I wanted to follow up with a few thoughts from our discussion today.

According to the Johnson article that Shante and I read, the boundaries that would have included the Napa tribe in the Patwin language area were provided in the mid to late 1800’s by local Native Americans, one of whom identified as Napa and was reported to have spoken two Patwin dialects. The association of Napa and Patwin was questioned in the 1960’s and even in the early 1900’s it was noted that the informants who provided this information did it well after the Spanish had established some of the south bay missions. It is possible that people who identified as Napa may have spoken a Patwin dialect because Patwin speakers moved into the area, or it is possible that boundaries changed as communities were displaced. I think I kept getting caught up in the idea that there is one truth, that the Napa either absolutely did or absolutely didn’t speak Coast Miwok, but as Shante stated, the effect of dismissing a person’s identity in order to reassign a “better” or more fitting one based on (Western) interpretations of data is dehumanizing. Additionally, it’s important to remember that some of the vocabulary that Occaye used that was also used by Coast Miwok were actually from Spanish words (puis/puisero).

The quote that Caroline mentioned today, “turtles all the way down,” was made famous by Clifford Geertz. He wrote about a story that had been told to him about someone whose cultural origin myth also included the world riding on the back of a turtle. The question was: what was underneath the turtle that the world rested on? He was told that underneath the turtle was another turtle. Under that turtle? “It’s turtles all the way down.” I think that Geertz used that as a metaphor for anthropologists to keep digging deeper for meaning–what’s the story of the second turtle, the third turtle, etc. I thought at first that this article seemed so simple and short, but once I started trying to make sense of it there were so many levels to consider. I think it’s tempting to rely on measurable data sets, and it is important to have a methodology with which to organize the world–anthropologists love taxonomies–but I have to remind myself that I’ll never get to the last turtle and that the digging itself is a meaningful part of trying to decolonize the lens through which we view indigenous people.