Big Valley Pomo

[Andre Cramblit]

American Indian Youths Preserve the Past, One Word at a Time

Pacific News Service, Youth News Feature, Shadi Rahimi, May 11, 2005

Editor's Note: Though only a few elders of the Big Valley band of Pomo 
Indians are still fluent in their language, young tribal members are 
picking up words and phrases with the help of technology.

Eighteen-year-old Kristin Amparo, a tribal member of the Big Valley 
band of Pomo Indians, lives with her parents and five siblings in a 
large house on their reservation in Clear Lake, about three hours north 
of San Francisco. She likes bouncing on a trampoline to slam-dunk a 
basketball in her back yard, zooming past the creamy white Konocti 
Vista Casino in a yellow all-terrain vehicle and, now, speaking 
Bahtssal with her 14-year-old sister Felicia.

The flat and green Big Valley reservation sits two miles from tiny 
downtown Lakeport on 153 acres encircling the banks of Clear Lake, 
whose blue-green waters host international bass-fishing tournaments and 
traditional Pomo tule boat races. On sunny days, kids fish for bluegill 
and catfish from the dock near the tribe's Konocti Vista Casino.

Only a few elders of the Big Valley tribe are fluent in Bahtssal, a 
tribal dialect that began to fade after settlers forced Northern 
California Pomos off their lands. Today, Amparo and her sister are 
among a small group of young people on the 470-member reservation who 
are learning to speak the dialect as part of a newly formed language 
program.

"We tell our mom stuff in Bahtssal, like, 'I have to go,'" says Amparo, 
who had never heard the language spoken before she began studying it 
under the new initiative. "It's really fun to learn."

According to tribal historians, the decline in fluency in Bahtssal 
dates back to 1852, when the United States Senate refused to ratify a 
federal treaty that had promised the Big Valley tribe 72 square miles 
of land on the south side of Clear Lake. Settlers began claiming plots 
of land the following year, making private property of the areas where 
Big Valley ancestors had gathered food for more than 11,000 years. As 
tribal members began working in fields and on ranches owned by 
settlers, and their children began learning English in white schools, 
Bahtssal began to fade.

James Bluewolf, who directs the language program, sees it as an 
exercise not just in cultural preservation, but also in healing. 
"People are still suffering from post-traumatic stress after being 
forced to give up everything they had," he says. "But every culture 
comes to a point where they are ready to make a change."

In Clear Lake, the epicenter of that change sits among piles of scrap 
metal, wood and rusty cars, in a building that looks like it has 
dropped from the sky. It is tiny and tidy, and painted a bright 
swimming-pool blue. Inside this building, which houses the tribal 
language program, young mothers watch their chubby-cheeked toddlers 
play in a preschool class held by the nonprofit Lake County Tribal 
Health Consortium.

In a cramped office past the play area, James Bluewolf smiles at the 
children's squeals. A stocky, soft-spoken man who once ran a 
landscaping business, Bluewolf has been using technology tribal 
ancestors could not have imagined to preserve and promote the tribal 
language. Bluewolf records hours of Bahtssal spoken by elders, which he 
edits into half-hour audio segments that air on the community radio 
station, and are available free on CD to tribal members. Bluewolf is 
also writing a curriculum for a 15-week course in Bahtssal.

In a program Bluewolf directs, local teenagers perform skits that teach 
words and phrases such as "Chiin the'a 'eh" ("How are you?") and 
"Q'odii" ("Good"). Bluewolf videotapes the skits and makes them into 
videos that are played on the Lake County television station, and made 
available on DVD.

In the play area, Alisha Salguero, 21, rocks her 5-month-old daughter 
to sleep while her 3-year-old son Brian plays. Brian has learned 
several words in Bahtssal in the preschool class, where Bluewolf uses 
hand puppets to teach the language.

"He's really picked it up," Salguero says with a smile. "I don't really 
know it, so I think it's good for him to learn his language."

While traditional song, dance, and tule boat races have always been 
part of the cultural life of Big Valley children, holding on to their 
tribal language has been more difficult, says Marilyn Ellis, 21. 
"That's why this language program is important," says Ellis, whose 
father, Ray, was the spiritual leader of the tribe.

Before he died several years ago, Ray Ellis revived the tribe's "Big 
Time" spiritual celebration. The gathering, held every September on the 
grassy banks of Clear Lake, includes prayer, dancing and singing -- and 
now, perhaps, the sound of children trying out their ancestral tongue.

"Our language is part of us," says Ellis, who does not speak the tribal 
dialect herself, but whose daughters can now name their cat and dog in 
Bahtssal. "If we don't know it, we're pretty much dead."

PNS contributor Shadi Rahimi, 24, is the co-founder and an editor of 
Seventh Native American Generation (SNAG) magazine, and an associate 
editor of YO! Youth Outlook, www.youthoutlook.org.
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