California Indigenous communities reclaim languages — and connections to their past

BERKELEY, CA., 7/8/26 — Inside the California Language Archive on the UC Berkeley campus sit boxes, recordings, field notes, grammar documents.

They are the painstaking work of linguists and anthropologists who traveled to California’s Indigenous communities throughout the 20th century, listened, transcribed, and then brought the material here — to a library, far from the Indigenous communities they worked with to gather the material.