22 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY august 8-14, 2024 www.montereycountynow.com Monterey, where she expected to die shortly. But death didn’t come as soon as she’d believed. Not long after she arrived in Monterey, Harrington, having heard there was still a speaker of the Mutsun language, showed up in Monterey to record everything Ascencion could remember, and have the energy to articulate. Harrington lived at the house for a few months, taking notes as Ascencion told stories lying on her deathbed. In a letter Harrington wrote to a colleague in August 1929 about meeting with Ascencion, he says, “I certainly place this above everything else in California as regards immediate urgency.” The Mutsun language had barely been spoken since 1850, and gaining her knowledge would be “filling a great blank in California ethnology.” When Harrington arrived, Man writes, Ascencion told him, “You are a vehicle of God that comes to see me in the eleventh hour to save my knowledge from being lost. I will teach you up to the last day.” In distilling Ascencion’s story, and what she told Harrington, Man writes that “aged women, it was believed, had the power to control the growth of plants” and that “nature provided such abundance of food that the Westerners always had an oversupply of wild fruits, grains and seeds.” She adds that the secret of the Mutsun’s health, Ascencion insisted, was bathing in cold water every morning. Bows, meanwhile, were expertly constructed, and arrows affixed with eagle feathers could cut through even bears, while baskets woven by the women with grasses were so tight they could hold water without leaking. Man writes that as Harrington was beside her in her final months in the fall and winter, others came to join him at her bedside: “The audience increased as word of the wise woman spread.” The last line of Man’s story reads, “It was January, 1930, when the last Westerner, Ascencion Solorsano, left the ruins of the garden of Popeloutchom.” The gift Ascencion gave to Harrington, and future generations, wasn’t just decoding a language—it was stories, a bridge back through time. Thankfully, Harrington took a lot of notes. Mondragon sits on a pile of riches that even he admits he doesn’t yet fully appreciate. In his collection of documents is a binder with hundreds of pages of Harrington’s notes, typewritten, that are filled with the folklore of the Mutsun, and the Costanoans—an umbrella term, along with Ohlone, to describe the many Indigenous tribes of the Central Coast. And while Harrington’s notes are available in the Library of Congress, including digitally, accessing them is painfully cumbersome. The notes are disorganized, and most of them are handwritten and often not legible. But the collection that Mondragon’s father assembled late in his life separates some of the wheat from the chaff, and it’s worth taking a brisk tour through a few of the more colorful stories Ascencion passed down, many of which lean into magic realism. There was a woman, Dona Tomasa Mendias, who was a devout Catholic who lived along the Watsonville lagoon. Yet she had a son who forsook Catholicism and became a Mason, and when he fell ill and did not mend, Mendias put out a call for help. Harrington’s notes channel Ascencion’s voice, not his, and he writes, “He was lying upstairs about to die, when…a buggy arrived with two men in it very well dressed, in black, and they drove up in front of the house. They stopped the buggy and into the house they went, they brought him downstairs, they raised him into the buggy and they left with him. The children and mother were horrified. They rushed upstairs to where he was lying, and there they found him dead. Surely those were demons that came to take him away.” The stories in the notes also contain much tradition—when the Mutsun tried to encourage rain, they would make a fire in a sweathouse and the men would sing and dance. Every time a song finished, the women would throw seeds they had gathered into the fire, which would then pop, and then the singing started anew. There’s also a lot of ephemera. One story of a child-eating Indian called One Leg—he reportedly only had one—is believed to be a devil of sorts, who after being hunted down is then cut into pieces and fed to ants, which apparently would prevent him from being brought back to life. There’s a snake that climbed up and lived in a redwood tree in the Santa Cruz Mountains that, the story goes, squeezed people to death and ate them. There’s a story of an Indian girl who loved to bathe and “gave no heed to her mother,” who then later told her, “A fish shalt thou become.” She then turned into a mermaid, the story goes. Some of the notes are brief asides: “The Indians of the [San Joaquin Valley] were very good medicine men but they could not bewitch the Indians of the coast. Their witchcraft did not avail over in this direction.” One of the most delightful inclusions in the stories is that Fremont Peak, which the Spanish and Mexicans called Gavilán Peak, was called by the Mutsun “Tooyohtak,” which roughly translates to “the place of the bumblebee.” The most compelling account of Ascencion’s life is arguably an unpublished, undated manuscript, written by an anonymous author. Mondragon deduced, through the process of elimination, that it was written by his aunt Martha Herrera, who was born in Gilroy in July 1912, and who surely would have spent a lot of time with Ascencion in the years At a storytelling event in Indian Canyon in late June, singers, dancers and attendees took part in ceremony and celebration. “You are a vehicle of God that comes to see me in the eleventh hour to save my knowledge from being lost.” Nik Blaskovich Nik Blaskovich Nik Blaskovich
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