Weaving the Words Togeer: Protecting Language and Life at the Same Time

Marie Wilcox at work | Photo: Dezaraye Bagalayos

The first thing Wukchumni elder Marie Wilcox wants people to learn is the true way to pronounce Yokuts, the broad and sweeping name that means the people, given to all the peoples living throughout California's great Central Valley and up into the Sierra before colonization. Here's a recording of Marie teaching the word's true pronunciation:

The average Californian, even if they happen to even know something about the Yokuts and Yokuts history, wouldn't necessarily know that there are around 60 different communities of people that fall under the umbrella of Yokuts. The Wukchumni are but one of those 60.

Marie Wilcox is the last fluent speaker of the Wukchumni language.

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In 2014, as part of the Global Oneness Project, Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee created a 10-minute documentary called Marie's Dictionary that told how Marie came to be the last fluent Wukchumni speaker, and how over the course of several years she came to compile and write the Wukchumni dictionary. Both the New York Times and National Geographic picked up the short documentary, as did KCETs sister organization LinkTV. From there, word of Marie, her dictionary, and her story spread and brought about a wider awareness of the Wukchumni and the Yokuts in general.

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Weaving the World Together

The Wukchumni are the Yokuts belonging to the Kaweah River and the Lemon Cove area in Tulare County. The Kaweah River once flowed from its headwaters in the southern Sierra Nevada down into the great Tulare Lake. That was before the river was dammed and its water diverted to feed the appetites of agriculture and the growing settler communities in the Tulare Basin. Before the destructive Spanish mission system took hold in California the Yokuts population was around 50,000, according to the most recent estimates. Today there are maybe 300 Wukchumni living in the basin; less than 5 percent of the native riparian habitat of the Tulare Basin remains intact.

Spurred by her sisters teaching Wukchumni words to the young people in their community, Marie decided to start writing down the words she remembered.

I was just fooling around one day, and putting a few words down, she says. They were just plain words, one word sentences. I don't know how many pages I had, maybe 98 I think it was, that I could remember at the time. I had books too, with Wukchumni words and some other words I could recognize from different tribes that were a part of our language too. I worked on that for a couple of years; maybe three.

In the end it would take seven years for Marie to complete her dictionary.

Watch Maries Dictionary, a documentary by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, on LinkTVs Global Perspectives

Growing up, while Marie's parents worked long hours in the fields, she was raised by her grandmother, Dinky Wilcox, who gave Marie her Indian name Che'ihmyat. Dinky Wilcox only spoke Wukchumni, immersing Marie in her native language from a very young age. Growing up was real nice because I got to be with my grandma, and we would go out to gather white root and she would bring biscuits and potatoes, we'd have lunch. I thought it was a pretty nice life. Not like it is today. We would go to North Fork Powwows; Grandma would play cards with the other ladies and I'd be under the table listening to them. You know how they talk, about everything. They gossip!

I think it was a much better world back then. How we stayed one family, we came together a lot. You don't see hardly anybody do that anymore. We used to plan things together. I think my grandmother is guiding me to stay that way.

Marie's grandmother passed away when Marie was still a young girl. From that point on she lived with her sister and her Filipino brother-in-law in Stockton for a while, and survived company men shooting at Filipino union members. When diabetes left her older brother bedridden, she moved back down into the south valley to help care for him. There Marie worked in the fields, married her first husband and had her first child at the age of 16. Her life resembled that of many young women with children and a partner to look after; working for survival and drinking for a good time.

It was not until her mother's passing in the late 1970's that Marie began to think about the traditions her grandmother had kept, And I thought, oh my gosh, I gotta teach our kids our traditions.

Ecologists often use indicator species as gauges to determine the health of an ecosystem. From a social science point of view, languages can be indicator species too.

From that point forward Marie became a Wukchumni elder, performing the face-washing ceremonies for the dead, imparting Indian names to the young, and - with the help and support of her daughter Jennifer- remembering and teaching the Wukchumni language, Yokuts' basket weaving, and bead work. The second time I met Marie, after initially meeting her at a yearly Go Native! event that Jennifer organizes, was at the Kaweah Oaks Preserve. She had been asked there to do a blessing of the preserve. The Kaweah Oaks Preserve is one of the few intact valley oak woodlands left in the Tulare Basin, and was once the territory of the Kaweah River Wukchumni Yokuts.

Ecologists often use indicator species as gauges to determine the health of an ecosystem from a scientific point of view. From a social science point of view, language can be considered an indicator species through which we can assess the health of not just the culture, but also the landscape in which that language evolved from. When a language is endangered and then lost, what else becomes endangered? What else is lost?

When I asked M

LINK:	https://www.kcet.org/shows/tending-the-wild/weaving-the-words-together...
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