The Indigenous Californian Origins of Klingon
Yeah, you read that right.
This is being sent out for the following time-sensitive reason: The Other Map is based on Ohlone land, and our local tribal band, the Amah Mutsun (whose language is the subject of this piece), is currently fighting to prevent the construction of a mine in the Juristac area, which is Mutsun holy land. More information on that situation is here:
https://www.protectjuristac.org/updates/eir-april-14/
I encourage anyone reading this to help out and donate what you can at this link:
https://donorbox.org/protectjuristac
Note before we begin:
We feel that discussing this history, in this context, is appropriate, as we want to support the Juristac cause. However, I have to note that, while we’re trying to be accurate in this essay, and respectful, over the years I’ve made an effort to contact modern Ohlone figures for information, and have categorically been turned down or ignored - given the tribal experience with white people (we go into it some at the end, but it’s been worse than average), that makes perfect sense and I am in no way bitter about it; I bring this up just because reliable information on the Ohlone is a little scarce (for example, a major book on the tribe - ‘The Ohlone Way’ – is notoriously misrepresentative) and this piece may have some inaccuracies. I believe we got the gist of it right, but just know that we tried. Without further ado:
The Indigenous Californian Origins of Klingon
Seeing Klingons, probably the most famous alien race from the Star Trek franchise, in a movie or TV show, you probably don’t think of California. These guys, with their grotesque prosthetic faces, are meant to be gruff and warlike – they hold grudges, are easily angered, and keep slaves, etc. Given that their features have always had Asian influences, I’m guessing they were originally based on the ‘barbarian’ archetype (epitomized by Genghis Khan and company), although their societal structure would eventually be a take on the culture of feudal Japan. What does a clearly fictional race, specifically built to be brash and brutal, have to do with the land of sun and sand?
Well, first off, the part of the Golden State connected to Klingons is very specific – it’s a slice of land that stretches back from the middle of the Monterey Bay coast into an area south of San Jose. This is the land of the Mutsun, a subtribe of the Ohlone, the Indigenous Americans that lived throughout the San Francisco Bay Area for thousands of years before the arrival of the Europeans. And the only similarity between the Mutsun (who lived in relative peace with their neighbors) and the Klingons (portrayed as just nasty, nasty people) would be some of the grammar of their languages. The grunting and guttural sounds Klingons make at each other, although far from what the Mutsun tongue sounds like, is partially based on the language of this Ohlone subtribe.
Besides the languages of J.R.R. Tolkien, the author of The Lord of the Rings (Tolkien was a linguist and spent a lot of time coming up with them), Klingon is about as real as fictional languages get. There are apps for learning how to speak it; some fans even held a wedding ceremony partially officiated in Klingon. There is a fairly large community based on speaking Klingon, and a number of books on the topic (and an opera written in it, which is… interesting).
However, Klingon didn’t come from thin air; from what I understand, the SOUNDS aren’t based on Mutsun, but how the sentences are structured was heavily influenced by Mutsun. Now, it’s not my place to be offended by that or not, so I’ll just say that there doesn’t seem to be animosity over it on the part of the Amah Mutsun. There was actually a lecture given in cooperation between the tribal band and linguist Marc Okrand in 2013, for what it’s worth, so it would appear that Okrand, who built the Klingon language, isn’t denying the influence, and that the Amah Mutsun don’t have bad blood over it. The title of the lecture was ‘From Mutsun to Klingon: How Helping Bring Back One Language Gave Rise to Another’, and that’s a solid summary of what happened.
Before we get into that, though, what is the Mutsun language, exactly? Well, it classifies as part of a group of languages known as Penutian, meaning that languages branching off of Penutian had a number of features in common. All Penutian languages are native to the West Coast of North America, concentrated from just above what is now northeastern metropolitan Los Angeles to modern Portland, Oregon. In addition, a Penutian language is native to a large chunk of British Columbia just south of the Alaskan border. We get this information from a 1913 study… but wait, what?
Or is it a Yok-Utian language, spoken in a much smaller area by significantly less people? Did its parent language family come from the interior of the country (the Great Basin) in 2500 BC and spread throughout Northern California? A couple of studies from 1997 and 2001 seem to think so, but scholars aren’t sure; I mean, the vagueness here makes sense as colonialism has wrecked the majority of communities that would have known such things, but I hope they figure it out. For our purposes, though, we’re content to leave it unanswered – however, Mutsun is definitely part of a language family with native speakers in other parts of the neighborhood.
This language family would be that of the Ohlone, the people that historically populated the Monterey Bay and what is now the San Francisco Bay Area (save some of the North Bay, see map above). The subtribes here all spoke languages that were, supposedly, somewhat mutually intelligible (like Italian is to French, or Portuguese is to Spanish), so the Mutsun language shared features with all Ohlone tongues. However, some of the other languages have had worse fates than Mutsun – The Other Map is headquartered in Awaswas land, but the Santa Cruz Mission killed the VAST majority of indigenous people here, so the Awaswas language has probably been lost to history (and yet, they’re trying to make Junipero Serra, who ran the Spanish mission system, an actual saint. Wow).
According to Okrand’s 1977 dissertation on the Mutsun language (which is 341 pages long), in 1770 it was recorded that there were 2,500 Mutsun speakers in the Pajaro River watershed (roughly the area on the subtribe map). By 1917, another account describes the entire Ohlone population as ‘a few scattered individuals’ who had been attached to the missions of San Carlos Borromeo (in the Monterey area), San Jose, and San Juan Batista (the last being the mission the Mutsun, as a subtribe, was abused in); that is, however, a European American recording, so it is what it is.
Mutsun was spoken widely in the San Juan Batista mission, as recorded by the Spanish, and may have mixed with other tribal languages spoken there as well. Giving credence to the Utian language family concept, a Spanish account from 1812 hypothesized that most natives within 150 miles of that mission could speak with each other (although there were some technical differences), so some cross-pollination of the language was likely. However, after the mission era, the numbers of fluent speakers gradually declined through deaths and the fading of memories.
However one woman, named Ascension Solorsano de Cervantes, remembered a lot. Born in 1855 in San Juan Batista, Cervantes grew up speaking Mutsun with her parents (she was a doctor, and would eventually run a hospital). For around half a year leading up to her death in 1930, a researcher for the Smithsonian named John Harrington would sit with her and take a LOT of notes on the language – the two of them basically saved it.
Enter Marc Okrand. Although most of Harrington’s notes were in the Smithsonian archives in DC at the time, 2,500 pages of them were on loan to UC Berkeley while Okrand was studying there for his doctorate. His dissertation, which I’ll link to, is based on putting Harrington’s notes together into something that would actually be useful to a linguist – as in, the notes Harrington took talking to Cervantes could be seen as raw data, and Okrand used the data to build a cohesive document (which is, again, well over 300 pages long).
Point being that Okrand was very, very familiar with the Mutsun language – he assembled a vocabulary of it, including how, exactly, the words fit together to form meaning: grammar. And, when Star Trek hit him up to invent the Klingon language for a Star Trek movie, he took that experience with him.
I’m not a linguist, and I definitely don’t have the chops to compare Mutsun to Klingon, but there is, at the very least, significant Mutsun influence on the fictional language. Okrand has said as much himself. Sounds pretty appropriative, but, as I said, the Amah Mutsun don’t seem to consider Okrand’s usage of their grammar as exploitative (his work preserving the Mutsun language decades previously was basically invaluable, so there’s that). Regardless, the connection is there.
To wrap things up, I may write another piece on the Ohlone at a later date, so I’m not going to go too deep into the history, or present, of the tribe, but you’d never guess the following: the Mutsun, and the Ohlone as a whole, have been treated horribly in a multitude of ways since European contact. For one thing, they’re still not a federally recognized tribe, and thus don’t have a reservation and can’t receive any of the related benefits. For example, the University of Calfornia rolled out free scholarships for indigenous American students in the fall of 2022 – but, because the Ohlone aren’t recognized, potential Ohlone students don’t qualify. Screwed up.
And, as mentioned up top, the Amah Mutsun tribal band is currently fighting to save sacred Mutsun land, Juristac, from being desecrated by a mine. Donate below if you have resources to spare:
https://donorbox.org/protectjuristac
Thanks and peace! More content coming in July.
Notes and Links:
Most of the information used in this piece comes from the internet. As I said, some of the sources I have on the Ohlone are unreliable, and others were, unfortunately, irrelevant. As far as physical books, I struck out.
Here’s Okrand’s dissertation:
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1p59z6kq
And here’s the ‘history’ page of the Klingon Language Institute, which talks about Okrand’s role in the languages creation:
https://www.kli.org/about-klingon/klingon-history/