SSBMI Language Department

Language Day Camp 2023

Fishing activity with Tribal Police

At Language Day Camp 2023, SSBMI Tribal Police will host a fishing activity where we will get to fish in the river while learning the Nisenan and Miwok names for some of the fish that we might catch as well as other language that we can use to talk about going fishing.

Nisenan and Miwok each have a word to refer to all "fish" in a generic sense, yet they also have names that you can use to talk about individual fish species. You can listen to audio recordings of the Nisenan and Miwok names for some of the local fish species and other aquatic life below:

If you want to say that you want to go fishing, or if you want to encourage someone to go fishing with you, then you can do so in Nisenan using one of the following phrases. Note that, in Nisenan, you use different suffixes depending on whether you are trying to encourage 1 person to do something with you ("-pɨ́") verus encouraging 2 or more people to do something with you ("-pé"):

Esak’ahá daak’ábe mi c’aykɨ́? (Do you want to know more?)

As the Language Department, we often have to search through archival materials (e.g. lists of words that linguists and anthropologists asked past speakers to translate into Nisenan or Miwok) in order to find Nisenan and/or Miwok names for different animal species (as well as interpret those materials in order to determine how best to say/write what the author originally heard, which is not always an easy task!). Sometimes, we encounter "gaps" in these materials: We may have reason to believe that past speakers had a name for a particular animal, but if the authors of these materials failed to ask speakers for that name then we may have no records of what it would have been, and so cannot yet teach it.

This is the case for a Miwok name for 'sturgeon', which we have been unable to locate in Miwok archival materials thus far. Hence, we did not include a Miwok name for 'sturgeon' in the Language Day Camp 2023 booklet. Nonetheless, we may find a Miwok name for 'sturgeon' (as well as other "missing" names) as we continue to proccess further archival materials and build our capacity to teach both languages.

Nonetheless, archival materials are not our only source of Nisenan and Miwok language information. If you know a Miwok name for 'sturgeon', or if you would like to share any other Nisenan or Miwok language with us, then we would appreciate if you reached out to us to share!