Saving Culture, Saving Language
Monday, April 21. 2008
Sometimes saviors come in unlikely forms.
The Native American community in the area of coastal California where I live is from a complex and fascinating culture called Chumash, "the ones who make shell bead money."
Chumash settled in this area, from Malibu to Paso Robles and on the Channel Islands, about 13,000 years ago. They thrived here for centuries, inhabiting an area of about 7,000 square miles in small communities, sharing many cultural traits but also exhibiting distinct differences depending upon their location.
When the Spanish missionaries arrived, the Chumash culture was fairly decimated, by conversion (both willing and forced); by what some historians have characterized as essential slavery; and through the rampant spread of European diseases, which the Chumash, like most Native American communities across the country, had no natural resistance to. And like many Native American communities, the Chumash were terrorized into stepping away from their language -- a technique used by conquerors around the world to undermine the conquered culture and their instincts to continue to see themselves as separate. Language is a powerful form of identity -- its symbols, its metaphors, its stories are all entwined in its words. Rip a language from a people and you have ripped much of their heart from them. The last fluent Chumash speaker died in 1965, and the Chumash language and its dialects have been in danger of disappearing completely, ending the richness of cultural identity and understanding permanently.
However, in spite of all of this, the Chumash people have survived. This week, they received a remarkable gift towards the restoration of a thriving culture: a dictionary of the ancient Chumash language Samala, captured by a graduate student in the late 1960's from copious notes taken by John P. Harrington, a linguistic anthropologist who spent 40 years immersed in Native American language as a field collector. The grad student, Richard Applegate, got a part time job at UC Berkeley and was given the daunting task of sorting through over a million pieces of paper that Harrington had squirreled away over the course of his collecting career.
Applegate has now put together findings from that research into a dictionary, with the hopes that it will help surviving Chumash reconstruct their language.
In its own quiet way, I think this is one of the most important things that has happened this week, even while news pages are crowded by presidential election coverage, dire economic predictions, and updates on violence in the Middle East. A culture has an opportunity to re-imagine itself into full being.
This is extraordinary!
You can read more about it in this LA Times story, and can find out more about the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians here.
The Native American community in the area of coastal California where I live is from a complex and fascinating culture called Chumash, "the ones who make shell bead money."
Chumash settled in this area, from Malibu to Paso Robles and on the Channel Islands, about 13,000 years ago. They thrived here for centuries, inhabiting an area of about 7,000 square miles in small communities, sharing many cultural traits but also exhibiting distinct differences depending upon their location.
When the Spanish missionaries arrived, the Chumash culture was fairly decimated, by conversion (both willing and forced); by what some historians have characterized as essential slavery; and through the rampant spread of European diseases, which the Chumash, like most Native American communities across the country, had no natural resistance to. And like many Native American communities, the Chumash were terrorized into stepping away from their language -- a technique used by conquerors around the world to undermine the conquered culture and their instincts to continue to see themselves as separate. Language is a powerful form of identity -- its symbols, its metaphors, its stories are all entwined in its words. Rip a language from a people and you have ripped much of their heart from them. The last fluent Chumash speaker died in 1965, and the Chumash language and its dialects have been in danger of disappearing completely, ending the richness of cultural identity and understanding permanently.
However, in spite of all of this, the Chumash people have survived. This week, they received a remarkable gift towards the restoration of a thriving culture: a dictionary of the ancient Chumash language Samala, captured by a graduate student in the late 1960's from copious notes taken by John P. Harrington, a linguistic anthropologist who spent 40 years immersed in Native American language as a field collector. The grad student, Richard Applegate, got a part time job at UC Berkeley and was given the daunting task of sorting through over a million pieces of paper that Harrington had squirreled away over the course of his collecting career.
Applegate has now put together findings from that research into a dictionary, with the hopes that it will help surviving Chumash reconstruct their language.
In its own quiet way, I think this is one of the most important things that has happened this week, even while news pages are crowded by presidential election coverage, dire economic predictions, and updates on violence in the Middle East. A culture has an opportunity to re-imagine itself into full being.
This is extraordinary!
You can read more about it in this LA Times story, and can find out more about the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians here.
