Linda Yamane facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Linda Yamane
Linda Yamane (center) at a ribbon cutting ceremony in 2010 to celebrate the Grand Opening of the Martinez Adobe with Congressman George Miller

Linda Yamane, born in 1949, is a talented artist and historian. She belongs to the Rumsien Ohlone people. She has worked hard to bring back the Rumsien language. She also revived old Rumsien traditions. These include special ways of making baskets.

Discovering Her Roots

Linda Yamane was born in 1949 in San José, California. Her grandmother, Beatrice Barcelona Reno, lived with her. Beatrice was part Spanish and part Rumsien. When Beatrice was an adult, many thought the Ohlone people were gone. But Beatrice shared old stories with Linda. She also taught Linda about plants used for medicine. However, she could not teach Linda much about Rumsien culture.

Linda traced her family back to the 1770s. One ancestor was Josef Manuel Higuera. He was an early settler of San Jose. San Jose was California's first Spanish civilian city. Linda also found out about Margarita Maria. She was a woman from Tucutnut. This was a large Rumsien village in the 1770s. Priests at a mission gave her that name in 1773. Linda did not hear the words "Rumsen" or "Ohlone" until she was in her 30s.

Linda Yamane's Amazing Work

Linda Yamane is a true artist and expert. She is a singer, painter, and basket maker. She also writes, builds canoes, and knows a lot about Rumsien games. She is an expert in the Rumsien language. Linda used to work as a graphic designer and illustrator.

She loves researching her family's past. This has helped her learn so much about Rumsien history and traditions. She works with museums and other groups. She helps them share and save knowledge about the Rumsien and Ohlone peoples.

For example, in 2005, she helped create an exhibit. It was called Ohlone Portraits: Our Faces, Our Families, Our Stories. This exhibit was at the Crissy Field Center in San Francisco. It showed large portraits from the late 1800s. These portraits had stories and photos of the people's descendants.

Linda also creates beautiful art. She drew a tule dwelling. This drawing is on signs in the Hillside Natural Area in El Cerrito. She also painted a large picture of a former village, Pruistac. This painting is at the Sanchez Adobe Park. For the past 20 years, she has helped plan Ohlone Day. This event takes place at Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park.

Bringing Back the Rumsien Language

The Rumsien language was almost lost. The last elders who spoke it died in missions. So, by the 1900s, no one spoke Rumsien anymore. Linda's grandmother knew some Rumsien words. She also told Linda many Rumsien stories. But that was all.

In the mid-1980s, Linda found important records. These were notes from Smithsonian expert John Peabody Harrington. He had worked with Isabel Meadows and Manuel Onesimo. They were Rumsien elders. Harrington wrote down the Rumsien language. He also recorded details about Rumsien daily life.

These notes were kept at the Smithsonian. They were on microfilm at some universities. But they were written in an old Spanish dialect. Linda could not understand them. She teamed up with Alex Ramirez, Onesimo's grandson. They worked together to translate the documents. They translated everything into English. This helped many people learn about Rumsien life for the first time.

During this research, Linda found a hummingbird story. She decided to write a children's book. In 1995, she published When the World Ended. It was about how Hummingbird got fire and how people were made.

Through this project, she met scholar Sandy Lydon. They have worked together since the 1980s. They share ideas and check each other's work on the Rumsien people.

In 1992, Linda attended a workshop. It was called "Breath of Life" at University of California, Berkeley. There, she found more Rumsien words. These words were for different types of baskets and tools. The Breath of Life program helps Native people. It pairs them with language experts. They work together to revive their old languages.

Linda also found recordings at UC-Berkeley's Hearst Museum. These were old wax-cylinder recordings. Anthropologist Alfred Kroeber made them in the early 1900s. Elders Viviana Soto and Jacinta Gonzales sang songs. They also told stories in Rumsien. Linda used a cassette tape of these recordings. She carefully wrote down everything. She matched the recordings with what her grandmother told her. First, she rebuilt the stories. Then, she brought back a large part of the language. These recordings helped her hear how words sounded. They also helped her make her dictionary even bigger.

Because of her hard work, Linda Yamane became the first person to speak Rumsien. This was since the last speaker died in 1939.

Rumsien Music

Linda used the songs from Kroeber's recordings. She did more than just learn words. She focused on putting the songs back together. Then, she shared them with others.

The Art of Rumsien Basketry

One of Yamane's traditionally styled baskets, now belonging to the Presidio Officers' Club collection.

In Rumsien tradition, personal creations were burned when someone died. Also, Spanish settlers forced Rumsien people into missions. This led to the destruction of their belongings. Because of this, only about 40 Rumsien baskets were left by the 1980s. The Rumsien people stopped making traditional Olivella baskets. The old ways of making them were lost. No Rumsien basket makers survived.

In the 1970s, Linda learned some basic basket-making skills. But these were not Native methods. Ten years later, she studied an Indigenous way of basket making. She learned from women of the Pomo tribe.

Linda visited museums all over the world. She saw Rumsien baskets in California, the Smithsonian, and museums in Europe. She called these baskets her "teachers." She took notes and photos. She counted stitches and coils. She also read notes from experts. These experts had studied her tribe's basket-making. Linda follows the old methods and ideas. She uses the same or similar materials. But she also creates her own designs. By the mid-1990s, she started making her own baskets. She thinks most baskets take her 2,500 to 3,000 hours to finish.

Finding traditional materials was another challenge. Linda started growing a garden at home. This helped her get the supplies she needed. She also made agreements with the Bureau of Land Management. This allowed her to collect sedge and other materials from public lands. Even after she gathers them, the willow, sedge, and other materials need time. They can take months or years to dry and get ready for weaving.

Linda has been a member of the California Indian Basketweavers Association since 1991. She was also a co-editor for their magazine, Roots and Shoots. Through another group, she took on Carol Bachman as a student. Carol learned both basket weaving and boat making from Linda.

Building Tule Boats

Linda uses many of the same skills for basket weaving to build tule boats. These boats are called kónon in the Rumsien language. She first learned how to make them in the 1980s. She took photos and notes at an event in Coyote Hills Regional Park in Fremont. She did not make many for almost 20 years. But since the early 2000s, she has made dozens.

She made one of her first boats for the Monterey History & Art Association. They took it out on Monterey Bay. This might have been the first tule boat on the bay in over 150 years. Linda, Carol Bachman, and Cheryl Carter worked together to build this boat.

Olivella Baskets

These special baskets are named after Olivella snails. These snails are found off the coast of central California. Their shells were used to make decorative, sequin-like beads. These baskets had not been made for 150 years or more. Making each bead is a lot of work. It involves collecting shells, baking them, and then cutting, shaping, and smoothing them. Each bead takes about 10 minutes to make. About three out of four beads stay whole. A large basket might use thousands of these beads.

To even see such baskets, Linda had to travel far. She saw examples on the East Coast of the United States and in Europe. No known examples were left in California.

Making Jewelry

Linda also creates jewelry. She often uses abalone shells. Abalone are hard to find now. Linda feels lucky that friends and divers helped her get a large collection of shells. In return, Linda started an abalone shell "bank." This bank helps other Native artists get shells for their traditional art.

Special Art Projects

• 2009: Linda received a grant to make an Ohlone presentation basket. She worked with the Big Sur Land Trust. In 2021, artist Susanne Takehara made a mosaic. It was called Weaving Past & Present. This mosaic showed Linda's basket. It is on an apartment building in East Oakland.
• 2010: The Oakland Museum was planning a new exhibit. It was about baskets from California's Native peoples. They realized they had no baskets from the Ohlone tribes. Linda was already a consultant for the museum's basket collection. The museum asked her to make a ceremonial basket. It was made in the Rumsien style. It was shown to the public in 2012. This basket had over 20,000 stitches. It also had 1,200 Olivella beads made by Linda. The basket had thousands of feathers. These were chicken feathers dyed red. This is because it is no longer legal to collect feathers from the acorn woodpecker, which was the traditional source. Linda also gave many live basket weaving demonstrations at the museum.

Select Publications

• When the World Ended: How Hummingbird Got Fire; How People Were Made: Rumsien Ohlone Stories (1995) - This book won an Aesop Accolades award in 1995.
• Weaving a California Tradition: A Native American Basketmaker (1996)
• A Gathering of Voices: The Native peoples of the Central California Coast (editor; 2002)
• The Dirt is Red Here: Art and Poetry from Native California (contributor; 2002)