In the pre-colonial period, there were over 1,000 different tribes in California with over 500 distinct languages. Today, all these languages are highly endangered and some might even be called extinct.
It’s a profound loss. Language is culture and culture is cosmology, and when we lose languages, we lose the worldviews reflected in ancient ways of speaking and a window into the indigenous understanding of reality. In many native tongues, the word for “people” applies…