ABSTRACT
This chapter provides missing context and details needed to better understand the Kumeyaay creation story. Kumeyaay people live in the border region of Southern California, extending well into Baja California Norte. Kumeyaay is part of the Yuman language family, which in turn belongs to the Hokan language stock, one of the oldest in California, dating to approximately 10,000 years ago. In addition to a great degree of dialect variation, Kumeyaay people, being separated as they are by an international border, must cope with the reality of two dominant linguacultures—English and Spanish. Of the five Kumeyaay communities in Mexico, only two are large enough to have their own school, and neither of these offers bilingual education. In the Californias, narrative localism has long been the norm and each of the Kumeyaay communities retains autonomy and views its linguistic variety as a distinct language, each storyteller retains rights to their story, which are typically slightly varied.
