This student is reclaiming his Pomo culture, one recording at a time

UC Berkeley graduate student Tyler Lee-Wynant grew up hearing stories about his great-great aunt, Edna Campbell Guerrero. Born in 1907 in Mendocino County, she was a native speaker of Northern Pomo, one of seven languages of the Pomo people who are Indigenous to Northern California.

During his childhood, Lee-Wynant’s dad would visit her with his cousins. Their parents hoped they’d pick up some of the language. 

“My aunt would call my dad by a Pomo name, Kal-til,” says Lee-Wynant, who’s earning his Ph.D. in linguistics at UC Berkeley. “He describes her as a no-nonsense person. She was an amazing individual. She cared so deeply about passing on what she knew.”

Throughout her life, Guerrero worked with several linguists, many of whom were at Berkeley, who began documenting endangered Native languages and cultures in the 20th century during a widespread shift to using English. This language loss was a devastating consequence of the forcible and violent displacement and cultural suppression of Native peoples, which began with European settlement and continued over generations.

During a session with a linguist, Guerrero would sit patiently for hours repeating vocabulary words, describing cultural practices and telling stories. This wasn’t a common practice for many Native people at the time, when there were a lot of negative attitudes toward being Indigenous. 

“There was a very strong pressure to assimilate,” says Lee-Wynant. 

Beginning in the 19th century, the U.S. government operated and funded boarding schools for Native children as part of a policy of forced assimilation. Children were separated from their families, communities and cultural practices, often forbidden from speaking their Indigenous languages. Between 1819 and 1969, more than 400 of these schools were active across the country.

As a result, many Indigenous languages in the United States are now endangered, including languages with only a small number of elder speakers. Whether these languages continue to be spoken has depended on the work of elders, tribal language programs and archival researchers.

Jonathon Cirelli is the language program manager of the Habematolel Pomo Tribe of Upper Lake. He says that culture and language are tightly interwoven, especially for Indigenous communities.

“As soon as you stop speaking a language, your connection, your ability to communicate with your loved ones and the people from your community, is diminished,” Cirelli explains. “People who went to the boarding schools became scared or worried about speaking their language, even decades after they left. Just that trauma would create barriers in their head to speak it.”

Lee-Wynant says that Pomo people from Guerrero’s community would warn her against working with linguists.  

“They felt like it wasn’t worth speaking the language, like, ‘We should just sort of assimilate. What is there left for us?'” he says. “But she never had that attitude.”

In 2024, Lee-Wynant began working as a graduate student researcher at the campus’s California Language Archive. Housed in Dwinelle Hall, it includes hundreds of boxes of audio recordings, field notes, photographs, videos and other archival materials documenting nearly 400 Indigenous languages, primarily from California and other U.S. states, but also from across North and South America and other parts of the world. With more than 60,000 files available online, it stands as one of the most publicly accessible and comprehensive Indigenous language archives in North America. 

In his role, Lee-Wynant is doing work to catalog and analyze the contents of a collection new to the archive. And within it, he would find hours of recordings of his aunt speaking Northern Pomo — tapes his family had never heard until now. 

23 boxes, a suitcase and a voice from the past

Created by linguist Sally McLendon from 1959 through the 1990s, the new collection includes boxes and boxes of recordings, notebooks and other linguistic materials featuring detailed documentation of the Eastern, Central and Northern Pomo languages through conversations with elders. She started this work as a graduate student at Berkeley and continued it as a professor at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center in New York. 

The collection was added to the archive last year through the efforts of the archive’s manager, linguist and archivist Zachary O’Hagan, who earned his Ph.D. in linguistics from Berkeley in 2020 and, like Lee-Wynant, worked in the archive as a graduate student researcher. 

Joining the archive as its first full-time manager in 2021, O’Hagan focuses on providing outreach and access, contacting researchers who might have valuable materials to add and connecting with Indigenous communities and scholars to make sure they know about it and can find the language materials they need. 

Andrew Garrett, a Berkeley professor of linguistics and the archive’s faculty director since 2007, says having O’Hagan on staff has been transformative. 

“It’s easy for people to think of archives as collections of objects,” he says. “But I think archives are really about relationships — relationships between the material that is curated in an archive and the various communities that have a stake in that material. And what Zach really has been able to do is to foreground that aspect of our archive, creating relationships that are going to last for years or decades.”

Lee-Wynant first heard recordings of his aunt speaking Northern Pomo as an undergraduate student at UC Davis on the Northern Pomo Language Tools website and then in other collections in the California Language Archive. But hearing her speak in this newly acquired collection, where she’s describing traditions and details about their family that he’d never heard before, feels especially profound. 

“It’s such a trove of information about my family’s history,” he says. “I always get the chills whenever I listen to it because you never know what story is going to come up.”

In one recording, Guerrero describes a traditional wedding. In another, she talks about how her younger sister was sent to the federal Sherman Institute in Riverside, and after she returned didn’t want much to do with being Northern Pomo. Guerrero, it seems, wasn’t sent to a boarding school. Lee-Wynant isn’t sure why, but he thinks the answer could be in the recordings he hasn’t yet listened to. 

“I wonder if that maybe was why they had a different sort of relationship with their Indigeneity,” he says. “There’s so much to just be discovered.” 

Lee-Wynant has told his dad and other family members about what he’s learned. He says that in piecing his aunt’s story together, he’s also piecing together parts of his own identity, strengthening his connection to his people. 

For Lee-Wynant, reclaiming his cultural heritage is deeply personal — and it is a gift he’s actively working to share with the next generation of Pomo speakers.

Teaching the next generation

Within the Northern Pomo language, there were several distinct regional varieties spoken. Speakers of each variety could understand each other, but each group had its own unique pronunciations, specialized vocabulary, idioms and distinct cultural identity tied directly to their ancestral lands. Guerrero spoke three of them. 

When linguists interviewed Guerrero and other Northern Pomo speakers, they would only occasionally make notes about which words pertained to which variety. This means that linguists today working in language revitalization, like Lee-Wynant, don’t really have a sense of what the different varieties of the language looked or sounded like. 

“One of things that comes up in language revitalization is what the language is,” says Lee-Wynant. “What Northern Pomo is now is really the mixture of these different varieties in the documentation.”

That mixture is what students are now learning in Mendocino County at Ukiah High School, which launched a new Northern Pomo language class in fall 2021. The curriculum was developed by Cathy O’Connor, one of the linguists who worked with Guerrero from 1979 to 1995. A community language teacher, Buffy Schmidt, teaches the class, learning as she goes.

Lee-Wynant shares new words and phrases from the archive’s materials with the educators when he comes across them.  

“It’s kind of like educated guesswork,” he says. “We find some words that we can use to express the meaning, but can we always be sure that this is what speakers would actually say? No. But so much a part of language revitalization is being OK with language change. Because languages do change.”

I think my aunt always had some hope that in the future, like now, descendants, people of the community, would value it and keep it going. And she was right.

It’s impossible to speak exactly how Native speakers used to, he says, but together, Indigenous communities can build new language varieties that unite them. Yet it’s not something that’ll happen overnight, says Cirelli, who’s been working with the Habematolel Pomo Tribe to create a new generation of Eastern Pomo speakers. 

“It’s a multi-generational, decadeslong thing,” he says. “I always say to our tribal members, to give them perspective: It took generations for us to lose our language. It might take a couple generations for us to regain it in the way we want to.”

For Lee-Wynant, his work has just begun. He says going through all of his aunt’s materials is a lifetime project for him. And Berkeley, at this moment, feels like the perfect place to keep it going. 

“There’s just so much momentum to get the languages spoken again, to work with communities,” says Lee-Wynant. “I think Berkeley’s one of the best places to be for that work to be supported. 

“I think my aunt always had some hope that in the future, like now, descendants, people of the community, would value it and keep it going. And she was right. I just hope I can live up to her determination to keep her culture alive, to keep the language alive. There’s just so much waiting to be learned.”