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One June afternoon in the early 70s I walked through the crackly gold grasses to a neat but unpainted cabin at the back end of a ranch near the drainage of the South Yuba in northern California. It had no glass in the windows, no door. It was shaded by a huge Black Oak. The house looked abandoned and my friend, a student of native Californian literature and languages, walked right in. Off to the side, at a bare wooden table, with a mug of coffee, sat a solid old gray-haired Indian man. He acknowledged us, greeted my friend, and gravely offered us instant coffee and canned milk. He was fine, he said, but he would never go back to a VA hospital again. From now on if he got sick he would stay where he was. He liked being home. We spoke for some time of people and places along the western slope of the northern Sierra Nevada, the territories of Concow and Nisenan people. Finally my friend broke his good news: “Louie, I have found another person who speaks Nisenan.” There were perhaps no more than three people alive speaking Nisenan at that time, and Louie was one of them. “Who?” Louie asked. He told her name. “She lives back of Oroville. I can bring her here, and you two can speak.” “I know her from way back,” Louie said. “She wouldn't want to come over here. I don't think I should see her. Besides, her family and mine never did get along.”
That took my breath away. Here was a man who would not let the mere threat of cultural extinction stand in the way of his (and her) values. To well-meaning sympathetic white people this response is almost incomprehensible. In the world of his people, never