Content area
Full Text
Language is life: 4th biannual gathering to preserve California Indian culture
On March 17th, dozens of California Indians and others will travel to the beautiful, windswept Marin Headlands across the Golden Gate from San Francisco for the 4th Biannual Language is Life gathering.
There, as the Pacific pounds the western shore of what many Native people call Turtle Island, the participants will share stories and tribal histories. They will also work on ways to recapture the lost tongues of their great-grandparents and protect and enliven what remains of the hundreds of dialects and languages that once flourished here.
This work is set against a California history of Indian oppression that includes not only the long-term Spanish - and on the Sonoma Coast, a briefer Russian - intrusion, but the post-Gold Rush American era of massacre, rape, slavery and land appropriation.
Estimates of pre-contact North Bay populations vary from the 10,500 estimated by U.C. Berkeley ethnologist A.L. Kroeber in his seminal, pre-World War I work for the Smithsonian on the area's major cultural groups - the Coastal Miwok of Marin and southern Sonoma, the Pomo of northern Sonoma, Lake and Mendocino counties and the Wappo of eastern Sonoma and the Napa Valley - to several times that number.
"We think our numbers were much greater than the 10,500 that have been estimated," said Federated Miwok tribal secretary Tim Campbell. "There are hundreds of sites recorded in Marin, for example. It's generally accepted that this area and California had the biggest concentration of Indian people in America north of Mexico."
Unlike other parts of North America where tribal units existed, like the Lakota on the Great Plains, most indigenous Northern Californians lived in communities that although sharing many customs, might speak an entirely different dialect or language just over the next ridge.
Many individuals spoke up to ten or eleven different tongues, according to University of California Phoebe Hearst Museum cultural attache, Otis Parrish.
In any case, by 1900, the Bay Area's once thriving and culture-rich Indian communities had been reduced to scattered families scratching out a meager living as fruit pickers or laborers.
"From, about 1,600 people in our community, by 1900, we had only about 102 inhabitants of our tribe," said Parish, who is the...