What Does It Take To Reawaken a Native Language?

"Há," says tribal elder Ron Montez, Sr. of the Big Valley Band of Pomo Indians, pronouncing the word for "I "or "me" in Eastern Pomo, one of over 50 critically endangered Native California languages. Alongside tribal cultural directors throughout the United States, Mr. Montez oversees a hard-won program to revive a language last spoken by elders who died in the COVID-19 pandemic.

Home to over 200 tribes and tribal communities speaking over 80 distinct languages, California is both a biocultural diversity hotspot and the epicenter of a linguistic crisis.

With few exceptions, according to UNESCO's World Atlas of Endangered Languages, all of California's Native languages are considered to be critically endangered, severely endangered or extinct. "Unless dominant attitudes change and some of the revitalization efforts under way are effective, the near future will see the disappearance of all California's American Indian languages," warned the Atlas in 2010.

Perhaps because most tribal efforts go underreported or unreported in the media, UNESCO's 2010 Atlas grossly underestimated the breadth and scope of actual tribal language revitalization efforts. From the Tolowa Dee-Ni' in California's far north to the Kumeyaay in the south, tribal language instructors and cultural directors have successfully incorporated Native languages into public schools, community gatherings and family homes where the newly born are raised as first language speakers.

"Now there's hardly a Chumash or Kumeyaay who don't speak their language, at least to introduce themselves," says Richard Bugbee (Luiseño), board member of the nonprofit Advocates for California Indigenous Language Survival (AICLS), whose mission is "helping Native communities create new speakers."

In fact, Native California tribes must constantly contest the extinction stereotype. Beyond the often-repeated phrase, "We Are Still Here," tribes have become adept at flipping the colonial narrative.

"One of the main things we've been pushing for is to eliminate the use of the E-word (extinction), the D-word (dead) or the M-word (moribund), as if the language was a dying patient. We prefer to use the terms 'sleeping language' or 'resting language,'" explained Raymond (Ray) Huaute (Chumash/Cahuilla), a doctorate candidate in linguistics at the University of California at San Diego.

"The Wailaki and Yuki never initially 'lost' or 'let go' of their language," asserts Cheryl Tuttle, Native American Studies Director and Wailaki teacher for the Round Valley School District in Covelo, California. "Native people were captured and forced to relocate, their lifeways were outlawed and English was forced on the people."

Historically, state-sanctioned policies and religious groups deliberately attempted to exterminate not only tribal peoples through genocide — but also their cultures, by forcing them to leave their ancestral territories and attend westernized boarding schools, and prohibiting them from speaking Native languages, singing traditional songs or dancing sacred dances. (Probably not coincidentally, one of the main databases for globally endangered languages, Ethnologue, is maintained by an evangelical Christian organization called SIL International.)

Generations of cultural genocide shredded the fabric of Californian Indigenous lifeways, yet surviving descendants in every tribal community guarded the remains, stitching together the remnants with resilience and creativity.

California tribes never stopped practicing their culture. Roundhouse dances were preserved through intergenerational training of new dancers; and songs were passed on from grandparent to grandchild, uncle to nephew. Traditional basketweaving, once in decline, is now flourishing, thanks to the never-ending efforts of master weavers and the California Indian Basketweavers Association.

Indigenous ecosystem management, a key component of maintaining traditional spiritual relationships with ancestral lands, waters and native wildlife, through wild-tending of culturally significant plants and cultural burning — low intensity "good fire" that helps prevent catastrophic wildfires — is proliferating throughout California.

After almost 120 years of fire suppression and prohibiting tribes from accessing their historical territories, lands are being returned to tribes (Newsom's administration allocated $100 million for this purpose), parks are developing co-management agreements, and there is an overwhelming demand for cultural burns by intertribal groups including the Tribal EcoRestoration Alliance (TERA) of Lake County and the Karuk-led Women in Fire Training Exchange.

A parallel linguistic renaissance is evidenced by the increasing number of California tribal language classes, many of which are interconnected with renewed access to tribal territories. "For tens of thousands of years, the land had been prayed to and became accustomed to the Yuki and Wailaki languages. Not only do the people need the wisdom contained in the language, but the land misses hearing the people and needs to hear those healing songs and prayers again," says Tuttle.

Through the steadfast efforts of tribal staff and linguists at academic institutes — supported by newly enacted policies including the recently signed 2022 California Indian Education Act (AB 1730), encouraging expanded teaching of Native American history and culture in schools, and California Assembly Bill 544, allowing special certification of Native language instructors — at present over 20 California-based tribes provide language classes to K-12 and adult learners. A few languages, like Kumeyaay, are also offered at the community college level.

Inspired by the Tolowa Dee-ni', Yurok and Hoopa tribes of Del Norte County, who succeeded in offering public school classes in their languages in addition to tribal-only classes on their reservations, along with the Chumash and Kumeyaay in Santa Barbara and San Diego counties, tribes are even breathing life into languages where little or no audio records exist.

Such is the case for the Wailaki and Yuki language programs developed by Round Valley instructors in a remote section of Mendocino County, on a reservation where distant bands from the Nomlaki, Pit River, Concow, Pomo and Wailaki tribes were force-marched hundreds of miles for relocation onto Yuki ancestral territory.

"Teaching Yuki is important because we live on Yuki territory and our ancestors spoke Yuki language," says Hailey Want, a Round Valley teacher responsible for creating Yuki 1 and Yuki 2 classes, inspired by the success of her colleagues who teach Wailaki 1,2, 3 and 4 at Round Valley Elementary, Middle and High Schools.

Linguistic Challenges and Innovations

Ray Huaute is a member of Natives 4 Linguistics, a group formed to help the field of linguistic science overcome academic biases and trends that have resulted in less than 0.5% of linguistic scholars originating from Native American communities. While recognizing the crucial role that linguistic scholars play in documenting and restoring tribal languages, a narrowly defined academic approach to language restoration won't work for most tribal communities.

In case after case, when well-intentioned linguists or tribal instructors began language classes by teaching phonetics or grammar, community members stopped attending. "They started out with around 40 people and it dropped down to zero because [the linguist] was teaching them about the language with linguistic terms instead of starting out with conversational phrases," explained one tribal cultural director.

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Tribes committed to language reawakening face extraordinary external and internal challenges: a paucity of fluent speakers, difficult-to-access archives or non-existent recordings, overburdened cultural resource officers, extremely limited funding, jaded youth, traumatized adults, and widely dispersed populations.

"Not having fluent speakers makes it difficult because I can't just walk up to anyone and ask a question about the language and expect them to know right away or give me the answer I was looking for," explains Lourdes Pedroza-Downey, a Wailaki instructor. "There may not be another person in your home or someone close that knows the language and you can't continue those conversations."

"We didn't have any audio recordings for Wailaki — we just had written recordings from elders who sat down with the linguists and anthropologists," recounted Tuttle. "With other languages, like Spanish or French, there is a plethora of premade materials. With Yuki and Wailaki, we have to create our own lessons and materials, then try them out with our students and revise them, if needed."

"We realized that we needed to give ourselves permission to just begin and learn along with our students. If we waited for fluency, another 50 years would pass without the language being learned by our youth," she explained.

Breathing Life into Sleeping Languages

California leads the nation in language revitalization, due to the tremendous dedication of tribal cultural staff supported logistically by AICLS, which has partnered with the University of California at Berkeley since the 1990s to develop and expand language support programs for tribes and tribal communities throughout the state. Characterized by a creative, collaborative spirit, the AICLS-inaugurated Master-Apprentice Program, which creates partnerships between elders and neophyte learners, and the Breath of Life program have become models for the nation.

"Our work is gaining momentum," notes AICLS Executive Director Carly Tex (North Fork Rancheria of Mono Indians and descendant of the Dunlap Band of Mono Indians). "We regularly receive requests from many potential partners working to revitalize indigenous languages."

When no living speakers are available, tribal languages are accessed through archival materials created generations ago. During each Breath of Life workshop, tribal members are partnered with linguists and archivists from libraries, museums and other repositories to access historical linguistic collections: wax cylinders, audio recordings, ethnographic notes and dictionaries (if they exist).

A sleeping language is reawoken one syllable at a time, as tribal members parse the pronunciation of words last spoken by their great-grandparents.

AICLS's Breath of Life initiative became the basis for national language and knowledge revitalization programs including the Recovering Voices and Community Research Programs at the Smithsonian Institute's National Museum of Natural History and the National Breath of Life Archival Institute for Indigenous Languages at the Myaami Center. With funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, these centers pair linguists with tribal members resolved to bring their language back to their people.

"I call our language work a 'reawakening' — instead of revitalization, which sounds like something that was dead. The language was never dead to our people, it has always been part of our community," asserts Nakia Zavalla, cultural director for the Samala Chumash tribe.

These are just a few examples of hundreds of tribal members dedicating their lives to building living language communities — cultural legacies that will extend far beyond their lifetimes.

As Zavalla put it, "I always tell my girls, if I leave this world tomorrow, I know that I've done something for you girls, to give back to my people and to my children."

What does success look like so far? The language instructors we spoke with define it as tribal members laughing during spontaneous street conversations in their Native languages and making jokes and Facebook posts in their ancestral tongues.

Regaining Culture and Identity Through Language

Current efforts to recover, resuscitate, and revitalize tribal languages could be compared to trying to recover water from ancient underground aquifers using hand shovels and buckets in the middle of a drought.

Yet every day, new speakers are born and strengthened and become teachers.

In the case of Wailaki, where no audio recordings existed, teachers worked closely with linguists Justin Spence and Kayla Begay during countless Zoom webinars to reconstruct Wailaki sounds and even create words based on linguistically similar languages.

In a number of cases, federally recognized tribes — possessing funds and infrastructure unavailable to tribes still fighting for recognition — have sponsored language classes for non-recognized tribes. Such is the case for the Wukchumni, a Yokut tribal band residing on the Tule River Reservation, whose language was kept alive through the painstaking efforts of elder Marie Wilcox, featured in the NY Times Op-ed video "Marie's Dictionary/Who Speaks Wukchumni?" by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee of the Global Oneness Project, based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

 "When you help a community protect their language, you aren't just protecting words — you're protecting a cultural identity and the well-being of real people," asserts 7000 Languages, a non-profit dedicated to creating free online language-learning courses for indigenous, minority and refugee communities. The organization's name refers to the fact that of the 7000 languages currently spoken on earth, over half are endangered.

"The changes in people who learn the language — especially the young people — they become activists in their culture. They promote their culture. It turns out wonderfully because people who can speak their language know exactly who they are," Bugbee says.

"Our own name for ourselves is Ivilyu'at (Ih-veel-you-aht)," explains Huaute. "That name comes from a reference to the First Created Peoples (Ivim-peh). The lyu means you're becoming, or changing into something. So when you speak the language, you are becoming those ancestors."