Stories
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Timiktak Quarry
Geologists have determined that the limestone spires and rocks at this location are 100 to 120 million years old, originating near the equator and as a result of the movement of the tectonic plates, have journeyed north to their present location at the north end of Rockaway Beach, often referred to as “The Quarry.” During the Spanish era in the 1770s, the local Indigenous communities were enslaved and forced to extract limestone to be used in the construction of Mission Dolores and The Presidio in San Francisco, as well as for the adobe outpost located in the San Pedro Valley…
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Shalliy Rammaytush!
Shalliy Rammaytush! When I founded the Muchia Te’ Indigenous Land Trust (Muchiateilt.org) in 2021, I knew that learning my ancestral language would play an important role in our work, helping to connect living descendants with the ancestors. There had been no known speakers of Rammaytush in more than one hundred years and documentation was sparse. An early mentor in this work for me was L Frank Manriquez (Tongva/Ajachmem), a two-spirit Indigenous artist, writer, canoe builder and tribal activist. She is co-founder of Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival, as well as the Breath of Life program, which brings California Natives…
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Breath of Life Restoration Workshop for California Indians, 2022
Hersha puuhi! Greetings! There haven’t been any known native speakers of the Rammaytush language for over one hundred years! Alfred Kroeber, cultural anthropologist and professor at University of California, Berkeley (b.1876-d.1960), declared the Rammaytush people extinct in 1915. For reasons related to survival, indigenous California people went underground with their identity and, in great likelihood, out of fear, would not have volunteered to help anthropologists with linguistic surveys. Hence, the academic world perceived the Rammaytush-speaking people as extinct. Not surprisingly, the list of recorded Rammaytush words is limited. Together with several linguists at the Breath of Life program at UC…