The Mutsun: The Ohlone Nation the Salinas Valley Forgot

You are driving through a valley that has a name you almost certainly know, Salinas, and a territory you almost certainly don't, Mutsun.

The Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, which today has more than six hundred enrolled members, are the descendants of the Mutsun-speaking people who held this drainage for thousands of years before the mission system arrived. Their territory encompassed the Pajaro River drainage and the lands east of Monterey Bay, precisely the landscape you have been moving through since leaving the coast. The boundary between Rumsen territory to the west and Mutsun territory to the east ran somewhere through this valley, a boundary that was meaningful to the people who lived on both sides of it for generations beyond counting.

At contact, approximately two thousand seven hundred people spoke the Mutsun language. The mission system confined them primarily to Mission San Juan Bautista, east of the Santa Cruz Mountains. In a single generation, the transmission of Mutsun as a living mother tongue was severed. There are no first-language Mutsun speakers alive today.

The Amah Mutsun Tribal Band is conducting active language revitalization, reclaiming the language from archived materials and rebuilding it as a spoken practice across a community scattered throughout California and the West. One tribal member has been quoted as saying that Mutsun is not a tribe. It is a territory.

Federal recognition status for the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band has not been formally established as of this research; the absence of that designation does not make the territory less real or the history less documented.

Language is territory, in a way that goes beyond metaphor. The Mutsun language encodes the drainage patterns of the Pajaro River, the seasonal movements of animals, the names of plants and their uses, the relationships between places. When the mission system prohibited its transmission, it was not only words that were lost. It was a way of inhabiting a landscape that had been developed over thousands of years. The reclamation project the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band is conducting now is a land project as much as a language project.

The valley you are looking at has a name in Mutsun. It has been this valley for far longer than anyone has called it Salinas.