Partnering with scholars at the University of California, Riverside, cultural leaders of the Pechanga Band of Luiseno Mission Indians are launching an ambitious effort to teach young tribal members their ancestral language and to create a model for revitalizing other endangered languages.

Beginning as soon as this summer, Luiseno youth and adults at Pechanga will have the opportunity to learn about their culture in Luiseno, one of approximately 100 tribal languages native to California. Fully half of those languages are now nearly extinct.

"With the death of ancestral languages, the process of comprehending one's own history and describing the landscape is changed," says Gary DuBois, director of Pechanga Cultural Resources. "The intimate descriptions of nature and human relations, which were once locked in the native language, no longer exist and must be translated through the dominant language. Therefore, it becomes impossible to transmit fundamental cultural ways of knowing across the generations."

"Guided by our elders, Pechanga decided to try to do something about this situation," said DuBois. "Learning Luiseno is an important part of being Luiseno. We challenged UCR to create a comprehensive model of revitalization and they rose to the challenge."

The lead linguist for the project is Eric Elliott, who is uniquely qualified for the task. A native of Southern California, Elliott has long been concerned about the plight of indigenous languages. He spent five years documenting the endangered Luiseno language by working closely with Villiana Hyde, native speaker of the Rincon dialect of Luiseno. His doctoral dissertation at UC San Diego was a 1,700 page bilingual English-Luiseno/Luiseno-English dictionary, the result of thirteen years of research on the Luiseno language. For the past eleven years he has documented the Mountain Cahuilla dialect of Cahuilla, and the Serrano language spoken by one remaining native speaker residing at the Morongo Reservation of Riverside County.

"We hope to revitalize the Luiseno language," said Elliott. "We hope that what blossoms at Pechanga can become a model for what can be done elsewhere."