Eliyahu Kamisher
Sun, October 10, 2021
Photograph: Bill Gozansky/Alamy
Skip Lowry interacts with nature much like his Yurok ancestors did – in the Indigenous Yurok language. There’s the original name for a purple flower, low-slung Yurok homes and sweet huckleberries. “Our worldview is harbored within the language,” said Lowry. He has been working for years to master the language and now works as a California state parks interpreter, guiding visitors through the Indigenous history of a state park on the foggy northern California coast.
Yurok members have always referred to the state park where Lowry works – a craggy point north of Eureka – as Sue-meg, but for around 150 years the region was known as Patrick’s Point and the park, established in 1929, kept the name. Patrick refers to Patrick Beegan, an Irish settler who built a cabin on the peninsula in 1851 and fled the area after his arrest on charges of killing a Yurok boy. He later resurfaced in the historical record for instigating an attempted massacre of Indigenous people in the region.
Peering through the foliage & coastal pine trees at Sue-meg state park.
Photograph: Randy Andy/Shutterstock
“It hurt my feelings to have to say Sue-meg village within Patrick’s Point state park,” said Lowry, referring to a collection of recreated Yurok structures in the park. “It’s painful for someone who knows how much more this place is than just an old homestead.”
As of last week, Lowry won’t have to. A commission of the California state parks unanimously voted to change the name, marking one of the most significant Indigenous name restorations in the American west and earning comparisons to the 2015 restoration of Alaska’s Denali mountain – the highest peak in North America. Not only is the name restoration the first in a statewide effort to address discriminatory names, it is also the product of decades of arduous work by Yurok Tribe members in reclaiming and rejuvenating their language – a tongue brought to the edge of destruction by genocide and forced boarding schools.
In the name Sue-meg lies a story about breathing new life into an Indigenous language and the sometimes contentious process of relying on western phonetics to capture the nuance and worldview of the Yurok people.
“It’s kind of bittersweet we’re using the western European alphabet to save our language,” said Lowry, who is part of the grassroots True North Organizing Network that pushed for the name change. “It doesn’t really always taste good.”
Sue-meg – which will be pasted on California’s 101 Highway and viewed by hundreds of thousands of visitors to the park each year – is often pronounced as it appears to a non-Native person, but its traditional pronunciation is closer to “Sue-mae”. The word encapsulates one of the most difficult sounds for Yurok learners to master, said Andrew Garrett, a linguistics professor at the University of California, Berkeley. There is no hard G in the Yurok language, and the consonant indicates an intermediate sound between a Y and G. “It corresponds to nothing that happens to be in English.”
According to Lowry, these subtle variations have deep meaning for expressing the Yurok worldview through language. “The last EG means ‘habitually’,” said Lowry. “The elders knew that the Sue-meg village was a habitually used fishing camp. It wasn’t always a really big village, but the two largest villages would all show up there during the right time of year to harvest and gather and trade at that village.”
Yurok members have always referred to the craggy point north of Eureka as Sue-meg, but for around 150 years the region was known as Patrick’s Point.
“It hurt my feelings to have to say Sue-meg village within Patrick’s Point state park,” said Lowry, referring to a collection of recreated Yurok structures in the park. “It’s painful for someone who knows how much more this place is than just an old homestead.”
As of last week, Lowry won’t have to. A commission of the California state parks unanimously voted to change the name, marking one of the most significant Indigenous name restorations in the American west and earning comparisons to the 2015 restoration of Alaska’s Denali mountain – the highest peak in North America. Not only is the name restoration the first in a statewide effort to address discriminatory names, it is also the product of decades of arduous work by Yurok Tribe members in reclaiming and rejuvenating their language – a tongue brought to the edge of destruction by genocide and forced boarding schools.
In the name Sue-meg lies a story about breathing new life into an Indigenous language and the sometimes contentious process of relying on western phonetics to capture the nuance and worldview of the Yurok people.
“It’s kind of bittersweet we’re using the western European alphabet to save our language,” said Lowry, who is part of the grassroots True North Organizing Network that pushed for the name change. “It doesn’t really always taste good.”
Sue-meg – which will be pasted on California’s 101 Highway and viewed by hundreds of thousands of visitors to the park each year – is often pronounced as it appears to a non-Native person, but its traditional pronunciation is closer to “Sue-mae”. The word encapsulates one of the most difficult sounds for Yurok learners to master, said Andrew Garrett, a linguistics professor at the University of California, Berkeley. There is no hard G in the Yurok language, and the consonant indicates an intermediate sound between a Y and G. “It corresponds to nothing that happens to be in English.”
According to Lowry, these subtle variations have deep meaning for expressing the Yurok worldview through language. “The last EG means ‘habitually’,” said Lowry. “The elders knew that the Sue-meg village was a habitually used fishing camp. It wasn’t always a really big village, but the two largest villages would all show up there during the right time of year to harvest and gather and trade at that village.”
Yurok members have always referred to the craggy point north of Eureka as Sue-meg, but for around 150 years the region was known as Patrick’s Point.
Photograph: Melissa Kopka/Alamy
History of violence
Patrick Beegan came to present-day Humboldt county as California’s Gold Rush spread to the redwood forests in the far reaches of northern California. He arrived only a year after white settlers first made contact with Indigenous peoples who had lived in the area for millennia, including the Yurok, Karuk, Wiyot and Hoopa, according to historian Jerry Rohde of Humboldt University. “Whites arrived here in April of 1850. By May the whites had begun killing the local Indians, and that was the start of our local genocide,” said Rhodes.
The large-scale attacks on tribes by the US military and vigilante groups continued for 15 years until the remaining First Nation people were forced onto reservations. The systematic attempts to wipe out Indigenous culture in the area, and throughout the country, continued as forced boarding schools sought to strip Yurok children of their culture and language. By the early 1900s, the Yurok language hung on by a thread.
Related: ‘No fish means no food’: how Yurok women are fighting for their tribe’s nutritional health
“[I] met elders who went to boarding school who were beat for speaking their language,” Rosie Clayburn, the Yurok tribal heritage preservation officer, said during a California parks commission meeting. “Those folks, when they would start to speak Yurok again it was hard for them. They would break down and cry.
“So even though this is a small world, it’s Sue-meg, it carries so much to us, it carries so much more meaning to us,” she added.
Starting around the 1970s the Yurok Tribe began the process of reviving their language through systematization, an effort that gained traction in the 1990s. Garrett, the UC Berkeley professor, has developed a Yurok language dictionary with the tribe since 2001. But in the background of his relationship with tribal language experts was a history of linguists belittling the Indigenous knowledge that they also sought to document. “Traditionally, you know, meaning 30 or 50 years [ago] the linguist mindset was ‘I’m the professional expert on the language and because I’m the expert I get to write down how the word is written and what it means,” said Garrett.
Yurok tribal headquarters in Klamath, California.
History of violence
Patrick Beegan came to present-day Humboldt county as California’s Gold Rush spread to the redwood forests in the far reaches of northern California. He arrived only a year after white settlers first made contact with Indigenous peoples who had lived in the area for millennia, including the Yurok, Karuk, Wiyot and Hoopa, according to historian Jerry Rohde of Humboldt University. “Whites arrived here in April of 1850. By May the whites had begun killing the local Indians, and that was the start of our local genocide,” said Rhodes.
The large-scale attacks on tribes by the US military and vigilante groups continued for 15 years until the remaining First Nation people were forced onto reservations. The systematic attempts to wipe out Indigenous culture in the area, and throughout the country, continued as forced boarding schools sought to strip Yurok children of their culture and language. By the early 1900s, the Yurok language hung on by a thread.
Related: ‘No fish means no food’: how Yurok women are fighting for their tribe’s nutritional health
“[I] met elders who went to boarding school who were beat for speaking their language,” Rosie Clayburn, the Yurok tribal heritage preservation officer, said during a California parks commission meeting. “Those folks, when they would start to speak Yurok again it was hard for them. They would break down and cry.
“So even though this is a small world, it’s Sue-meg, it carries so much to us, it carries so much more meaning to us,” she added.
Starting around the 1970s the Yurok Tribe began the process of reviving their language through systematization, an effort that gained traction in the 1990s. Garrett, the UC Berkeley professor, has developed a Yurok language dictionary with the tribe since 2001. But in the background of his relationship with tribal language experts was a history of linguists belittling the Indigenous knowledge that they also sought to document. “Traditionally, you know, meaning 30 or 50 years [ago] the linguist mindset was ‘I’m the professional expert on the language and because I’m the expert I get to write down how the word is written and what it means,” said Garrett.
Yurok tribal headquarters in Klamath, California.
Photograph: Andre Jenny/Alamy
Linguists have had a long history of attempting to control Indigenous languages they documented, one that parallels colonization of the US and still echoes today. Under US law, a self-taught linguist owned the language of the Penobscot Nation in Maine – the tribe is still seeking to wrest cultural authority over their language from his legacy. In 1998 the language dictionary for the Hopi people in Arizona – considered the gold standard in Indigenous language preservation – was beset by controversy over whether the University of Arizona or the Hopi Tribe owned the dictionary’s copyright.
When Garrett first started working with the tribe in 2001, he felt a lot of “resistance” to how Yurok experts wanted to structure their language, which deviated from the academic standards prescribing single-letter symbols for vowel sounds in phrases like “sue” in Sue-meg. Yurok experts were attached to the system they had begun to develop and wanted a dictionary that catered to language learners, not academics, said Garrett. “I’m sure I would have been relieved if the Yurok people had succumbed and used the Spanish or Italian type of vowel writing, but they didn’t,” added Garrett. “Eventually, I became attached to what they have and decided it was kind of lovely.”
Yurok language revival has been a resounding success and is held up as a national model by many. The language is taught in public high schools, and students can study the language for California college requirements. All of the elder tribe members who spoke Yurok as a first language have now passed away, but people like Lowry are living in tandem with their vibrant language. His 12-year-old son is named K’nek’nek’. “It means heartbeat or pulse of energy, which is exactly the way he is,” said Lowry.
The collection of redwood structures called Sue-meg village that now form the heart of the 640-acre Sue-meg state park were constructed in 1990 by a team of Yurok builders, including Axel Lindgren III. Lindgren helped carve the 20-ft redwood boards with an antler tool and turned Hazel branches into rope to strap the structure together. Later, as a maintenance supervisor for the park, he painstakingly kept the buildings in good condition despite pressure from his boss to spend his time on other projects. “I felt I was kind of in-between two worlds,” said Lindgren. “It was time for this change to be made.”
Linguists have had a long history of attempting to control Indigenous languages they documented, one that parallels colonization of the US and still echoes today. Under US law, a self-taught linguist owned the language of the Penobscot Nation in Maine – the tribe is still seeking to wrest cultural authority over their language from his legacy. In 1998 the language dictionary for the Hopi people in Arizona – considered the gold standard in Indigenous language preservation – was beset by controversy over whether the University of Arizona or the Hopi Tribe owned the dictionary’s copyright.
When Garrett first started working with the tribe in 2001, he felt a lot of “resistance” to how Yurok experts wanted to structure their language, which deviated from the academic standards prescribing single-letter symbols for vowel sounds in phrases like “sue” in Sue-meg. Yurok experts were attached to the system they had begun to develop and wanted a dictionary that catered to language learners, not academics, said Garrett. “I’m sure I would have been relieved if the Yurok people had succumbed and used the Spanish or Italian type of vowel writing, but they didn’t,” added Garrett. “Eventually, I became attached to what they have and decided it was kind of lovely.”
Yurok language revival has been a resounding success and is held up as a national model by many. The language is taught in public high schools, and students can study the language for California college requirements. All of the elder tribe members who spoke Yurok as a first language have now passed away, but people like Lowry are living in tandem with their vibrant language. His 12-year-old son is named K’nek’nek’. “It means heartbeat or pulse of energy, which is exactly the way he is,” said Lowry.
The collection of redwood structures called Sue-meg village that now form the heart of the 640-acre Sue-meg state park were constructed in 1990 by a team of Yurok builders, including Axel Lindgren III. Lindgren helped carve the 20-ft redwood boards with an antler tool and turned Hazel branches into rope to strap the structure together. Later, as a maintenance supervisor for the park, he painstakingly kept the buildings in good condition despite pressure from his boss to spend his time on other projects. “I felt I was kind of in-between two worlds,” said Lindgren. “It was time for this change to be made.”
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