Indigenous languages · recovered texts live

Mutsun — the Mutsun Language

The language of Popeloutchom — the Mutsun homeland in the Pajaro and San Benito watersheds of California — carried today by the Amah Mutsun, who are relearning it from its own documents.

Recovered texts are here to read. The people's own curriculum doorway is in preparation — in partnership with the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band. The goal is the whole collection in Mutsun: every book to read and to hear, here and in the school. Nothing is published until they have guided and reviewed it.

The language

Mutsun is a Southern Ohlone language of the Utian family — the language of the Indigenous people of the Mission San Juan Bautista and Mission Santa Cruz country, in what are now San Benito, Santa Cruz, Monterey, and Santa Clara counties, California. The Amah Mutsun Tribal Band are the documented descendants of those mission communities, and Popeloutchom is their name for the homeland.

The catalogues long wrote the language off: its last fluent first-language speaker, Ascención Solórzano de Cervantes, died in 1930. But she and the recorders before her left a mountain of the language on paper, and the Amah Mutsun do not count their language gone: from those very documents — the mission writings, and the great body of record Solórzano herself gave — the Band's language program is teaching Mutsun again, with regular lessons and a new generation of speakers rising. This programme's own peoples register holds Mutsun's formal status open; what stands here is the people's own word for their work: reawakening.

Their own teachers

The Amah Mutsun Tribal Band carries its own language revitalization program — lessons for its members, work on the Smithsonian-held documents, and the Amah Mutsun Relearning Garden at the University of California, Santa Cruz Arboretum, where the language and the land are relearned together. The Band's own foundation names language revitalization among the purposes it raises support for.

Amah Mutsun Tribal Band — the Humunya Foundation — the Band's own house; language revitalization stands among its stated purposes

The writing

The modern Mutsun alphabet is the Band's own, built with their linguist partners from the documents. The recovered witness below keeps the Spanish-based mission spelling of Felipe Arroyo de la Cuesta, who wrote the language at San Juan Bautista two centuries ago — and its glosses are his Spanish, exactly as printed. The two writings are not the same: read the witness in its own dress, and learn the language at the Band's house in the Band's spelling.

Recovered reading

One recovered book stands here: Arroyo de la Cuesta's Mutsun phrase book (printed 1862, in Shea's Library of American Linguistics) — its front matter and phrases 1–50, the Mutsun as the mission wrote it with Arroyo's own Spanish glosses, exactly as printed — the glosses are Spanish, not English, and no translation is supplied. It is the people's own earliest printed witness, recovered as a historical text — not a Sacred Name edition; the collection's own edition in this language waits for the partnership. Read the front matter and phrases 1–50 of the Mutsun phrase book (1862)

The phrase book now stands fifty phrases further: phrases 51–100 are recovered on their own page, whole and in their printed order (printed pp. 10–11), each with Arroyo's Spanish gloss exactly as printed — printed defects standing as printed, among them № 100's gloss parenthesis "(clale.)". It is the same witness as the first fifty — a historical text, not a Sacred Name edition. Read phrases 51–100 of the Mutsun phrase book (1862)

An open invitation

This door stands open by invitation. If you are a speaker, teacher, or language keeper of Mutsun, or you carry its authority, this programme asks to work with you — to be guided, corrected, and reviewed by the people whose language this is. In this collection the holy names are never invented: what the Creator is called in a language is for its own speakers to give, and the spelling of every text is theirs to settle. Write to the publisher at [email protected].

The first door is the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band.

To hear it

When Mutsun opens here, it will be heard as well as read — in its own voice, spoken and recorded by Mutsun speakers. Until then this door is silent in Mutsun on purpose: the first voice heard in it should be the people's own.

The other doors

One small advertisement stands at the bottom of this page — never inside the reading text. The words of the book stand more prominent than the advertisement.