Flutes of Fire: An Introduction to Native California Languages Revised and Updated

By Leanne Hinton

An essential book on California’s Indigenous languages, updated for the first time in over 25 years.

Before outsiders arrived, about one hundred distinct Indigenous languages were spoken in California, and many of them are in use today. Since its original publication in 1994, Flutes of Fire has become one of the classic books about California’s many Native languages. It is written to be approachable, entertaining, and informative—useful for people doing language revitalization work in their own communities, for linguists, and for a general readership interested in California’s rich cultural heritage. With significant updates by the author, this is the first new edition of Flutes of Fire in over 25 years. New chapters highlight the exciting efforts of language activists in recent times, as well as contemporary writing in several of California’s Native languages. Both a practical guide and a joy to read, Flutes of Fire is an essential book for anyone who cares about the Indigenous languages of California and their flourishing for many generations to come.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Heyday
• Release date: Jul 26, 2022
• ISBN: 9781597145695

Leanne Hinton

Leanne Hinton is professor emerita of linguistics at UC Berkeley, and she has worked closely with many Native communities on language learning and research, particularly in California. She is a founding member of the Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival and its biennial Breath of Life workshop. For her advocacy she has received numerous honors, including a Cultural Freedom Award from the Lannan Foundation and an Honored One Award from the Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries, and Museums. Her previous books include How to Keep Your Language Alive (2002), Bringing Our Languages Home (as editor, 2013), and The Routledge Handbook of Language Revitalization (as coauthor, 2018).

Book preview

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As in many things Californian, the superlative applies to the number of languages spoken within the borders of the state in aboriginal times. One hundred and four languages and dialects were spoken by the [Indigenous peoples] of the state when Caucasians first settled within its boundaries. This vast aggregation of languages within so limited an area is not found anywhere else in the world.

—Gifford and Block, Californian Indian Nights, p. 15

INTRODUCTION

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The California Mosaic

CALIFORNIA TODAY IS A MOSAIC of overlapping cultures; there are practices performed and words uttered every moment of every day from Africa, Asia, Latin America, Polynesia, the Middle East, and of course dominantly from Europe.

Embedded in this complex pattern of people and traditions and ways of thought are the state’s First Peoples, the many communities of California Indians. Before the rest of the world arrived here, Native California was already one of the most diverse areas on Earth, culturally and linguistically, and it had been for thousands of years. Estimates of how many languages were spoken here range from eighty to over one hundred, together representing five major language families and various smaller families and linguistic isolates.

In this land of rich and varied resources, people could maintain healthy populations and lead very different sorts of lives from other groups. People along the coast had access to fish, shellfish, and nutritious aquatic plants; some went out in boats to hunt the great sea mammals. A few miles inland were those whose staples were the acorn and pine nut. Along the major river systems—the Sacramento, San Joaquin, Klamath, and Eel—and their tributaries, people could fish for the abundant salmon, while their upslope neighbors hunted deer, pronghorn, or mountain sheep. Everywhere, people tended the local useful plants. Ways of living varied, but because different groups of people were geographically close to each other, they could interact often and develop close trading relationships and ceremonial ties. Because of these interactions, people were often multilingual, but each community could nevertheless stay independent enough to maintain its own variety of speech.

Even today, there are many California Indian languages still alive in their communities, each with its own particular genius. There is a great deal to learn from all these different languages, especially about the amazing choices humans have in organizing and talking about the world around them. There are so many ways to construct language itself, many ways to play with it or use it to powerful effect. The elders who speak these languages have so much to tell us about the vocabulary of different kinds of knowledge and activities, about the worldviews expressed in the way utterances are put together, about the infinite number of ways people have of constructing their lives. At a time when these languages (along with over half of the languages in the rest of the world!) are endangered, it is more important than ever to learn the lessons they can teach us.

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Some California languages have only one or two fluent speakers left, and some have none. Mary Jones, the last fluent speaker of her Konkow Maidu language. Photo by Mary Bates Abbott, 1992.

California Indian languages are in the ultimate crisis of a life-or-death struggle. After decades of cultural disruption and attempts by authorities to eradicate Native language use, Native California languages are rarely spoken at home, and so children, and often their parents, are not learning them in the normal and natural way that languages are transmitted from generation to generation. Most of the languages are known fully only by a few elderly people, and every year sees the passing of several of those elders. Some languages have only one fluent speaker left as I write, and some have none.

In the quarter century that has elapsed since the first edition of this book, scores of last native speakers of California languages have died. Those old ones who learned their language as a first language, who were in communities where they could hear the language spoken around them—they will all be gone soon.

No one feels this impending loss more strongly than the Native Californians themselves. Many concerned members of these communities are making enormous efforts to keep the languages and cultural practices alive. All over California, from the Oregon border to the Mexican border, from the Pacific Ocean to across the Sierra Nevada, Native Californians carry on the cultures of their pre-Columbian heritage, even while they participate in the cultures and intercultures more recently derived from Europe and elsewhere.

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Laura Somersal, one of the last native speakers of Wappo, died in 1990. Photo by Scott Patterson.

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Bertha Mitchell (1936–2018) maintained traditional lifeways and taught her language to others throughout her adult life. Photo by Kate Hedges.

Many far-seeing elders, such as Elizabeth Meadows (Rumsen Ohlone), Rosario Cooper (Obispeño Chumash), Della Prince (Wiyot), Villiana Hyde (Luiseño), Essie Parrish (Kashaya Pomo), and Laura Fish Somersal (Wappo), spent years documenting their languages with linguists before they died, to make sure there would be records for the future. Others, such as Ray Baldy (Hupa), Florence Jones (Wintu), Agnes Vera (Yowlumni), Violet Super (Karuk), Bertha Mitchell (Patwin), Ralph Luther Girado (Kawaiisu), and Claude Lewis (Mojave), spent some of their last years teaching younger members of their tribes through intensive language methods (see Chapter 19). In the same way, living elders such as Verdena Parker (Hupa) and younger fluent speakers like Loren Me’-lash-ne Bommelyn (Tolowa), Daniel Ammon (Tsnungwe), Stanley Rodriguez (Kumeyaay), and Crystal Richardson (Karuk), who learned their languages by their own efforts, are continuing to teach their languages to others. Young adults today like Pyuwa Bommelyn (Tolowa) and Muriel X. Ammon (Tsnungwe) are making every effort to learn and use the languages of their heritage and to keep them active for future generations. Some people, such as L. Frank (Tongva/Ajachmem/Rarámuri), Linda Yamane (Rumsen Ohlone), Louis Trevino (Rumsen Ohlone), and Vincent Medina (East Bay Ohlone)—all of whose ancestral languages had ceased to be spoken a generation or more ago—have gathered together all the written materials and recordings they can find, to treasure and to learn from. Linguists, anthropologists, and archivists have also worked to preserve the California languages in their own ways and for their own varied reasons, often including that they simply hate to see languages and cultures die.

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Katherine Siva Saubel (1920–2011) was a Cahuilla speaker and scholar who worked with linguists to record the Cahuilla language for future generations. Photo by Mary Bates Abbott, 1992.

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Karuk speaker Violet Super helped her nephew Terry Supahan and several other relatives develop proficiency in their language through the Master-Apprentice Language Learning program. Photo by Mary Bates Abbott, 1993.

This is a book about the languages of California and about the people who are striving to keep them alive. It is a book about the joy of languages, the wonderful ways they are put together, and how they express human thought—the sacred, the scientific, the practical, and the humorous. It is about how these languages change through time, and how they survive and influence other languages, including English. It is also about the Native people who are reclaiming their languages today, and learning to speak them again, against all odds.

My own journey to the languages of California was long and full of detours, and most of the way I never guessed where I would arrive, even though, looking back, it seems a predictable enough destination. My initial interest in ethnomusicology led me one summer to Supai, Arizona, the beautiful Grand Canyon home of the Havasupai Indians. That was 1964, and I was twenty-two years old, full of all the ambitions and confusions of youth. The Havasupais took me in and molded my character and my career. For many decades, Supai was the most constant learning place in my life.

Having gone to Supai to study the Havasupais’ musical traditions, I soon found that I needed to know the language to understand the song. So, linguistics started to become a major interest, and with the help of my friend Margaret Langdon, I eventually entered graduate school in that field, with her as my mentor. My dissertation was a linguistic study of Havasupai songs.

My first university job took me far from California to the University of Texas at Dallas. I did not adjust easily to the academic world, and the only thing that kept me sane (besides meeting the man who would later become my husband) was a fulfilling project with the Havasupais: designing a writing system with them and helping them establish a bilingual education program. I also consulted with the nearby Hualapai language program and did much of the same kind of work there. This was, and still is, the sort of linguistics in which I find the most meaning.

Although I had done some work with the Kumeyaay languages as a graduate student, my real work with the languages of California began after I arrived at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1978. Besides basic teaching and research duties, I was given the job of codirector, and later director, of the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages. I continued my interest in writing systems and bilingual education here in California, doing consultant work for programs around the state. I also taught a field methods class with Kashaya Pomo speaker Milton Bun Lucas, working with graduate students to analyze the grammar of his language. With Alice (Schlichter) Shepherd I studied Wintu songs, based on a series of tapes by singer Grace McKibbin. Most importantly, I began to spend time with a growing number of Native Californians whom I am honored to know and to learn from.

In 1987, Malcolm Margolin invited me to start a regular column on language in News from Native California, a quarterly devoted to California Indian history and culture. That was the actual beginning of this volume. The first edition of this book is derived from a series of essays that originally appeared in that journal. The essays have since been edited at least slightly, and some significantly. In this edition, most have been expanded, and some are completely new. This book is not intended to be an exhaustive analysis of the California languages; instead, these essays were selected because they go well together and give, I hope, a good overview of some of the important issues and interesting characteristics of California languages.

California itself is of course a recent political construction, whose borders in no way match the borders of Native American linguistic or cultural groupings. I do not hesitate to cross these borders when there is a good story just on the other side. Chapters 2 and 3, especially, wander freely into Baja California, Arizona, and the Northwest. In the same spirit of denying boundaries, I am loath to leave an excellent essay out of this book just because I am not its author, so I have also included two columns written by other people for News from Native California that seemed to fit well here: I have incorporated and expanded on a delightful essay by Robert Oswalt on Russian loan words in the Kashaya Pomo language (Chapter 8), and I have adapted some powerful oral histories transcribed by Vera Mae Fredrickson as the main part of Chapter 16. Chapter 21 consists of pieces by a dozen young Native Californians.

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Silis Jackson with Verdena Parker, his Hupa language teacher. Photo by Scott Braley, 2018.

In Chapter 1 we will survey the many Native languages spoken in California and how they are related to each other. I follow in Part I with a set of portraits of California language and culture, to show the richness of the heritage many people are working to reclaim. These are four essays on language creativity and playfulness: an essay on song, one on storytelling, and two about the structure of California languages and what that structure shows about worldview.

Part II is a series of essays on what languages tell us about the history of their speakers, and in Part III we explore some of the interesting aspects of the vocabulary and grammar of California languages. In Part IV we examine the ways in which prejudice and oppression have led to the decline and sometimes dormancy of languages in California. Part V is two chapters on the documentation and writing of California languages. Part VI is a set of chapters on how the people who speak and study these wonderful languages are fighting to keep them active.

It is only fitting that a book about the Indigenous California languages ends with a chapter in some of the Indigenous languages of California. So I conclude the volume with a chapter called In Our Own Words, a set of brief writings by the new speakers of California Indian languages—those who have learned (or I should say are learning, for it is a lifelong project) their languages beyond the time that those langauges ceased being spoken in the community at large. These speakers have learned from the elders even when their parents did not know the language, or they learned from the documentation provided by speakers who shared their knowledge with the anthropologists and linguists who recorded or transcribed what the elders told them. This chapter of short essays and poems shows that California languages are not dead, not even sleeping, but still very much alive within the language heroes who have determined to carry them on.

As a linguist, I have come to understand how linguistics itself has been shaped by colonialism. Linguists are undergoing a deep self-examination about how their field has come out of and sometimes even contributed to the disinheritance of Native people. I believe that the fascinating but often esoteric scholarly pursuits of professional linguistics can only gain meaning and validation by what they can provide to people who are not linguists, and especially people within the communities whose languages they study. This means maintaining a close relationship to and being an advocate for the language needs and priorities of those communities.

The language issues that are important to California Indians are not always the same ones that are important to non-Native academics. Yet linguists can have a unique ability to address community language needs. That said, linguists must not allow academic institutions to be the sole source of their values, but must instead constantly endeavor to balance the priorities and demands of the two places where they do their work: the academy and the speech community.

Therefore, I intend this book for a broad audience—for linguists, for Native Americans, and for folks in general. Any book about language must also be about the lessons in humanity that we learn through language. Through this book I seek to bring to the reader a sense of urgency about the endangerment of our great linguistic treasure, and a sense of the priceless value these languages have, not only to the first Californians and to linguists but to all of us.

1 See Appendix for an explanation of linguistic orthography.

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aspirated t

múúthaaq̓álcan = girl

After a while each man took a girl. They set out in different directions—one pair to the East, one to the South, one to the North, one to the West; two remained in the center of the earth. Then they began to multiply and raised a great many real people. Each group began to talk differently from the others and later each became a separate tribe. This was the beginning of the different Indian languages and tribes of California.

—Istet Woiche, Annikadel: The History of the Universe as Told by the Achumawi Indians of California, p. 160

CHAPTER ONE

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California’s First Languages

CALIFORNIA HAS MORE INDIGENOUS LANGUAGES than any other state, and indeed more than most areas of this size in the world! There are somewhere between eighty and one hundred (but maybe more?) different languages in California, depending on which sources you read.

We can’t count an exact number of California languages in part because of the gray area between different but related languages and dialects of the same language.1

There are lots of different ways to define the distinction. Are two versions of a language similar enough that people from both groups can understand each other fully? If so, that would be one reason to call them dialects of the same language. If the people can understand each other a little bit but not always fluently, are those still different dialects, or are they two distinct languages? There are also social and political reasons at play in deciding what gets classified as a distinct language and what is considered a dialect. In some cases, one language might include many versions with multiple dialectal differences.

Some linguists who have studied the Yokuts language(s) of central California call it a single language with an extraordinarily large number of local dialects (Golla 2011, p. 147). Yet in the eyes and ears of their speakers, they count as different languages, each with its own local name (e.g., Wukchumni, Yowlumni, Tachi, etc.) A Tachi person might say, for example, Yes, the Wukchumni language is very much like Tachi, and I can understand it pretty well, but they would never say that Wukchumni and Tachi are the same language.

Kumeyaay, in Southern California, is in the opposite situation. Kumeyaay used to be categorized as a single language, but as more varieties have been studied, current linguists now say that Kumeyaay is actually a group of at least six different (but closely related) languages! (See Langdon 1991 and Miller 2018.) But Stanley Rodriguez (Kumeyaay speaker, teacher, and linguist) says that for the sake of social unity, he and others prefer to call all the varieties Kumeyaay—a single language with lots of variation (personal communication, July 2021).

A pet peeve of mine is seeing maps of California languages labelled as California Indian tribes. There is a strong difference between the concepts of language and tribe. It should tell us something when we realize that although there are somewhere above eighty languages in California, there are 110 recognized tribes, as well as a large number of unrecognized tribes seeking recognition. Tribe is a government construct that has been imposed on Native California. Traditionally, the most common political unit in Native California was an autonomous village.2 There were social and ceremonial connections between villages, but they were politically independent. Many independent villages might have spoken the same language, though with dialectal differences, and today there are still different tribes that speak a common language. There are also many tribes whose members use several languages, a result of the historical land takeover by settlers and the fact that different groups were displaced and then grouped together in government-imposed locations. And then there are scores of unrecognized tribes, whether due to treaties that were never ratified by the government or periods in the mid-twentieth century when many tribes were officially terminated by the federal government. This means that some of the California languages are not represented by a recognized tribe at all. Nevertheless, the people of unrecognized tribes are working just as hard as others to keep their languages alive. To make the situation even more complex, some tribes are recognized by the state of California but not recognized by the federal government.

Why are there so many different languages in California? There are three main reasons, each of which interacts with the others. One is that California, as all Californians know, is a beautiful and bountiful place to live. If you look at the map at the beginning of this book, you’ll see that, in much of the state, each language takes up a relatively small area. One circumstance that made this possible was the diversity of animal and plant life within each region; in most of California, the natural resources could support a community within a conscribed area very well, which meant they weren’t as dependent on other groups, who might speak different languages. The parts of California where the language areas are larger correspond to where the climate is drier, meaning resources are likely to be fewer—forcing the people to trade with outside groups—as well as sparser. A population living in a desert would need more land to support itself.

Even in resource-rich regions, however, it might not have been possible to live well in small areas without trade relationships. Access to foods from different ecosystems was critical, as were other important items, such as obsidian for arrowheads. The trading networks were vast, stretching all over California and beyond. (Abalone shells from California have been found at old sites all the way to Ohio!) Both the size of a community’s region and its trade relationships with others have notable effects on language, as you will see in some of the chapters that follow.

The second reason for California’s language diversity is its history of repeated migrations into the area by different groups. Throughout the history of the peopling of North America, people speaking different languages were able to migrate into the various regions of California and create a place for themselves—perhaps through diplomacy with other tribes already in the area, or maybe through warfare—but never needing to dominate a large swath of land.

Setting aside the question of languages versus dialects, let’s examine the notion of language families—groups of related languages. Migration into (or, rarely, out of) California is illustrated by the fact that there are some large and widespread language families that include members both inside and outside of California. The Athabascan language family, for instance, spreads all the way from Alaska and Canada into the southwestern United States, and it includes several languages in California (e.g., Hupa, Tolowa, Wailaki, Cahto). The California languages Yurok and Wiyot are related to the Algonquian languages of the Northeast. The Uto-Aztecan languages that are spoken throughout the Great Basin and all the way down to Mexico City also include more than a dozen California languages (e.g., Mono, Tübatulabal, Kawaiisu, Tongva, Luiseño, Chemehuevi, and more).

We can tell that two languages belong to the same family by finding similarities between them. By way of illustration, let us compare the Hupa language of California with the Navajo language of the Four Corners region of the southwestern United States. Sets of Hupa and Navajo words are shown in the box on this page.

Ignoring the accent marks of Navajo (which represent tone), one can see that the words have a striking similarity to each other. There are some differences, of course—otherwise they wouldn’t be counted as separate languages—but even then we can recognize certain patterns. Navajo may have a long vowel (such as aa) while Hupa has a short vowel (a). Navajo regularly uses a nasalized vowel (such as ã) where the corresponding Hupa word uses a vowel followed by n or ng. Hupa words with x, s, or m, will regularly match up with Navajo’s k, z, and b, respectively. In some cases where Hupa has a consonant at the end of a word, that consonant has disappeared in the Navajo word. These consistent differences show how the sounds of languages change over time in an orderly fashion. Looking at just these few examples, it is easy to see that Hupa and Navajo are related. Applying this same comparison test to other Athabascan languages allowed linguists to recognize and name this language family. Some scholars have proposed that the Athabascan language family might have originated as far away as Alaska and then spread into California and the Southwest through successive migrations.

Native languages have been in California for thousands of years, and their origin stories place them here from the beginning of time. Either way, their long-term residence in the region is due, again, to the first reason for such diversity—they can maintain their individual integrity because the rich resources of the land allow them to remain independent from people speaking other languages.

Let me give an example of a more recent migration from just outside of California, this time of a Yuman language. There is a tribe in Baja California called the Paipai whose language is very similar to three closely related languages used hundreds of miles away in Arizona: Yavapai, Hualapai, and Havasupai. Predictably, these four languages are sometimes called the Pai languages, and together they form a branch of the Yuman language family of Southern and Baja California that extends through Arizona and part of Sonora. The similarity between them would not be remarkable if the tribes all lived next door to each other, but in fact there are a number of very different languages in between the Paipais’ home region and the area that encompasses the three Arizona languages. Linguists visiting the Arizona communities over the years have mentioned to the Yavapais and others the existence of the very similar Paipai language, and this made folks curious. Over the past few decades, Yavapais have taken several expeditions to visit the Paipais, and Paipais have come to Arizona on occasion as well, including for intertribal conferences and gatherings. The languages are definitely different, but they are close enough so that someone speaking Yavapai

Reviews for Flutes of Fire

[dreesie-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I originally started the first edition of this book--which is also excellent, but also quite different. If you are looking more for a history of language reclamation and a look at California languages at one point in time, it is still totally worth a read. I wanted to read about the current status and issues, so this edition (2022) was the better choice for me.This book is a fascinating look at native California tribes and languages (including those that cross state and national boundaries)--homelands and language families, heritage vs second language speakers, teaching and reclamation efforts and methods, and the work done currently and historically various tribes on their own languages and with linguists (many of whom, now, are natives academically trained and thus can read historic linguistic notation on their own languages). There are several nonprofit groups put together to help with pedagogical sharing and other support, and their efforts also appear here.