Tongue ties (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

Tongue ties

By Beth Curda/Enterprise staff writer
http://www.davisenterprise.com/articles/2005/01/31/features/335fea0.txt

At 65, Patrick Orozco is still learning who he is.

A lifelong resident of Watsonville, he was a weighmaster and vegetable
inspector for a frozen food company until retiring five years ago. He
is married and has grown children.

Still, he feels he has much to learn.

He has known since his childhood that he is  Native American, but until
a couple of decades ago, he knew little more.

When he was growing up, he visited his grandmother, Rose Rios, every
other day. He brought her herbs he had found, and she told him what
they were and how his ancestors had used them. She sang songs and told
him stories in English, mixing in an Indian word here and there.

She told him he was a Mission Indian, but she couldn't tell him anything
more specific than that.

What happened to his ancestors' language? Their dances? Their songs?

In the mid-1970s, a battle over a tribal burial site in Watsonville
sparked a research project Orozco and others around him have been
involved in since -- research into their own family histories.

At one point, he was working practically around the clock, dividing time
between grading broccoli, cauliflower, asparagus, squash and other
vegetables, and researching his ancestry and that of others who
requested help.

He has had little success finding information from before the time
Europeans arrived in the area. Information dwindled over the years,
once Native Americans began intermarrying with the Spanish, he says.
Little information -- some songs, some stories -- has survived.

But he learned over the years that he is Juaneno from San Juan
Capistrano, Chumash from San Buenaventura and Costanoan Ohlone. His
ancestors were poor and did not have the education the Spanish had.
They cut wood, farmed, fished or gathered berries for sale.

More recently, he has had help. As Orozco continues to learn his own
family history and assist others, researchers at UC Davis are
cataloging thousands of pages of notes that were taken 50 to 100 years
ago by the late John Peabody Harrington.

More than a linguist

Harrington meticulously recorded native cultures during the first half
of the 20th century with the help of consultants within tribes in
California and the western United States, other U.S. regions and
portions of Meso-America and South America. Most of his work was in
California and the Southwest.

What languages did they speak? What did certain words mean? What did
they eat? What materials did they use for homes, baskets?

Harrington recorded far beyond the information of a typical linguist,
said Lisa Woodward, a UCD graduate student cataloging his work.

He was secretive about his work, she says. He abbreviated the names of
his contacts so others conducting similar research could not duplicate
it. He hid from the Bureau of American Ethnology, his employer, some of
the work he was conducting, as it was beyond what he had been assigned,
Woodward said.

Generations of work

Woodward is one of just a few people cataloging the notes, on hundreds
of reels of microfilm that UCD's Native American Language Center is
borrowing from UC Riverside and rewriting with the help of a National
Science Foundation grant.

Woodward and the other graduate students print out the microfilm frames,
then retype Harrington's notes. The notes are faded in spots,
scribbled, often abbreviated. The researchers catalog them in a
database by line, paragraph, reel and volume. Alongside the more
legible, accessible, searchable typed copy, the students create
databases of tribal terms and Harrington's definitions and context for
them.

An excerpt from his notes on the language  Klamath, for example, reads:

They eat the root of the cattail and of the tule they eat the white
lowest part of the stalk -- never the roots, the roots are black & are
used for coloring (Klamath) baskets with. They eat both of these raw.
p'p'a/.s, cattail. But p'p'sam, anything which is derived from p'p'as.

For Serrano, another language Harrington studied, he visited the
communities in 1916 and took 1,600 pages of notes on the language.

It took three graduate students three months to enter the language into
the project database. Only a few speakers of Serrano remain, when they
used to spread through parts of the areas now known as San Bernardino
and Riverside counties and eastward across the desert to the Salton
Sea.

They are on two reservations, Woodward said, San Manuel in San
Bernardino County and Highland and Morongo reservation between Banning
and Palm Springs.

The remaining speakers are incorporating Harrington's notes into a
language revitalization program, Woodward said.

Harrington collected material on 135 languages. His original notes -- an
estimated 1 million pages -- are in the Smithsonian Institution's
National Anthropological Archives and copied onto 477 reels at UC
Riverside.

After Harrington died in 1961, people sent his work from all over to the
Smithsonian. The University of California became interested and
purchased the copy stored at the Riverside campus.

The UCD group is interested in making his work available to scholars and
Native Americans alike.

"It's pretty inaccessible, especially to Indian people," said Martha
Macri, director of both the Native American Language Center and of this
project. The Language Center is within the university's department of
Native American studies.

"What we're trying to do," Macri said, "is make it possible (for) the
people from whom this material was collected to have access to it."

Many of the languages he studied are hardly spoken today -- some not at
all. For some, the century-old notes are the only written record of
their history. Varying depending on how much time he spent with a group
and with whom he worked, some languages take up just part of one reel,
while others fill 10 or more. Chumash is recorded onto 96 reels. Some
of Harrington's notes on the language have never been read.

"It becomes very precious (to preserve) these heritages," Macri said.

Woodward claims no Native American ancestry, but became interested in
the subject as an undergraduate student then as a professional
archaeologist. She returned to campus to work more with Harrington's
notes.

"I think if this was just an academic project and it was just going for
the benefit of scholars, I probably wouldn't be as enthused by it,"
Woodward, 32, said. "... Just being able to see the end result, taking
these notes back to the (Native American) communities. ... People get
so excited. And like we said before, some of Harrington's work is the
only work for some of these languages. His notes are real resources for
specific groups."

The project will outlast Macri's lifetime, the 59-year-old says, so she
is glad to have Woodward to carry it into the future.

Bridging a gap

Karen Santana, 24, grew up on a small reservation in Point Arena, but,
until a couple of years ago, knew little about her heritage. The
reservation was "kind of a low-class neighborhood," she says -- rural,
with minimal medical services and widespread diabetes and high
cholesterol, vandalism and a tendency to serve as a hideout for
fugitives.

"It's not the kind of neighborhood you want to walk around at dark," the
UCD undergraduate student says. "Most people have dogs or guns, things
they think they need to survive up there."

Much of her family is there, and she visits often.

Growing up, she didn't learn much about her tribal ancestors. She was
told to do well in school and get a job.

"I didn't hear a lot of my heritage before because ... I don't think
people realize that that is an area where you can go into and actually
make a living. So anything to do with culture wasn't really emphasized
in my upbringing."

She went to college with the intention of becoming a doctor, but
eventually decided to change direction. She took a language class and
became interested in learning more.

Her tribe only has a few language "speakers" left. She met with one of
them, and he gave her everything he had researched.

"He basically sat me down and told me one day ... 'I've been waiting for
somebody to come along, some youngster who wants to learn the language.
I just want to see them, and I just want to see it go on.' "

Studying her culture, Central Pomo, could be a way to give back to her
family, she realized, and give her the new educational direction she
had been seeking.

She has been working on the Harrington project for a couple of years,
learning about his century-old research and about herself. It is
helping her understand the history of her tribe; she is learning things
that she thinks some of her elders don't even know.

"It gives me, one, a better sense of pride in my own culture," she said.
"I'm attached to that culture, so I feel more of a responsibility to
know it and understand it so I can teach it to other people."

It's a good thing she is investing so much into learning the history.
The elder she worked with last summer has died.

"For me, that's like, I don't know, I know that there's a whole culture
that was thriving before all of that happened. ...

"I feel like people tend to forget that there's a rich history here,
especially in California (at one time heavily populated with tribes).
It's a really rich and complex history, so any part of it from before
contact (between Indians and white people), I think it's something
important to be known and recognized." Uncovering history

During the 1975 battle over the burial ground in which Orozco and others
occupied to prevent a warehouse development on the site, Orozco began
thinking seriously about researching his heritage.

"During that time, it was kind of like, will we ever know who we are,
besides just Indians, you know? ... 'I am an Indian, but who am I?'
That ran through my mind. It started to build up in me, you know, even
though I was already in my 30s. I said, it's time to find out who we
are."

He didn't have to look far to find some of the information about his
past. His great-grandmother and great-uncle are mentioned in the notes,
as is a friend of his family who worked with Harrington.

"It's exciting," Orozco said. "It inspires us even more to continue.
Finding out not only about ourselves, but others, you know?"

Through the Pajaro Valley Ohlone Indian Council, he helps track down
family information for Native Americans. He said he takes pride in his
work when he sees the responses of those he has helped.

"We're helping other people trace their lineage. That makes us feel good
about that, you know? That we helped this individual obtain his Indian
lineage."

He has been speaking in schools.

"I'm teaching the kids language, I'm teaching (them) songs and dances.
We put it all together. ... This way, they will know it -- we are still
here. We are still here."

-- Reach Beth Curda at bcurda at davisenterprise.net or 747-8045

Sunday, January 30, 2005