"Monika Luna & Quirina showing off "tcutsusYmin yuukise yuu urakase", green acorns and salmon BERKELEY, Calif., June 30, Associated Press, Michelle Locke —  Quirina Luna-Costillas grew up thinking the language of her Mutsun ancestors was gone, lost in the flood of disease and destruction that ravaged California Indians. With the language went identity. Other children would ask her, with the bluntness of youth, “What are you?” She’d tell them and get a blank stare, accompanied by: “What’s that?” She later stumbled across a book by a Spanish missionary that listed hundreds of Mutsun (moot-SOON) phrases. It might as well have been Greek. Luna-Costillas turned detective, hunting for echoes of the almost vanished dialect. The trail was pretty cold; the last fluent speaker of Mutsun died in 1930.  But there were clues to be found in the vast archives of the University of California at Berkeley, where for nearly a century anthropologists have been recording the cultural memories of Indians who survived the disasters of colonization and the Gold Rush. Six years after she began her quest, Luna-Costillas and a small group of other Mutsuns have scraped together a nodding acquaintance with their ancient language. They compiled a dictionary with the help of a linguistic professor and translated the Dr. Seuss classic “Green Eggs and Ham” to read to their own children.         ‘SYMBOL OF SURVIVAL’ Luna-Costillas and fellow language detectives recently met in Berkeley to mark the 50th anniversary of the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages, a project dedicated to saving the language of California’s past. “When people lose a language they lose, we all lose a body of knowledge and a way of looking at the world that’s really important,” says Leanne Hinton, survey director. “To the participants themselves, language is a symbol of their identity and so it’s a symbol of survival against all odds.” The race to save dying languages is going on across the United States. Tribes are videotaping elders and, in a few cases, children are being taught their ancient tongue in immersion programs. Eighty-five California languages are believed to be endangered or dormant. It’s no mystery why. The ranks of native speakers were decimated as tribes were forced from their land, ravaged by Western diseases brought by immigrants and hunted down for bounties. Some estimates put the pre-European Indian population in California as high as 300,000. In 1900, census figures recorded fewer than 16,000. For survivors, Indian languages were taboo, stamped out as children were sent to live with non-Indian families or dispatched to boarding schools where they were punished for speaking anything but English.         FOCUS ON 50 LANGUAGES   Berkeley has targeted 50 endangered languages, running weeklong language restoration workshops every other summer for the past 10 years. The workshops offer a crash course in linguistics and match language learners with a mentor, usually a graduate student. The workshops also show participants how to search through the stacks and stacks of field notes filed by Berkeley researchers over the years. The history of Berkeley’s Indian research is not without controversy. This is where Ishi, the man known as “The Last Wild Indian in America,” was taken in by pioneering anthropologist Alfred Kroeber in 1911. Ishi lived in a university museum for the four years until he died of what was believed to be tuberculosis. He had asked that his remains not be autopsied, but scientists did it anyways.  Sending his brain to the Smithsonian, where it remained in storage until California Indians reclaimed it two years ago.  Hinton says it's likely the earliest linguists and anthropologists saw their work as pure research.  Their legacy is a nuts-and-bolts guide to the past for descendants of the people who talked to interviewers about everything from tribal myths to favorite recipes. "The notes did more for us than just the language.  It connected us and it helped us culturally understand some of the things that our ancestors practiced on a daily basis," says Lisa Carrier, a Mutsun working Luna-Costillas on their recently formed Mutsun Language Foundation. One day, Luna-Costillas found her great-great-grandmother, named in the archives as one of the interview subjects.  "It was wonderful," she says.  The Mutsuns with the help of their mentor linguist Natasha Warner, now a professor at the University of Arizona, are working on a coloring book for children. In an interesting side note, their work was aided by a 1977 dissertation on Mutsun grammar by Marc Okrand, a Berkeley linguist who went on to create the Klingon language for TV's "Star Trek." The Mutsun Indians, part of the large group of Ohlone, were among the many tribes that lost all their land;  they are petitioning the federal government for recognition as a tribe.  "That makes having a common language even more important," says Carrier.  "I remember being in school and my friends - they were Aztec - we had show and tell and they could bring things.  We didn't have anything to share." Luna-Costillas isn't fluent in Mutsun, but she speaks phrases and tries to speak Mutsun to her four children as much as possible.  "It gives them identity.  They know they're Mutsun."  Like many protective mothers, one of her mantras is "don't touch," which sounds like "ek-way ta-tay" in Mutsun.   A few years back she says something extraordinary happened.  Her third child, Jonathan, spoke his first word. It was "ta-tay." Natasha, Quirina & Lisa at UC Berkeley (Marie Bonillas, Monika Luna & Mary Carrier in background) Oakland Tribune - UC Berkeley revives long-lost Indian language - By William Brand, Staff Writer Saturday, June 08, 2002 - BERKELEY -- Words that have not been spoken in more than 70 years are being uttered again in a heart-fluttering flood of emotion this week inside a language laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. In five intense days, almost 50 descendants of California Indian groups from across the state have been learning how to speak again in languages few of their grandparents understood. In a Dwinelle Hall laboratory this week, a song recorded on a wax cylinder in 1908 and sung by a member of the Luiseno tribe from the Los Angeles area brought tears to the eyes of the singer's descendant. "This is awesome and wonderful," said L. Frank Manriquez, a Luiseno tribe member, as the eerie, melodic song from long ago filled the room. For many participants, the week-long session that ends today was a voyage of discovery and new beginnings. And, they all agreed, it opened new windows on their past. "We always knew where we came from," said Lisa Carrier, of Livermore. "But we thought we were 'Mission Indians' from San Juan Bautista (the colonial Spanish mission). That's true, that's where we were taken (by the  Spanish), but we actually were Mutsun (pronounced moot-soon)." Carrier said the group --part of the Ohlone nation -- once lived in a wide area extending west from Monterey Bay across the coast range into the Central Valley. "The last person who spoke our language fluently was Ascencion Solarasano, and she died in 1930," said Quirina Luna-Costillas, of Madera.  "Pre-contact, before the Europeans arrived, there were around 85 indigenous languages in California, maybe more," said UC Berkeley linguist Leanne Hinton.  "Now, 35 of those languages have no speakers, and the other 50 have very few speakers, and most of those people are 75 to 80 years old," Hinton said. But today a few languages have a handful of young speakers, who are teaching others and learning more. So these programs are making a difference, Hinton said. The workshop, called Breath of Life, is the latest of a series that began a decade ago, when scholars and descendants of California tribal groups realized that UC Berkeley's Hearst Museum and the Bancroft Library held vast collections, even recordings, of long-forgotten California Indian languages.  The workshop is supported by Advocates for Indigenous California Language  Survival and UC Berkeley. At 31, Luna-Costillas, a mother of four, is the matriarch of the Mutsun language, having learned from the works of pioneering early 20th-century Smithsonian linguist John Peabody Harrington and Marc Okrand, a UC Berkeley Ph.D. who later wrote the Klingon fantasy language for the Star Trek films.  Luna-Costillas started her quest a decade ago. She said she heard the university was offering a summer session dedicated to discovering long-forgotten California Indian languages, so she and her sister signed up. Her mission to uncover the Mutsun language led her into the vaults of the Hearst Museum and the Bancroft Library, the U.S. Census archives in San Bruno and even Star Trek land. Along the way, Luna-Costillas found her cousin, Lisa Carrier. "We didn't even know we were related," Carrier said. This week, nearly a dozen Mutsun descendants -- looking incredibly familial -- sat in a row in the language labs -- taking notes on basic Mutsun grammar from University of Arizona linguist Natasha Warner. Warner wrote her UC Berkeley Ph.D. dissertation on the Mutsun language. Thankfully, Okrand had gone before her and had interpreted Harrington's notes, which were written in a style peculiar to the linguist. Warner went on from there, preparing a grammar for the almost forgotten tongue.  But, Luna-Costillas said, they've discovered more than language. Harrington was especially interested in California Indians, and as he visited each group he wrote everything down. Even recipes. "Our family has always used anise seeds in a tea when babies are teething," Carrier said. "We were always told it was a Mexican remedy. But there it was, in Harrington's notes. It was a Mutsun recipe."  Across the room, retired merchant mariner Darnell White, of Point Arena, sat studying alone. "I'm one of the last elders that speak our language, Central Coast Pomo," White said. "My mother spoke it to us -- but that was 65 to 70 years ago. But I wouldn't dare say a word outside the house for fear of being mocked and ridiculed. But it was the first language I heard, and I never forgot it." As an adult, he learned Arabic and Vietnamese, and studied Serbo-Croatian at the Armed Forces Language School in Monterey.  Back home, he said, he watched Pomo children growing up without their native language. Now, he attends the Breath of Life workshops and studies on his own to increase his own fluency. "This place is fabulous," he said. "It's a treasure trove for language." "I want to teach our kids this language that is thousands of years old, to give them a common bond. I'm firing up interest in a few. I have some hope." For information on a subscription to News From Native California, call (510) 549-2802. The Mutsun website is www.mutsunlanguage.com   Lisa & Quirina studying Cal-Berkeley dorms UC Berkeley "Breath of Life" conference strives to revive California Indian languages 03 June 2002 By Kathleen Maclay, Media Relations Berkeley - In hopes of reviving ancestral California Indian languages that have only a few living speakers left, or in many cases, none at all, representatives from the Chukchansi, Barbareño Chumash, Northern Pomo, Maidu, Wukchumni, Yowlumni, Wappo and other groups are gathering this week at the University of California, Berkeley. Nearly 50 representatives from 29 of the 85 endangered or "dormant" California Indian languages will be on hand June 2-8 for a crash course in linguistics at the fifth biennial "Breath of Life-Silent No More" language restoration workshop. Unlike other language restoration efforts, the UC Berkeley program is aimed at those languages with no remaining fluent speakers. "Language death is a symptom of the death of a culture and a way of life," said Leanne Hinton, UC Berkeley professor of linguistics and the director of the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages, a research group within UC Berkeley's Linguistics Department. "When a language dies, the world loses a whole body of knowledge and verbal art, and the people whose language dies lose a sense of their identity within the world," said Hinton. "This workshop serves indigenous California people who recognize this loss and are striving to save their languages from extinction." Word is spreading about this type of work and "language revitalization is really taking off around the world," Hinton said. The workshop is co-sponsored by the survey and by Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival. Grants from the Lannan Foundation and the Sociological Initiatives Fund help finance the popular workshop whose roster this year grew substantially. Hinton finally limited the group to 50. All participants are part or full California Indians, except for a woman from Texas who hopes UC Berkeley can teach her how to better use materials she has assembled to revitalize the Texas Indian language of Cohuilteco. Breath of Life participants start out receiving phonetic name tags and move on to explore a wide range of the campus's linguistic and anthropological resources: field notes, dissertations and tapes that may contain language word lists or tribal stories and rituals with words, written phonetically, from California Indian languages. They look at UC Berkeley materials relating to their languages, tour archives and libraries, and get help identifying and locating published and unpublished notes and audio tapes made by researchers. They examine wax cylinders, used by early researchers to make sound recordings of voices now gone. Participants also learn the basics of linguistic analysis, how to read phonetic writing, and how to use linguistic information along with publications to create language restoration materials. And each dialect represented at the workshop is assigned a mentor, usually a graduate student researching the language. They can attend lectures and tutorials. Some participants will join the workshop for the first time; others have been here before, finding help and hope. Even with stellar resources and guidance, the task is daunting and demanding, Hinton said. But Breath of Life boasts success stories. One is that of the Mutsun language, one of eight Ohlone/Constanoan dialects once spoken along the Central California coast. The last speaker believed to be fluent died in 1930. Quirina Luna-Costillas and Lisa Carrier are attending Breath of Life for the fourth time, having only missed one workshop since the program's inception 10 years ago. Joining them is Natasha Warner, a former graduate student who is now a University of Arizona professor. She has been a mentor for them since their first workshop. Warner, whose specialty is experimental phonetics, said that while theoretical research is important, working with the Mutsun language is the most rewarding part of her work. Today, Mutsun language revitalization efforts include an English-Mutsun dictionary, a useful phrase book, the Mutsun story of the thunder, a Mutsun translation of "Green Eggs and Ham" and teaching some Mutsun children their ancestral language at home. Luna-Costillos said her young son might have been the first person in 100 years to utter his first word in Mutsun: "tatay", or touch. Breath of Life participants are asked to develop a specific goal for the week, such as being able to revive a particular ceremony or prayer, maybe a song or story, in their language. At an opening session on Sunday night that began with a blessing in Mutsun, one Central Coast Pomo participant said he will concentrate on learning about available reference materials in his language to help those who follow him. Another participant, a Northern Pomo, said he hopes to learn the grammar and phonetics of his language, so he can teach his daughter the language he was unable to learn as child. The last day of the workshop coincides with the start of the two-day, 50th anniversary celebration of the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages, a research center and archive which provides workspace for scholars and students specializing in the field as well as funding for fieldwork. Workshop participants will launch that event Saturday morning, June 8, when they report the results of their when they report the results of their week. MADERA, Calif. -- Robin Shulman, Los Angeles Times - Quirina Luna-Costillas is reading Dr. Seuss to her three children at the dining-room table. She turns the pages of "Green Eggs and Ham," holding up the familiar pictures of Sam I Am and his odd-color breakfast. But she does not speak the familiar staccato rhyme. She has blocked out the English words, and reads instead from text she has Scotch-taped on top. "Samka Am. Kan Am Sam," she says in Mutsun, a language last spoken fluently by a San Juan Bautista-area Indian in 1930. The children, ages 10, 6 and 2, jostle one another as Luna-Costillas points to green eggs. "What color is that?" she asks. "Tcutsu!" 2-year-old Jonathan answers in the language of his great-great-great-grandparents. Luna-Costillas is a 30-year-old Mutsun Ohlone Indian who grew up in California's Central Valley. She has spent five years piecing together her people's lost language from century-old grammar texts, various transcripts and wax recordings--in her spare time, while working as a cashier. She has been teaching Mutsun to her children in hopes that they will pass it on. Jonathan may have been the first child in 100 years to say his first word--tatay, or "touch"--in Mutsun. "We thought the language was dead," said Luna-Costillas, who recalls her fourth-grade textbook declaring local Indian languages and people extinct. But five years ago, she began attending regional tribal gatherings and learned the Mutsun people were alive and well, their language merely dormant. It slept in the notes of missionaries, and of anthropologists and linguists who transcribed the stories and rituals, games and songs of Mutsun speakers. And in wax cylinder recordings, early audio discs that disintegrate each time they are played and are useless after half a dozen hearings. Luna-Costillas has awakened the language in everyday phrases at home. Amaniti. Come and eat. Ani hotoh. Where are your shoes? She is working with linguist Natasha Warner to create an English-Mutsun dictionary, a textbook for children and translations of stories and songs. And she teaches Mutsun at tribal gatherings. Mutsun is not the only Native American language being revived. From Arizona to Alaska to Hawaii, tribes are videotaping elders speaking languages that they are the last to know. Speakers are giving classes by long-distance telephone. In school immersion programs, children are learning languages that their grandparents were the last generation to speak. Congress in 1990 passed the Native American Languages Act, which translated into money for language renewal projects all over the country. That year, the National Parks Service gave nearly $15 million to Native American cultural preservation efforts, which include language study. The Administration for Native Americans awarded $2.5 million to language projects last year, and this year expects to double that sum. But despite the new attention to saving these languages, chances are dismal that many will survive, experts say. Throughout the country, about 175 are spoken, according to 1999 Senate testimony by Alaska linguist Michael Krauss. But only a very few are spoken by enough young people to give them a chance at survival. In 60 years, Krauss predicted, only 20 Native American languages will be left. In California, where about 30 Indian languages have fallen out of use, more than 15 besides Mutsun are being resurrected, linguists say. In Woodland, near Sacramento, a woman learned Rumsien songs from recordings of her great-great-grandmother's voice. Another woman is developing a CD-ROM to teach Ajachemem, once spoken in Orange County. A statewide program run by Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival has paired 65 elders with "apprentices" studying 20 languages. Some tribes with gambling operations donate part of their casino proceeds to language instruction. And a summer workshop at UC Berkeley gives California Indians a crash course in linguistic notation and research. Lost Language, Lost Knowledge "Posterity loses when you lose a language," said UC Berkeley linguist Leanne Hinton, who runs the workshop. "You lose the diversity of human thought and human knowledge and human experience. You're not just losing a bunch of words." Luna-Costillas knows that well. She grew up in Madera, traveling to Hollister and Gilroy to pick apricots and grapes with a clan that included her parents and five brothers and sisters. She knew she was Indian, not Mexican like the other children. The others had Spanish to affirm their identity; she had nothing more tangible than her grandmother's herbal remedies. In 1996, searching for a better sense of her history, she attended a few Native American gatherings in the Bay Area and met people who were learning dormant languages. They told her Mutsun had been preserved in written texts. She found a book on the Mutsun people of the San Juan Bautista Mission by missionary Felipe Arroyo de la Cuesta, who kept notes including 2,884 Mutsun phrases. She spent hours committing the words to memory and perusing other records. The Mutsun, scholars say, come from land that stretches from the San Joaquin River west to the coast, and north from Morgan Hill to Soledad. About 200 Mutsun people live in Madera, Luna-Costillas says; 400 or so remain in the San Juan Bautista area, near the mission built in the late 1790s. While Native Americans labored in the missions, they were forced to learn Spanish and abandon their languages. A woman named Ascencion Solorsano was apparently the last fluent Mutsun speaker; the language was thought to have died with her in 1930. Luna-Costillas took vacation time to enroll in the Berkeley workshop. She and Warner worked from a 1977 dissertation on Mutsun grammar by Berkeley linguist Marc Okrand, who used his work as the basis for the Klingon language he made up for the "Star Trek" series. Luna-Costillas had trouble deciphering Okrand's jargon, so the next year, she enrolled in a linguistics class at Fresno City College. She began to write words on index cards and stick them in her apron at work so she could practice in spare moments at the checkout stand. She learned enough to sing Mutsun songs at a cousin's funeral. And she taught the words to her two oldest children. When Jonathan was born, she spoke to him in Mutsun. Translating "Green Eggs and Ham," Luna-Costillas filled in the blanks as best she could. Could you, would you on a train? "We didn't know what to use for train. So my cousins said, 'Let's do "snake-like," because it's long.' So we used lisana--snake--and putka--like." Would you? Could you? In a car? "When cars came, the Mutsun people used the Mexican word for car, maquina. So we went ahead and used it: Maquinateka. In a car." Last year, Luna-Costillas quit her job and got one as a monitor ensuring that Indian remains and artifacts are not disturbed at construction sites. On rainy nights, she huddled in her Toyota truck with the light on, poring over Mutsun texts. Luna-Costillas knows her children are the best bet for preserving the Mutsun language. But she says she won't pressure them, and it has been hard to keep her two oldest, who live part time with her former husband, interested. Luna-Costillas' parents can't really speak Mutsun, but they try, especially when they baby-sit for their grandchildren. "To see your grandchildren tell each other something in the language that was never spoken--could never be spoken--" Lillian Luna says over the phone with obvious emotion, "--the baby being asleep and waking up and saying something in Mutsun without being told to say it." "It's something they took away," says her husband, Ruben Luna, who is holding back tears. "They couldn't use it in the missions," he said. "It's very important. Quirina is bringing it back."