Native American women reclaiming their language
Effort aims to restore ‘Indianness’ lost over past 150 years
In 1980, when fourth grader Quirina Geary’s class learned about Spanish missions and the Native American tribes they conquered, she proudly announced that her family was part of the Mutsun tribe, which lived for thousands of years in what is now Central California.
But when her classmates asked her to speak in her native tongue, she froze. Despite growing up with many Indigenous traditions — she foraged for mushrooms and gathered acorns, her father fed the family with hunted deer, they lived intergenerationally and with extended family — she did not know a single Mutsun word. “I felt less Indian that day,” Geary, now 49, recalled. “There is something about language that is so deeply rooted in identity. It’s how you see the world, and how the world sees you.”
The linguist Kenneth Hale famously said, “The loss of a language represents the loss of a rare window on the human mind.” A study published by Northern Arizona University found that language loss can destroy a sense of self-worth and identity. Language death does not happen in privileged communities, as scholar James Crawford wrote in the 1990s.
More than a dozen generations have died since Spanish and other European settlers arrived on the continent, and Native American tribal languages have become endangered. In a bid for assimilation and control, colonists barred many traditional practices and forced tribal children into boarding schools, mostly run by Christian missionaries who separated families from children, stripped them of their traditional clothing and hairstyles, taught them English, and punished them for speaking their native languages. Many children died, and physical and sexual abuse was pervasive.
Now, nearly 150 years later, Native languages are spoken by a scant number of tribal elders, if at all, and they are generally not taught to children. Half the nation’s Native tribal languages are extinct, and linguists estimate up to 90 percent of Indigenous languages worldwide will die out by the end of the century.
In a quest to reclaim their cultural identity, some tribes seek to revive or relearn their Native languages, which has been associated with increased physical and community health. This is particularly important for Native Americans, who have some of the worst health of any racial group in the nation and have been hit particularly hard by the novel coronavirus, advocates say.
A City University of New York study found that Indigenous language maintenance leads to lower rates of diabetes, smoking and suicide.
And for some who grew up traditionally Native American but unable to speak the language, such as Geary, language revival is a matter of reclaiming a part of their identity.
“Someone else’s ancestors came along and took away their language forcibly, took away their rights and maybe committed genocide against them,” said Natasha Warner, a linguist working on Mutsun language revival at the University of Arizona. “The descendants come along and say, ‘I want to get my heritage back, I want to get my people’s culture back.’ Language is a big route into that.”
Since that grade school moment, Geary has dedicated her life to reclaiming her “Indianness,” as she called it. Shortly after graduating from high school, Geary went to her family’s ancestral land in what is now San Benito County, Calif., about 80 miles south of San Francisco, seeking to learn the Mutsun language from Native speakers.
But she could not find native Mutsun speakers there. No one seemed to know that her tribe still existed.
“People would say: ‘Oh, they’re all dead. They’re all extinct,’ ” Geary recalled. “This was obviously not the case. There were hundreds of us throughout California.”
In the mid-’90s, Geary attended the Breath of Life Archival Institute for Indigenous California Languages at the University of California at Berkeley, a weeklong intensive language workshop for Native American people with little or no fluent speakers of their languages. There, she met Warner, who was a linguistics grad student. The two continue to work closely to revive the Mutsun language.
“Reviving a language with no Native speakers is incredibly hard,” said Warner, who describes herself as an “outside linguist” because she is working on language revival but is not Native American herself. “But this is the most rewarding work that I do. Actually helping people in their daily lives to find a greater sense of identity is quite meaningful.”
“We both always wanted to make sure Indian people were at the forefront, which meant so much to me,” Geary said. “This way, we as Indian people are in control of what goes on.”
Geary is part of a legacy of Indigenous women who have preserved language and traditional cultural practices throughout history. Seen as the keepers of cultural knowledge, women are also the primary transmitters of this information to younger generations.
For example, Geary’s great-great-greatgrandmother Josefa Velásquez worked with linguists to maintain the Mutsun language before she died in 1922. The last first-language speaker of the Mutsun tribe, Ascención Solórsano, shared her language knowledge with researchers at the University of California at Berkeley throughout the early 1900s. In the year that preceded her death in 1930, she helped a linguist archive her knowledge of language, traditional medicine and culture.
“She worked to share the Mutsun language until her final breath,” Geary said. “Without that, we wouldn’t have anything.”
And Native American women nationwide carry forth this work today. Crystal Richardson, a third-generation language-revitalization worker from the Karuk tribe of Northern California, has documented more than 500 hours of master-speaker recordings since she began working on the language in 2004. Her aunt, Nancy Steele, co-created the Master-Apprentice Language Learning Program, based on the book How to Keep Your Language Alive, which Steele co-authored in 2001. Richardson enrolled in the program when she was 19. Now, Richardson is a master-apprentice trainer and is developing a virtual youth conference to recruit and support young language reclaimers.
“Indigenous women will make resources appear,” said Richardson, who organized an Indigenous women symposium when she was an undergraduate student at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. “We are the stewards of not just the land and the culture but also the children.”