Chumash dictionary rescues a lost language

When the last person who spoke fluent Samala died 43 years ago, it seemed the language of the Chumash people was doomed. Now, a new dictionary with 4,000 entries gives the ancient language new life, Steve Chawkins reports:

"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.'

Details about the unlikely author of the new text, and how it almost didn't see the light of day in Steve's full story.

--Veronique de Turenne

Photo: Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times

Comments

[janet]

Good for them. I've visited the Chumash Center in Thousand Oaks a couple times, and once had a private tour with an elderly lady acquaintance and one of the native Chumash who run the place. His genuine feeling for the trees there and the oldest one as "Mother Oak" was so moving.

But he was also passionate about his tribe's anger that the Mexicans claim to be the "native Americans" in order to claim historical precedence over the "anglos," and how they now discredit Christopher Columbus as akin to the Conquistadors, European racists who took the Mexicans' land.

But the Chumash guide pointed out that it's the Chumash and other Indian tribes around the country who are the only real native Americas, that the Mexicans are just as much interlopers as the later Europeans. By claiming rights to "Aztlan" or other excuses to "retake" the west, they are actually wiping out the history of the Chumash whose lands THEY took. And whom they enslaved, like other Indian tribes in the west, to build their Catholic missions for the rich, and in the process infected many with deadly disease.

If the Chumash gaming money can fund project like this linguistic one, helping them reclaim their place in history, then there is some silver lining to the evils of gambling and the unfairness Indian casinos pose to non-Indian businesses.