UC Davis

[00:00:00] Lewis Lawyer:: You know, I'm seeing the tribes are saying, no, it's not part of the history of your California. It's our language. And it's not that it was our language. It is our language. [00:00:11][10.7]

[00:00:17] Soterios Johnson:: In what is now California, close to 100 indigenous languages were spoken before Europeans arrived. According to UNESCO, most of the languages native to the Americas are critically endangered. Many others are entirely extinct. A new book by a UC Davis alumnus is the first ever published description of one of those languages, Patwin or Patwin, originally spoken in hundreds of communities in Northern California. This is The Backdrop, a UC Davis Podcast Exploring the World of Ideas. I'm Soterios Johnson. Native Americans have been working to preserve and revive the state's indigenous languages for at least the last 20 years. In "A Grammar of Patwin," when Louis lawyer brings together 200 years of word lists, notebooks, audio recordings and archival material to create an invaluable linguistic resource and reference -- the first of its kind. Welcome to The Backdrop, Lewis. [00:01:04][47.1]

[00:01:05] Lewis Lawyer:: Thanks. Nice to be here. [00:01:06][1.1]

[00:01:07] Soterios Johnson:: So, you know, before we start, I've heard the language pronounced a couple of different ways -- Patwin and Patwin, which is correct? [00:01:13][5.3]

[00:01:14] Lewis Lawyer:: Well, that's a good question. The native pronunciation would be closer to "Putwin," but yeah, I guess when you read the word in English, it looks like Patwin. So people say, Patwin, I would say "Putwin" is probably closer to correct. [00:01:29][15.2]

[00:01:30] Soterios Johnson:: OK, I'll stick with "Putwin" here. So. So let's put Patwin into context. Where was it the predominant language? When was that? And at its peak, how many people were speaking it? [00:01:40][10.2]

[00:01:42] Lewis Lawyer:: So Patwin is the native language of Davis, actually, and the area surrounding Davis, so basically the whole southwestern drainage of the Sacramento River. So that includes the Putah Creek watershed and almost all the Cache Creek watershed all the way up to almost to Clear Lake, but not quite. And yeah, all the way up to the northern the northern side of the Colusa County. So really kind of a big area by by California language standards. And there were something in the neighborhood of 30,000 people speaking the language 200 years ago. And as you mentioned, they were in a few hundred villages, so there wasn't central Patwin government at any time it was a system of politically independent but allied and trading and and, you know, interdependent societies. [00:02:43][61.5]

[00:02:45] Soterios Johnson:: Right. So and 30,000 people back 200 years ago. I mean, that was a that was a significant civilization going on. [00:02:50][5.4]

[00:02:50] Lewis Lawyer:: Oh, yeah. It's a sizable group. Definitely. I mean, they live in a very rich area of the world. If you think about the natural resources available in the Yolo wetland area and in the hills and and the grassland and all the way down, you know, along Suisun Bay and the Suisun marshes there and incredibly rich area. So it could support a lot of people. Yeah. [00:03:12][21.8]

[00:03:13] Soterios Johnson:: So fast-forward to today. How many people are speaking the language today? [00:03:17][3.8]

[00:03:17] Lewis Lawyer:: Well, the exact number isn't really know. To my knowledge, there's there's one person who grew up speaking the language so one sort of native first-language speaker still around. But there are a lot of learners. There's a number of active learning communities, actually. All three of the federally recognized Patwin tribes have learners learning the language and they're teachers doing amazing work there. There are also people who aren't working directly with the tribes, doing their own learning. So there are a number of speakers these days and they're predominantly learners of the language. [00:04:01][43.9]

[00:04:03] Soterios Johnson:: Is it considered an endangered language or a critically endangered language at this point? [00:04:07][4.6]

[00:04:08] Lewis Lawyer:: Yes, I'm sure if you looked at those global sort of statistics, it would be called critically endangered. Yes. In fact, I'm sure it is. When I started this project, the International Organization of Standards didn't recognize the existence of the language at all. They they called it a dialect of Wintu, which is actually a different related language. So I worked with them to add Patwin to the the ISO classification. And I think they I think they classified it as critically endangered. But, you know, those those labels aren't the most useful labels all the time. Some folks find words like endangered to be offensive because it sounds like, you know, they're being treated like a species of wild animal or something. Really, it's it's a language. It's a living language. Its people are still here and they're still speaking the language. So. [00:05:00][52.4]

[00:05:01] Soterios Johnson:: So how did put when become this language that wasn't being used anymore? Was there kind of a deliberate effort to eradicate it or was it more of a gradual assimilation into the languages European settlers used? [00:05:13][11.8]

[00:05:14] Lewis Lawyer:: Yeah, well, it was a little bit of both. So, you know, the story that you're more likely to hear in school is that, you know sort of well, the Europeans came in and that was that ended up being the dominant culture. And so people sort of the native people joined into that culture and started speaking the language. In fact, it was a lot more violent and deliberate than that. People, children were taken from their families and put in boarding schools where they were not allowed to speak their language and they were physically punished if they did speak their language. And, you know, indigenous people had no no rights, they weren't allowed to represent themselves in court. So so they couldn't defend themselves legally against things that white people did to them. And so basically, there was a lot of violence against native people. And in fact, some counties, I don't think Yolo County, but some counties and the state and federal government, I believe, are known to have offered bounties for settlers killing native people. So there's a lot of really deliberate and unfortunately state-sponsored violence going on against native people -- physically, their bodies and then also cultural violence going on at places like missions and boarding schools and just just sort of the world in general. It wasn't very it wasn't safe to be a native person for a long time in California. [00:06:45][90.5]

[00:06:47] Soterios Johnson:: Right. [00:06:47][0.0]

[00:06:47] Lewis Lawyer:: So that situation has recently changed, I think [00:06:50][2.9]

[00:06:50] Soterios Johnson:: so. It's it's kind of not surprising that the language almost became extinct, but people are still keeping it alive. Let's listen to an archival clip you brought to get a sense of what it sounds like to him. [00:07:03][12.4]

[00:07:04] Sarah Gonzalez: (Speaking Patwin) [00:07:04][0.2]

[00:07:16] Lewis Lawyer:: Tthat recording we just listen to is by a speaker named Sarah Gonzalez. She's a River Patwin speaker from Grimes, which is up near Colusa. That was recorded in the 1960s. So what the story is, is the beginning of the creation story. This is a story about how the world was first made. What Sarah Gonzales was saying just then was that in the beginning there it was all water. There's water everywhere. And Turtle, Peregrine, Falcon and Coyote are in a boat and they're they're sitting in a boat and they're floating up there way up above. And at some point, Peregrine got tired or bored and he said he said, "Let's plan something." And Turtle says, "OK." And that's that's the bit of the story we just heard. But those those three end up and turtle specifically ends up playing a big role in creating creating the world. [00:08:10][54.1]

[00:08:11] Soterios Johnson:: You know, it kind of sounds familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. Is it related to any other languages from, say, other continents? [00:08:18][6.7]

[00:08:19] Lewis Lawyer:: That's a good question, too. Not not that is known. It's known that it's related to two other languages for sure. It's related to Wintu, up in the northern Sacramento Valley and the surrounding mountains to the west. And Nomlaki, which is in between in between the two. So we know that those three languages are related to one another. That's called the Wintuan language family. And there's a theory that the Wintuan language family is part of a larger language family called Penutian, which stretches all throughout the West Coast. It's not the only group on the West Coast, but there are many, many hypothetically Penutian languages on the West Coast all the way from British Columbia down into California. And those are languages like just across the Sacramento River, the Nisenan language and the Konkow language and also in the Bay Area, the the Ohlone languages. Those are all Penutian languages, for example. So there's that theory. And then people have people have tried to figure out wider connections where the pollution languages are related to languages from elsewhere. But even the Penutian hypothesis is not universally accepted. So I would say it's definitely related to two other languages and potentially many more. You know, part of the problem is that, as you mentioned in your intro, there's about 100 languages in California and not all of them have been studied very well. One of the reasons that I did this project is that I was trying to include some California languages and in a global language database that I was building about something else and I could barely find any information about them. And I surprised myself by realizing that I didn't know anything about the language that was spoken where I grew up. I grew up in Davis. I didn't even know what it was called. So, you know, it's it's this goes back to the sort of crisis of documentation. There's all these all these learners who want to learn Patwin. You can't just go to a bookstore and, you know, get by the Patwin dictionary and buy the Patwin learning books. It doesn't exist. And so that's, you know, the animating thing here for us as documentary linguists is to just try to get that information into a readable form, basically. [00:10:46][147.1]

[00:10:47] Soterios Johnson:: Right. So, I mean like your journey into this was you weren't actually looking to study this language at all, but you just found a dearth of information about it and you just kind of made it your mission to create some documentation around it. [00:11:02][14.4]

[00:11:02] Lewis Lawyer:: Yeah, that's right. You know, like I say, I was building a database of something else and realized that there wasn't any information. And at the same time, I was kind of realizing I was I was starting to feel like my work in some sort of abstract linguistics was not directly applicable to the world. Just in my personal opinion, I was starting to have a crisis of confidence in my own work. And I realized, oh, my gosh, I have all these skills about describing language structure and there are no descriptive materials for the languages in the place that I'm from. Hey, I can do something really useful here. I can make a book that people will potentially be reading for a really long time just because it's it's going to be sort of a primary reference for for language. And so I turn my attention to that. [00:11:54][51.8]

[00:11:55] Soterios Johnson:: So as a linguist now, what's unique about the language or maybe what's what's the major difference between Potkin and, say, English to give people a sense of the language? [00:12:03][8.7]

[00:12:04] Lewis Lawyer:: Yeah, there are there are differences on a variety of levels. One of the first things you might notice is the the sounds in that clip we were listening to, some sounds are very familiar. They've got, you know, M's and L's and sort of a lot of the sounds that we do have in English. But some of them are less familiar. The way that we're saying Patwin and trying to be sort of close to the the native pronunciation there. That has an unaspirated P. So instead of saying "Putwin" or Patwin, you kind of say it with a muted P like the Spanish P. Patwin. And that's that's a Patwin sound. But they also have the aspirated P, so they make a distinction there, like between the Spanish sounding P and the English sounding P. That may not be interesting for normal people, but we linguists look very excited by things like that. [00:12:59][54.5]

[00:13:00] Soterios Johnson:: Well, those differences that really make those differences really kind of you can tell when, like a native speaker of a certain language is speaking it, maybe when someone speaking it as a foreign language, those little differences are kind of what kind of really stand out. [00:13:12][12.5]

[00:13:13] Lewis Lawyer:: Absolutely. And other things like they can have an H at the end of a word in that recording, we heard the word for boat, which is "newh", and there's a hook at the end, which is just something you couldn't do in English. But there's some some even more striking sounds. They have "thsluh" sound. So in the word "beethlauhsh," which means "over there," there's a "thsluh," which is kind of like the Welsh double L. is a similar sound. So anyway, there's there's some interesting sounds when you when you kind of focus in on on the rhythm of the language as it's spoken and the individual sounds themselves are quite different from English, [00:13:51][37.9]

[00:13:52] Soterios Johnson:: And I think I read that word order doesn't play such a great role as it does in other languages. So, [00:13:57][5.4]

[00:13:58] Yeah, it plays a different role in Patwin. So whatever you you want to focus on, you put at the beginning of the sentence and then you kind of say the rest of the words and you have a lot of freedom about what order they go in. So if you want to say, you know, I found the example, a speaker named Oscar McDaniel said at the sentence, "That dog bit me." But the way that he chose to say it in that moment was "That me dog bit." I think that maybe it was "That me bit dog." The point is that you take the actual phrase "that dog" and he split it across the sentence. So not only can you take the phrases like "that dog" and "me" and put them in any order and you can, but you can also take the individual phrases like "that dog' and you can split them up and put other stuff in the middle of it. So the word order is radically different from what you see in English. [00:14:49][51.1]

[00:14:50] Soterios Johnson:: It's fascinating because, you know, to an English speaker, that would be confusing, like did he bite the dog or did the dog bite him? [00:14:58][8.4]

[00:14:59] Lewis Lawyer:: Well, and actually, it's it's case marking is what helps with that. So kind of like in Latin, some people might be familiar with, you know, you can do that too. "Summa cum laude." "Summa laude" is a phrase, but it's split. And, you know, put the you put the preposition right in the middle there, because Latin is also interesting in this way. But that's because "summa" and "laude" are in the same case. And it's the same with "that" and "dog" in the sentence that Oscar McDaniel said. They're both in the object case. So you can tell that they're both parts of the object of the sentence. [00:15:32][33.9]

[00:15:33] Soterios Johnson:: Got it. OK. [00:15:34][0.5]

[00:15:34] Lewis Lawyer:: Yeah. The structure of the verb is also interesting. It's much more complicated than in English, so it's got a root. But then you can add lots of different elements on top of that root. You can layer it like a big I don't know, like I almost said, like a big cake. But, you know, you can add layers and layers and layers of meaning to this little root. You can reduplicated so you can say the root more than once. You can add a little suffix. That means that the action goes back on itself. So it's reflexive or that the action is is passive or reciprocal. You can say it in in a way that is not committing to the reality of what happened called irrealis. So some speakers use that for telling stories or saying a negative. You know, I could go on and on about the verb that was the longest chapter in the book. It's really a complicated structure and it's something that takes your mind a long time to to wrap itself around. [00:16:32][57.6]

[00:16:32] Soterios Johnson:: Yeah, I mean, it sounds like a very sophisticated language. Was it -- [00:16:36][3.8]

[00:16:36] Lewis Lawyer:: Yes. [00:16:36][0.0]

[00:16:37] Soterios Johnson:: Is it a written language? Or do you notate it with like using the Roman alphabet? [00:16:41][4.5]

[00:16:42] Lewis Lawyer:: Yeah, well there's a little bit of both really. I mean, so it didn't have written a script before Europeans came. So it's not a written language in that way. There are meaningful systems of symbols like in basketry patterns and rock drawings. But the language didn't have a written system back before contact. So all the first writings of the language are Europeans or settlers writing it the way that they hear it. So either in sort of their own special way that they come up with. Or some of them are trained linguists, so they write it down in a in a phonetic script. But now I would say that there is well, there are multiple native scripts because the tribes are working to develop their own scripts. Hmm. None of them are just following linguistic tradition. They're all coming up with their own ways that makes sense to them to write their language down. So I would say actually recently so within the last couple of decades, their native scripts are being developed for these languages. They're based on the Roman script because every one of those tribes now is literate and in English. [00:18:00][78.2]

[00:18:01] Soterios Johnson:: So once you decided to do this, to document the Patwin language, how did you go about gathering all the materials from all over? [00:18:08][7.5]

[00:18:09] Lewis Lawyer:: That was quite a task, although it's well, I say that it's pretty easy these days because of the Internet, to be honest, but it was it was a task. So there had been linguists before me who had studied Patwin but most of them hadn't published much. So there wasn't much in the way of a bibliography of materials to go from. So I had to build my own. And right away I wanted to make that one of the things that I shared. So I constantly shared updated versions of my bibliography with tribal members that I was in contact with because I know that they were building their own archives and trying to make complete collections of archival material as well, I ended up finding archival material all over the place. There's a collection at Berkeley because there was a a very active documentation program there for Californian languages. For this language, it was it was between the '50s, in the '70s. Also in the special collections library at Berkeley, the Bancroft, they have some older documents. There's one the oldest wordlist is held there from 1821 that was taken in the Spanish mission. But then there's also Patwin when archival material in Philadelphia at the American Philosophical Society. There are some in Bloomington, Indiana, at the Archives of Traditional Music there -- not music. In this case, it was just a wordlist, an important one actually. There is a museum in L.A. that is famous for its Gene Autry collection, but also it has a research library and they have some some of the only documentation of of the South Patwin dialect, which is the one around Suisun, was written by one of the Vallejo brothers, and it's stored in that museum in L.A. So it's really it's just all over the place. And there's some in Chico that I haven't actually delved into in the Meriam library up there. There's just really a lot of material. And so I was spoiled in that way. Some sleeping languages don't have a lot of material, and you really have to just use one person's work and do as much as you can with it. Patwin has a lot of people who worked on it, actually. And so there was a lot of material. But then it becomes difficult to navigate. They all have their own writing system. They all have their own different reasons for doing research. They all have different level of skill in documenting languages. And there's no index. And some of them have 10 notebooks or seven notebooks. And it's just whatever they happen to be talking about that day is scribbled in these notebooks or audio recordings. [00:20:54][164.4]

[00:20:54] Soterios Johnson:: Right. [00:20:54][0.0]

[00:20:55] Lewis Lawyer:: So one of the things I did other than gathering materials and documenting which materials I had gathered, I also wanted to index the language in those materials so that if I wanted to know about the word for "tree," I could just search the word for "tree" in a central database. And I didn't have to page through dozens of notebooks and hours of audio material every time I wanted to know about one word. [00:21:17][21.9]

[00:21:18] Soterios Johnson:: Right. [00:21:18][0.0]

[00:21:18] Lewis Lawyer:: So I built myself a database that I used to query the language. And I ran a little course with undergrad assistants for a while who were helping to digitize the English side so it could all be indexed. And it's really useful. I still use it all the time. So when people contacted me and asked me for a word or something, I can pretty easily call it up. [00:21:38][19.7]

[00:21:38] Soterios Johnson:: I mean, you were very fortunate that there was a lot of source material, but the fact that no one ever actually sat down to kind of bring it all together to make sense of it. I mean, you you basically are providing this amazing academic but also cultural service to help to preserve and even kind of promote the continuance of this language. [00:21:59][20.9]

[00:22:00] Lewis Lawyer:: That's the goal. Yeah, that's the goal. You know, I play a non-central role in the continuance of the language, and I'm pretty adamant about that. When I first got into this, I was thinking, wow, I'm going to really be you know, I'm going to really play a pretty heroic role in this in this language. And I learned right away that that's just not it's not the right approach for a settler to take. I am very happy to use the skills that I have as a linguist that I've been lucky enough to develop as a linguist to help make reference material for this language. But nothing I can do is going to make the language continue and survive, in a way. That's sort of maybe an extreme way of saying it. But it's how I think about it. Nothing, no knowledge that I learn matters. The point is for the people whose language it it is. So the Patwin people themselves, the Wintun people, you know, it's it's because of them that the language is surviving and continuing and they are carrying it on and they're doing all the work. So, you know, people like me and institutions like the University of California and, you know, funding institutions like the NSF, we can provide a supporting role to provide materials for those communities, whether it's the communities that are really doing all all the work. [00:23:34][93.6]

[00:23:34] Soterios Johnson:: And they are they are doing that work in what ways? They are holding classes and things of that nature? [00:23:39][4.9]

[00:23:40] Lewis Lawyer:: Anything you can imagine. Yeah, classes, mentorships. Just valuing and learning from cultural people. There were whole generations that got swept up into this residential school system, and so it ends up being kind of rare to have people who remember what used to be everyday things that everybody would have known how to how to weave a basket and everyone would have known the traditional foods. These were obvious sort of universal things. And and that knowledge got shockingly close to just completely disappearing. And so the communities are really good at identifying the people who still have this knowledge and promoting them and learning from them. I couldn't even list all the ways that they're doing it, but it's really impressive to me. [00:24:27][47.0]

[00:24:28] Soterios Johnson:: Right. And just to to for people who don't know about the residential school system, there was a whole school system where the I guess the predominant Western European settler culture created these residential schools where they would take young Native American children and take them from the family, put them in these boarding schools to kind of Westernize them. And that almost eradicated the language and the culture and other things, right? [00:24:53][25.4]

[00:24:54] Lewis Lawyer:: Yes. Those those residential schools were definitely a place where the the predominant culture, Euro, Euro-American culture, tried to educate native people and a lot of native culture ended up disappearing there. But it was a lot more active than than that. The guy who founded the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, which ended up being a template, I think, for for residential schools around the country. He his famous quote is "Kill the Indian, and Save the Man." And his idea was that you needed to eradicate native culture in order to civilize people, which is a violent idea. And he was in charge of schools and children and children went there to these schools and just were not they were not well taken care of. Their culture was literally beaten out of them. They were very, very violent places. And they they had a very big effect. I mean, when you think about the speed with which these cultures became so threatened, it's astonishingly fast. You know, take Davis, for instance. So 180, 190 years ago, everyone in Davis -- and there was definitely a village at Davis from from as long as we can remember -- everyone there just spoke Patwin. That was the language of everyday life and everyone's culture there was Patwin culture because that was just the culture that had always been there. And it was this deep, you know, the people have been there for for a couple thousand years, as far as we know, living in this way. And fast-forward to today, not really very, very long after that, and nobody knows the name of the village that was at Davis. We literally don't know what it was called and we don't know what dialect of. Patwin was spoken there. It was not documented and it is lost. It's it's just it was so effective, this program of reeducation, so, so terribly effective. So, yeah, that's the sort of theater that you find yourself in when you as a sort of unsuspecting theoretical linguist, decide to go make a difference with a Native American language. And all of a sudden all these things that you never learned in school become really important and you realize what a different world it looks like from a Native American person's eyes. So I really just try to sort of sit back and listen when it comes to all that. [00:27:40][166.2]

[00:27:40] Soterios Johnson:: Hmm. So in general, like as a linguist, why is it important to keep languages alive? I mean, somebody might think like, "OK, what happened was terrible, but is it worth trying to keep a language that not many people speak alive?" [00:27:55][15.3]

[00:27:57] Lewis Lawyer:: Yeah, you know, that's that's a really good question. And there's a couple of ways of answering it. I would say from the perspective of an academic or a traditional linguist, one of the answers that often comes out is, well, you know, if you lose a language, you lose all the knowledge that's encoded in that language. And so already we have a hard time piecing back together the kind of knowledge of landscape and fauna and flora that was present in native California for thousands of years because the languages are going and with them goes a lot of knowledge. So that's one way of answering that question. But really, I think a better answer that I've come to learn is just because it's it can't be our decision. We can't just let it happen. Because of the history of violence against these cultures. You can't just say "What's another language?" You can't just let it go. This is a problem that Western cultures have caused not just in America but around the world. This history of colonialism and violence is causing a lot of destruction of peoples' languages. And if they don't want to lose the language, then they shouldn't have to lose the language. This is again decentering myself because it's really not my decision whether the language should or shouldn't go. But in my experience, nobody wants the languages to go. And it's not just because of the loss to the scientific community of the understanding of local fauna. It's because of human rights. It's it's a people's right to have a culture and it's a people's right to have a language. And that's the problem with languages falling asleep. [00:29:50][112.6]

[00:29:51] Soterios Johnson:: Where do you see the Patwin language say, like 10 years from now or 20 years from now? [00:29:55][4.0]

[00:29:56] Lewis Lawyer:: That's a really good question. One thing that you can definitely see is that the tribes are now in a position to really reclaim it. So it's no longer something that academics will go out in the field and document and put in an archive because it's important knowledge for scientists to have and it belongs to the world or it's part of the history of California or something like that. You know, I'm seeing the tribes are saying, "No, it's not part of the history of your California. It's our language. It's and it's and it's not that it was our language. It is our language." And so the tribes are making themselves the centers of things like developing spelling systems and developing archives of languages and developing teaching programs for their children and for adults, and making the decisions about what books should be made and how they should be made and who should get them. And all of those things are now becoming more controlled by the by the Patwin people themselves in a way that really they they always should have been. But now now it seems like the people are in a position to do that more. So I can definitely predict that that's going to keep on happening. And I'm pretty optimistic about the number of speakers and stuff, too. I really -- I'm an optimist by nature, but I see all the people learning and the you know, how much it means to people to to learn language. And it's it's still going. I hear people speak it and it's it's still going. [00:31:38][101.7]

[00:31:40] Soterios Johnson:: Well, Lewis, this has been really great, very enlightening. Thanks so much for coming on to The Backdrop. [00:31:43][3.2]

[00:31:44] Lewis Lawyer:: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. It's been really a pleasure to be here. So thanks for having me. [00:31:48][3.7]

[00:31:49] Soterios Johnson:: Lewis Lawyer is a linguist, UC Davis alumnus and author of "A Grammar of Patwin." Find out more about his work and the Patwin language on our website, ucdavis.edu/the-backdrop-podcast. And if you like The Backdrop, check out our other UC Davis podcast Unfold. It breaks down complicated problems and unfolds curiosity-driven researc. Join public radio veteran and host Amy Quinton and co-host Kat Kerlin for Unfold. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Soterios Johnson and this is The Backdrop, a UC Davis Podcast Exploring the World of Ideas. [00:31:49][0.0]

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