Great documentary about an elderly Wukchumne Yokuts woman who is the last fluent speaker of the Wukchumne language. Wukchumne is one of the Yokuts languages. There over 60 Yokuts languages/dialects and tribelets, but most of the languages are gone now and so are most of the tribes. A few remain. Looks like maybe she was born in the 1930’s. She heard her grandparents speaking Wukchumne as she was growing up, possibly until ~1950. Her grandparents were nearly Wukchumne monolinguals as their English was not very good and they most spoke Wukchumne. The grandparents were probably born ~1880.
I worked on a similar language and very closely related language called Chukchansi which is spoken a bit to the north. I worked for a while as a linguist/cultural anthropologist for the tribe. I designed and alphabet for them, and I must say, my alphabet is much superior to the English alphabet. Any alphabet created nowadays will be. Making an alphabet is no easy task. I believe the Karuk have had 3-4 different alphabets made for them down through the years, but none of them were well-liked so they may not have an agreed-upon one now.
I also worked on a phrasebook and dictionary of the language. The dictionary was not so easy either. I also went through all of the anthropological literature about the tribe was going to write a culture book but that got all wrapped up in internal Indian politics and hangups regarding the anthropologists.
In addition, I worked out a prehistory of the tribe including a dating of the tribelet (they went back 800 years). I created a map of their territory with boundaries which was not so easy either. Unfortunately that ran into Indian politics too as they wanted to use the tribal territory map and situate a casino and the facts were not lining up with the desires. In addition, I created a local map on the wall with pins for all of the villages along with their names. Locating those villages was not so easy either.
Anyway it was a lot of fun. I worked there on a US government grant for a couple of years and I’ve never had so much fun in my life. Every time I went into work, it was like going on vacation. I didn’t want to leave at night and I wanted to work all weekend. It wasn’t even work. It was just fun.
The landscape in the video looks like the landscape of the area where I live.
