ANTHRO UPDATE

Lone Woman’s Story Retold by Native Voices

The story of the Lone Woman of San Nicolas Island—who lived isolated on the windswept island for years— has been told many times by non-Natives. Her extraordinary life entered history as conveyed by gesture to English- and Spanish-speaking people. There were no Nicoleños in Santa Barbara when she arrived in 1853.

Data on the Nicoleño language are scarce, and scholars have debated its origins and relationships. This summer, researchers including Curator of Anthropology John R. Johnson, Ph.D., published a reassessment of the language drawing on oral histories about the Lone Woman passed down by Native consultants to linguist J.P. Harrington. They discovered evidence indicating she spoke a dialect of the Gabrielino (Tongva)/ Fernandeño language.

Their argument rests in part on linguistic analysis of the Lone Woman’s tokitoki song, familiar to Museum-goers. A Ventureño Chumash man, Melquiades, was a member of the crew which spent a month on the island with her. He taught the song to Ventureño Chumash man Fernando Librado, who shared it with Harrington. Translation of parts of the song include the evocative lament, “my heart is no longer in the sea.”

One of the coauthors— Barbareño Chumash Elder Ernestine Ygnacio-De Soto— is intimately tied to the history. Her Barbareño greatgrandmother Luisa Ygnacio briefly met the Lone Woman, and Luisa’s first husband Policarpio (a Chumash man of Cruzeño and Barbareño ancestry) was one of the crew members who interacted with her for a month on the island.

Look for Morris et al., 2020 “The Lone Woman’s Nicoleño Language” in Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology, vol.40, no.1.