Chumash language brought back from the brink
The last fluent speaker of Samala died in 1965, but thanks to a trove of anthropological notes, a linguist has drafted a 608-page dictionary to keep the tribal tongue alive.
SANTA YNEZ — A generation ago, the ancient Chumash tongue of Samala was all but dead, its songs and sagas buried in a university basement beneath mountains of yellowing research notes.
But now Samala is the talk of the reservation.
Thanks largely to a non-American Indian graduate student who was working for pocket money 40 years ago, the tribe has unveiled the first major Samala dictionary, a key moment in the language's rebirth.
Chumash: A photo caption accompanying an article in Sunday's California section about efforts to save the ancient Chumash language of Samala described Mati Waiya and Luhui Isha as members of the Santa Ynez band of Chumash. Although they are Chumash, neither is a member of the Santa Ynez band.
At a lavish event in the Chumash casino's concert hall Friday night, most of the tribe's 150 enrolled members lined up for copies of the long-awaited 608-page book.
"This is awesome," said Nakia Zavalla, the 33-year-old cultural director for the Santa Ynez band of the Chumash, handling the volume as gingerly as a sacred text. "We won't have to constantly go searching for our culture -- now it's right here."
The dictionary's 4,000 entries sound as foreign to most of the tribe members as they were familiar to their ancestors. It's a tough language for English speakers, filled with sharp interruptions called glottal stops. Some words don't quite roll off the tongue -- qalpsik is to braid the hair tight -- and more than 100 prefixes can dramatically change the meaning of verbs.
"There are so many rules," moaned Zavalla. "Just a glottal stop -- it sounds like uh-oh -- can change the meaning of ma from 'the' to 'rabbit.'
The last Chumash fluent in the language died in 1965. For years, speaking Samala carried a stigma, even on the reservation. At the American Indian boarding schools attended by students in past generations, use of native tongues was a punishable offense, a serious violation in an environment that aimed to minimize the value of being Indian.
More recently, some parents saw the language as a needless burden for their children -- a reminder of an identity it sometimes seemed better to hide.
"I would never even tell people I was Chumash," said Sarah Moses, 66, the head of the tribe's education committee. "I would say I was Mexican."
It was the same story in other tribes. About 30 of the state's American Indian tongues have no speakers left and another 50 have only a few. Fueled in some cases by revenue from their casinos, tribes have hired linguists to help them bring back languages now limited mostly to guest appearances in scholarly publications.
