ojibwa tribe. “It’s thrilling to get inside another worldview.” On the last day of Breath of Life, people cheered as each language group sang songs or enacted skits. And because the Muwekma-Ohlone have made extraordinarily rapid progress, they have inspired other groups. A few months ago, Guzman and the other Muwekma women traveled to Connecticut to share their experiences with the Pequot tribe, who are starting a language group of their own. On that trip, the committee also addressed the Society for the Study of Indigenous Languages of America in Boston. “Sheila and the other women were nervous, but I kept telling them they know more about this than anyone else,” says Blevins, their linguistic advisor. The Muwekma women spoke and sang in Chochenyo. At the end of the presentation, Catherine Callaghan, who had discovered the “CHOCH” notes 42 years earlier and happened to be in the audience, got up to speak. In a real sense, the Muwekma women singing “Ten Coyotes” represented the same hope for the future that drove Callaghan’s work in language restoration. Blevins noticed there were tears in the older linguist’s eyes as she rose to address the gathering. “I never thought my work would ever come to such a wonderful thing as this,” Callaghan said. “I had no idea.” |
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