Awaswas: The Language the Mission System Almost Finished

On August twenty-eighth, seventeen ninety-one, a Franciscan priest named Fermin de Lasuen arrived at a place the Awaswas people had called Aulintak for longer than anyone had been recording names. He erected a tent for worship. That tent was the founding moment of Mission Santa Cruz.

The Awaswas were the people of this coast, from Ano Nuevo in the north down to the Pajaro River in the south. Their language was one of several related Ohlone languages, distinct and complex, shaped over thousands of years of living by the sea and in the redwood canyons. The mission system's project was to replace it with Spanish, to replace every cultural practice with Catholic observance, and to put the labor of the newly baptized to work in the mission's fields, workshops, and building projects.

The first baptism at Mission Santa Cruz came in October of seventeen ninety-one, an eight-year-old girl. California Missions Foundation scholarship documents what followed across the system: neophytes, as the baptized were called, were subject to detention inside mission walls, separation from family members who resisted conversion, and punishment for flight. One historian summarized the mission's effect on the Awaswas as obliteration of their way of life. That word is not rhetorical. It describes what the records show.

The missions were secularized in eighteen thirty-four, by which time the population of Awaswas speakers had collapsed. The language was barely recorded before the conditions for its transmission were destroyed. The few word lists that survive are fragments. A language takes ten thousand years to grow into a people's full expression of the world; it can be ended in two generations.

Descendants of mission-era Awaswas and Mutsun families are alive and organized today. The Amah Mutsun Tribal Band is engaged in language revitalization and land stewardship work. The erasure was not complete, even when it was intended to be.