Anne Brice (narration): This is Berkeley Voices, a UC Berkeley News podcast. I’m Anne Brice.
(Music: “The Hairdresser” by Blue Dot Sessions)
Tyler Lee-Wynant grew up hearing stories from his dad about his great-great aunt, Edna Campbell Guerrero. Born in 1907 in Mendocino County, she was a native speaker of Northern Pomo, one of seven languages spoken by the Pomo people who are Indigenous to Northern California.
During his childhood, Tyler’s dad would visit her with his cousins. Their parents hoped they’d pick up some of the language.
Tyler Lee-Wynant: She would call my dad by a Pomo name. So his Pomo name is Kal-til. He describes her as someone who could just sort of see right through you. She was a no-nonsense person. She was an amazing individual. She cared so deeply about passing on what she knew.
Anne Brice (narration): Tyler is a second-year Ph.D. student in linguistics at UC Berkeley and a graduate student researcher at the campus’s California Language Archive.
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Housed in Dwinelle Hall, the archive includes hundreds of boxes of audio recordings, field notes, photographs, videos and other archival materials documenting nearly 400 Indigenous languages. The languages are primarily from California and other U.S. states, but also from across North and South America and other parts of the world.
More than 80 California languages are represented in the archive, including Chochenyo, Mojave, Karuk and the Pomoan languages, spoken by different tribes inhabiting distinct territories: Chochenyo in the East Bay, Mojave along the Colorado River in parts of Arizona, California and Nevada, Karuk in the Klamath River basin and Pomoan languages from central Sonoma and Mendocino Counties inland to Lake and Colusa Counties.
Tyler grew up in Santa Rosa of mixed heritage, with the Pomo side of his family spread out across the country.
Tyler Lee-Wynant: Growing up outside of the homeland, you know, growing up in Santa Rosa, which is an hour or so away from Mendocino, especially in my younger years, I definitely felt a certain disconnect from that aspect of myself.
I’ve always had my family, though. My family has always been my community first and foremost. Whenever we meet, we always share the words that we know and the focus is always on being Northern Pomo.
It wasn’t really until my undergrad when I started to learn the language that I felt a stronger connection.
Anne Brice (narration): As a linguistics undergraduate student at UC Davis, he worked on several language projects. He did his own fieldwork with a contemporary speaker to help build a dictionary in Hupa. He also worked with a team to create content indexes for at least 30 different Indigenous languages.
(Music: “Cran Ras” by Blue Dot Sessions)
Later in college, Tyler began to learn Northern Pomo, first visiting the Northern Pomo Language Tools website. There, his aunt Edna is one of three Native women saying words and phrases in the language.
Tyler Lee-Wynant: It was an emotional experience to just hear my aunt’s … like this is my aunt, and she’s speaking Northern [Pomo]. It was just incredible.
Anne Brice (narration): He also accessed the California Language Archive’s digital collection. With more than 60,000 files available online, the archive is one of the most publicly accessible and comprehensive Indigenous language archives in North America.
Andrew Garrett is a Berkeley professor of linguistics, and has served as the archive’s faculty director since 2007. He says the archive is a vital resource for scholars, educators and Indigenous communities.
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Andrew Garrett: For many communities, the kinds of materials that we have are essential for their own cultural reclamation projects, their own language revitalization projects, for restoring community wellness and social health and reintroducing cultural practices that maybe were banned in the past, or fell out of use because of various kinds of pressures.
Sometimes we have the only recordings of a particular language or the only documented information about certain cultural practices or certain stories or certain kinds of vocabulary, and that material is really valuable in Indigenous communities today.
Anne Brice (narration): It was in the archive that Tyler found scores of notes and audio recordings of his aunt made by UC Berkeley linguists over more than 50 years.
In the recordings, she’s telling stories, describing cultural practices, saying vocabulary and conjugating verbs.
Here she is at age 59 being interviewed by researcher Eero Vihman.
Eero Vihman: Northern Pomo word list, part 2. Informant Edna Guerrero. Recorded in August 1966.
Now, to kiss.
Edna Guerrero: sip’u:n.
Eero Vihman: Again?
Edna Guerrero: sip’u:n.
Eero Vihman: How do you make, uh, the sound (blows air through lips so they vibrate)?
Edna Guerrero: bitu:taman.
Eero Vihman: Say it again?
Edna Guerrero: bitu:taman.
Eero Vihman: To spit.
Edna Guerrero: kʰet̪’, kʰet̪’.
Eero Vihman: To hiccup.
Edna Guerrero: shich’ukan, shich’ukan.
Eero Vihman: To shimmer, to shine.
Edna Guerrero: ts’ala:man, ts’ala:man.
Eero Vihman: To groan.
Edna Guerrero: k’at̪a:man, k’at̪a:man.
Eero Vihman: It also means to moan. To giggle.
Edna Guerrero: To giggle. What was it now? To giggle.
Eero Vihman: We’ll put it aside. To whistle.
Edna Guerrero: pʰishu:t̪in.
Eero Vihman: Again?
Edna Guerrero: pʰishu:t̪in. ts’ihits’ihiman, isn’t it, for giggle?
Eero Vihman: Say it again?
Edna Guerrero: ts’ihits’ihiman.
Tyler Lee-Wynant: She lived in a time where she encountered a lot of negative attitudes towards being Indigenous. There was a very strong pressure to assimilate.
Even within the community, other Pomo people, they would discourage her from working with linguists because they felt like it wasn’t worth speaking the language, like, “We should just sort of assimilate. What is there left for us?” And she never had that attitude.
Anne Brice (narration): Here she is later in the same interview talking about different types of owls. One is associated with foreboding. It’s an example of a bit of unexpected cultural information that Tyler comes across when working with archival materials.
Edna Guerrero: The siyak’ is the one that late at night sometimes, it’ll sit around and (makes a loud inhale noise). He’d go like that. But the shadodo is, to the Indian people, he is the bringer of bad news or … they always say when he comes around [gap in audio] he’s telling you of something bad that’s going to happen.
Tyler Lee-Wynant: My aunt was just so strong and strong-willed despite all the negativity, and it reflects whenever I listen to her. She’s always just so confident and such a fascinating and just such a strong person. It’s very inspiring for me.
(Music: “Don Germaine” by Blue Dot Sessions)
For her to have faced all the problems of her days with such a strong will, what’s stopping me? I have nothing but admiration for her.
Anne Brice (narration): Now, as a graduate student researcher, Tyler is cataloging and analyzing the contents of a collection new to the archive: boxes and boxes of recordings, notebooks and other linguistic materials created by linguist Sally McLendon.
She made them from 1959 through the 1990s, first as a graduate student at Berkeley and later as a professor at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center in New York.
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Sally’s collection includes many Pomoan languages, including Northern Pomo, spoken by Tyler’s aunt.
Many of the archive’s materials were created by Berkeley linguists throughout the 20th century and into the 21st century with the goal of documenting endangered Native languages and cultures during a widespread shift to using English.
This language loss was a devastating consequence of the forcible and violent displacement and cultural suppression of Native peoples that began with European settlement and continued over generations.
(Music: “Lissa” by Blue Dot Sessions)
The new collection was added to the archive through the efforts of the archive’s manager, linguist and archivist Zachary O’Hagan. He earned his Ph.D. in linguistics from Berkeley in 2020 and also worked in the archive as a graduate student researcher.
You can read a companion piece on UC Berkeley News about Sally McLendon, her lifetime of research with Indigenous communities and how her collection of tapes and notebooks found their way to the archive.
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Zach became the archive’s first full-time manager in 2021. In the role, he supports ongoing documentation and preservation, and works with researchers on their projects.
His main focus, though, is on providing outreach and access. He finds and contacts researchers who might have valuable materials to add to the archive and he connects with Indigenous communities and scholars to make sure they know about the archive and can find the language materials they need. Andrew says having Zach on staff has been transformative.
Andrew Garrett: It’s easy for people to think of archives as being about objects and archives as being collections of objects. I think what archives really are is about relationships — relationships between the material that is curated in an archive and the various communities that have a stake in that material. And what Zach really has been able to do is to foreground the relationship aspect of our archive, creating relationships that are going to last for years or decades.
Anne Brice: Zach, do you have … like, how do you do that? Do you have a certain guiding principle in how you start to build and develop and maintain these relationships?
Zachary O’Hagan: I do have a bit of a guiding philosophy. I suppose I try and think of the university as a relatively big obstacle and foreign place and complicated place for most people outside of the university world and even for people inside it. I think that the best relationships push through a lot of that relatively directly and with as personal of a touch as possible.
So we might have a group of tribal researchers coming to the archive. People bring so many different experiences to the table, and it’s easy to make them sit down and fill out a form or tell them that they can’t stay five minutes into lunch because there’s a schedule.
I believe that it doesn’t take much to demonstrate to people that you are trying to do good by them. But it requires a bit of willingness to meet them directly as other people and not as people who are visiting an institution, I would say.
(Music: “Cedar Stand” by Blue Dot Sessions)
Anne Brice (narration): When Tyler listens to his aunt in audio recordings from the new collection, he’s constantly learning new things about his culture and family.
Tyler Lee-Wynant: Sally McLendon, I think, interviewed my aunt with the intention of learning about baskets. But during the course of those interviews, my aunt would talk about, I mean, she knew everything about everyone.
It’s such a trove of just information about, aside from language, culture and different people and my family’s history. I always get the chills whenever I listen to it because you never know what story is gonna come up.
I’ve become quite emotional from some of the stories that she would tell.
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I don’t even think that Sally expected my aunt to talk about certain things. In one recording, she was talking about what a traditional wedding looked like, which was incredible.
But also she talked about how some of my relatives were sent to Round Valley, which was essentially a prison camp in the early days, where whenever settlers would come across Native Americans, they’d round them up and send them there. Some of my ancestors were sent there and they tried to escape and she talked about that story. It’s hard to hear.
My great grandma, she went to a government school, and this is something I found out from one of the tapes. She went to the Sherman Institute, which is in Southern California somewhere. The government’s intention was to assimilate Native Americans. And when my great-grandma came back, she didn’t really want much to do with being Northern Pomo.
Anne Brice: Oh, really? When did she come back? How old was she?
Tyler Lee-Wynant: My goodness, I think this is for high school. So probably, I don’t know, 17, 18 or so. Yeah, but my aunt, so Aunt Edna, interestingly, at least from what I recall from those recordings, she didn’t go to a government school.
Anne Brice: OK.
Tyler Lee-Wynant: So, and I just wonder if that maybe was why, you know there was a different sort of relationship with their Indigeneity.
Anne Brice: Yeah, and they were sisters?
Tyler Lee-Wynant: They were sisters, yes.
Anne Brice: Oh, interesting. Who was the older sister?
Tyler Lee-Wynant: I think Edna was older.
Anne Brice: Huh. Do you know why she didn’t go?
Tyler Lee-Wynant: I don’t. Maybe she talks about it more. I haven’t listened to all of the interviews with her, but maybe that is somewhere. Yeah, I mean, there’s so much to just be discovered.
(Music: “Spark” by Blue Dot Sessions)
Anne Brice (narration): Tyler has told his dad and others in his family about what he’s learned. He says that in piecing his aunt’s story together, he’s also piecing together parts of his own identity, strengthening his connection to his people.
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Anne Brice: Are you learning different varieties of Northern Pomo now?
Tyler Lee-Wynant: So that’s kind of one of the big questions. One of things that comes up in language revitalization is what the language is. And what Northern Pomo is now is really the mixture of these different varieties in the documentation.
So, you know, my aunt spoke three varieties of Northern Pomo, but the linguists who worked with her would only occasionally make notes about which words pertained to different varieties. So we don’t really have a sense of what the different varieties looked like or sounded like. That is a project that’s been in the back of my mind to get started at some point, trying to restore these distinctions between the varieties, and figuring out which variety pertained to which community prior to colonization.
Anne Brice (narration): He’s also teaching the language to the next generation of Pomo speakers. There’s a new Northern Pomo class taught at Ukiah High School in Mendocino County. The curriculum was developed by Cathy O’Connor, one of the linguists who worked with Edna from 1979 to 1995. A community language teacher, Buffy Schmidt, teaches the class, learning as she goes.
Tyler shares with the educators new words and phrases from the archive’s materials when he comes across them.
Tyler Lee-Wynant: It’s a lot of thinking on her feet and drawing from the documentation somewhat opportunistically. A lot of it’s kind of like educated guesswork. We find some words that we can use to express the meaning, but can we always be sure that this is what speakers would actually say? No. But it’s so much a part of language revitalization that, you know, it’s sort of being OK with language change. Because languages do change.
(Music: “Step in Step Out” by Blue Dot Sessions)
Anne Brice (narration): It’s impossible to speak how Native speakers used to, he says, but together, Indigenous communities can build new language varieties that unite them.
In October, the language program manager of the Habematolel Pomo Tribe of Upper Lake, Jonathan Cirelli, visited the California Language Archive. There, he looked through some of the materials in the newly acquired McLendon collection.
Jonathan explains that the main goal of the program is to create a new generation of Eastern Pomo speakers.
Jonathan Cirelli: That sounds fairly easy, but in reality, it’s a multi-generational, decadeslong thing. I always say to our tribal members to kind of give them perspective, it took generations for us to lose our language, it might take a couple generations for us to regain it in the way we want to.
Anne Brice (narration): Culture and language, he says, are tightly interwoven. Especially for Indigenous communities.
Jonathan Cirelli: The colonial idea of killing the Indian and saving the man, kind of the Carlisle Boarding School removal, all that, really tried to separate the Native person from their community.
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Their first target was language, because as soon as you stop speaking a language, your connection, your ability to communicate with your loved ones and the people from your community, it’s diminished. And everyone started speaking English.
People who went to the boarding schools became scared or worried about speaking their language, even decades after they left a boarding school. Just that trauma would create barriers in their head to speak the language.
Learning your language or learning just how to say “Hello” to your aunties and uncles or your family members, I think, strengthens your heritage and your identity for our tribal members.
Anne Brice (narration): For Tyler, his work has just begun. Going through all of his aunt’s materials is a lifetime project for him. And Berkeley at this moment feels like the perfect place to keep it going.
Tyler Lee-Wynant: There’s just so much momentum to get the languages spoken again, to work with communities. I think Berkeley’s one of the best places to be for that work to be supported.
For me to be in the CLA, to work with a lot of these collections, things are turning to where a linguist who’s also Indigenous can create resources and do work with the community and for that to be supported. There’s more of a giving back.
(Music: “Child’s Play” by Blue Dot Sessions)
Anne Brice (narration): He recalls an interview that his aunt Edna gave in the ‘80s where she talked about the language attitudes she encountered.
Tyler Lee-Wynant: I think she always had some hope that in the future, like now, descendants, people of the community would value it and keep it going. And she was right.
Especially meeting the high school kids, they’re so passionate and they care so much about this aspect of themselves. So I really am very hopeful about the future and the future of the language and being Northern Pomo, our culture.
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Anne Brice: Do you feel like there’s a piece of her that’s kind of living inside of you as you do this work?
Tyler Lee-Wynant: I’d like to think so. I mean, I just hope I can live up to her and her determination to keep her culture alive, to keep the language alive, the traditional culture to the extent that you know we’re able to in this day and age. I’m committed to doing this work and sort of letting things unfold.
(Music: “Littl Jon” by Blue Dot Sessions)
It feels so fulfilling and so meaningful in my life to be able to do this, to be supported to do this kind of work. I cannot overstate … it’s been so amazing. There’s just so much and yeah, there’s just so much waiting to be learned, you know. It can only get better.
Anne Brice (narration): I’m Anne Brice, and this is Berkeley Voices, a UC Berkeley News podcast from the Office of Communications and Public Affairs. This episode was produced by me and Jason Pohl. Script editing by Tyler Trykowski. Music by Blue Dot Sessions.
You can find Berkeley Voices wherever you listen to podcasts, including YouTube @BerkeleyNews.
This is the first episode of our new season of Berkeley Voices. In six episodes, we hear from UC Berkeley scholars working on life-changing research and the people whose lives are changed by it. New episodes come out on the first Thursday of every month, from November through April.
We also have another show, Berkeley Talks, that features lectures and conversations at Berkeley.
You can find all of our podcast episodes, with transcripts and photos, on UC Berkeley News at news.berkeley.edu/podcasts.
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