Breath of Life: Revitalizing California's Native Languages Through Archives
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San Jose State University SJSU ScholarWorks Master's Theses Master's Theses and Graduate Research Fall 2013 Breath of Life: Revitalizing California's Native Languages Through Archives Susan Gehr San Jose State University Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/etd_theses Recommended Citation Gehr, Susan, "Breath of Life: Revitalizing California's Native Languages Through Archives" (2013). Master's Theses. 4386. DOI: https://doi.org/10.31979/etd.yfva-e77q https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/etd_theses/4386 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Master's Theses and Graduate Research at SJSU ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Master's Theses by an authorized administrator of SJSU ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected]. BREATH OF LIFE: REVITALIZING CALIFORNIA’S NATIVE LANGUAGES THROUGH ARCHIVES A Thesis Presented to The Faculty of the School of Library and Information Science San José State University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Library and Information Science by Susan Gehr December 2013 © 2013 Susan Gehr ALL RIGHTS RESERVED The Designated Thesis Committee Approved the Thesis Titled BREATH OF LIFE: REVITALIZING CALIFORNIA’S NATIVE LANGUAGES THROUGH ARCHIVES by Susan Gehr APPROVED FOR THE SCHOOL OF LIBRARY AND INFORMATION SCIENCE SAN JOSÉ STATE UNIVERSITY December 2013 Dr. Debra Hansen School of Library and Information Science Dr. Patricia Franks School of Library and Information Science Mr. David de Lorenzo The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley ABSTRACT BREATH OF LIFE: REVITALIZING CALIFORNIA’S NATIVE LANGUAGES THROUGH ARCHIVES by Susan Gehr This thesis presents an oral history of the Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival (AICLS) and its Breath of Life Workshop. Held every other year since 1996, the workshop is designed to meet the language revitalization needs of California Indian people whose languages have no living fluent speakers. Breath of Life Workshop organizers arrange visits to four archives on the University of California, Berkeley, campus and connect participants with linguistic mentors to read and interpret archival documents in their language for the purpose of bringing their language back into use. Through interviews with AICLS founders, Breath of Life Workshop participants, and University of California, Berkeley, linguists and archivists, this study uncovers the role archivists play in the Breath of Life Workshops and in the care of Native language collections more generally. Topics addressed include the selection and use of archival documents in the program and the changes to archival practice and policies that have resulted from archivists’ work with Breath of Life participants. The thesis also examines issues involved in the collection, arrangement, description, preservation, and access to the documentation of California Indian languages. The study concludes with recommendations for future language revitalization programs. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am so grateful for all the support I received in the course of writing this thesis. I thank Debra Hansen for chairing my committee, for the gift of so much of her time spent reading and improving my thesis from beginning to end, for her steady encouragement, and for helping me grow as a writer. I thank committee members David de Lorenzo and Pat Franks for their commitment to my thesis, for their helpful ideas, and for their endorsement of my work. I thank the Southwest Oral History Association, the Lynn Reyer Award in Tribal Community Development/SPAIC, and San José State University’s Circle of Learning Project for their financial support and encouragement. I thank the Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival for granting me permission to do an oral history of their vital and effective organization. I thank the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages for agreeing to receive the oral history collection from which this thesis was written. I am grateful for San José State University’s oral history instructor Nancy MacKay for preparing me so well for this thesis. I thank also Teresa Bergen for her excellent interview transcription services. I thank oral history narrators L. Frank Manriquez, Leanne Hinton, Malcolm Margolin, Quirina L. Geary, Leah Mata, Lauren Lassleben, Lisa Conathan, and Andrew Garrett for taking the time to share their stories, knowledge, and experiences with me. This thesis could not have been finished without the enthusiasm of my son Logan who supported my time management schemes wholeheartedly. A special thank you to my husband Greg, without whom I could not have dedicated so much time to this thesis. v Finally, I wish to thank my friends at PhinisheD.org for all their words of encouragement and their good advice. I am also very grateful to Stephen King for all the helpful ideas in his book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. And a scratch behind the ears goes out to my cat Honda, who was always a calm and adorable presence as I wrote. DEDICATION This thesis is dedicated to my son Logan, my best taskmaster who informed me that I was not nervous about finishing my thesis, I was motivated. vi NASALIZING, ORTHOGRAPHIZING, morphemizing, phoneticizing. Linguisticizing, glot’alizing, dipthonging, cognating. Retroflexing, affixing, fricativing, aspirating… phew! What a week, but we wouldn’t have missed it for the world! Thank you for your love, your generosity, your vitality… but now it’s time to go. Breath of life… bagels no more! from “Breath of Life—Silent No More” by Linda Yamane (Rumsien Ohlone) reproduced here courtesy of Heyday Books vii Table of Contents 1 Introduction ......................................................................................1 2 Overview of AICLS and the Breath of Life Workshop .................36 Part I. Founders and Organizers 3 Introduction ....................................................................................63 4 L. Frank ..........................................................................................74 5 Leanne Hinton ..............................................................................102 6 Malcolm Margolin .......................................................................139 Part II. Workshop Participants 7 Introduction ..................................................................................174 8 Quirina L. Geary ..........................................................................183 9 Leah Mata ....................................................................................205 Part III. Archivists 10 Introduction ..................................................................................241 11 Lauren Lassleben .........................................................................250 12 Lisa Conathan ..............................................................................285 13 Andrew Garrett ............................................................................310 14 Conclusions ..................................................................................332 Bibliography ................................................................................352 viii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. Agenda, 2012 Breath of Life California Indian Language Restoration Workshop ......43 ix Chapter 1: Introduction In an interview concerning the Native languages collections created by Humboldt State University’s Center for Indian Community Development, Karuk artist and language scholar Julian Lang said, “In the end, Indians don’t want to be mainstream; they want to be Indians.”1 When the era of outright extermination of Native American peoples drew to a close in the late 19th century, cultural assimilation of Native Americans became the agenda of the U.S. government. In an 1880s report discussed in linguist Leanne Hinton’s book chapter “Federal Language Policy and Indigenous Languages in the United States,” J.D.C. Atkins, federal commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, wrote, “The first step to be taken toward civilization, toward teaching Indians the mischief and folly of continuing in their barbarous practices, is to teach them the English language.” 2 Hinton went on to describe how the Indian boarding school system enforced English-only policies so harshly that some Native children gave up speaking their languages and swore they would protect their children by never teaching them. Other Native children resisted the pressure to give up their Native language. Frances Jack (Pomo) told her parents and her teachers that she did not want to quit speaking her language. Instead, she dropped out of the school partway through the fifth grade.3 1 Julian Lang (Karuk) language scholar, writer and artist, unpublished interview with the author, April 29, 2009. 2 Leanne Hinton, “Federal Language Policy and Indigenous Languages in the United States,” in The Green Book of Language Revitalization in Practice, eds. Leanne Hinton and Kenneth L. Hale (San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 2001), 41. 3 Leanne Hinton, Flutes of Fire: Essays on California Indian Languages (Berkeley: Heyday Books, 1994), 179. 1 As Native American languages were experiencing precipitous drops in numbers of speakers due to loss of life and pressures to speak only English, anthropologists and linguists were traveling throughout the West to document the languages. From 1907 until his death in 1961, John Peabody Harrington took nearly a million pages of notes and made thousands of recordings of more than ninety