Linda Yamane

Linda Yamane (born 1949) is an Rumsien Ohlone artist and historian who has reconstructed and "almost singlehandedly revived" the Rumsien language, basket-making methods, and other Rumsien traditions.

Family life Yamane was born in 1949 in San Jose, California. Yamane's grandmother, Beatrice Barcelona Reno—daughter of a Spanish-Basque father and a Rumsien-Spanish mother — lived with her family when she was young. but could not teach her about Rumsien culture. Growing up, Yamane could also identify Margarita Maria, a woman from Tucutnut, the largest village of the Rumsien local tribe of the Carmel Valley, in the 1770s. She was given that name when baptized by priests at the mission in 1773. Through her passion for researching her roots, she has developed substantial knowledge about Rumsien history and traditions. She partners with and consults many museums and other cultural institutions to help preserve and share knowledge of the Rumsien people and, more generally, of various Ohlone peoples. For example, in 2005 she worked with National Park Service ranger Naomi Torres and historian Paul Scolari to curate the exhibit Ohlone Portraits: Our Faces, Our Families, Our Stories at San Francisco's Crissy Field Center of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area and the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy. Nineteen almost life-sized portraits from the late 19th and early 20th centuries appeared alongside biographies and smaller photos of those individuals' descendants. She creates art, such as the drawing of the tule dwelling that appears on interpretive signs in the Hillside Natural Area in El Cerrito, CA. She also created a large painting of a former village, Pruistac, for the Sanchez Adobe Park. For the past two decades, she has helped organize Ohlone Day in Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park.

Rumsien language Because the last of the elders who spoke Rumsien died in the missions, knowledge of the language had died out before the start of the 20th century. Harrington had worked with a Rumsien-English woman named Isabel Meadows and another Rumsien elder, Manuel Onesimo, to document the Rumsien language and Rumsien daily life and traditions. These notes were archived at the Smithsonian and available at some universities on microfilm.

In the course of this research, Yamane found several Rumsien creation stories and decided to write a book for children. She published When the World Ended: How Hummingbird Got Fire; How People Were Made: Rumsien Ohlone Stories in 1995.

Through this translation project, she also met scholar Sandy Lydon, with whom she has collaborated since the 1980s. The Breath of Life program, founded by linguist Leanne Hinton, pairs linguists with indigenous individuals want to revive their ancestral languages.

Basketry One of Yamane's traditionally styled baskets, now belonging to the Presidio Officers' Club collection. In Rumsien tradition, it was customary to burn an individual's personal creations upon their death. Combined with the need to trade for supplies after Spanish colonialists began moving the Rumsien people into missions and the destruction of their possessions to force them into those missions, only an estimated 40 Rumsien baskets remained worldwide by the 1980s. Essentially, the Rumsien people stopped making traditional Olivella baskets when European colonialists came to the region. In addition to her work with CIBA, through the Alliance for California Traditional Arts she took on Carol Bachman as an apprentice. Bachman learned both basketweaving and the related art of boat making from Yamane. Yamane and Bachman worked together with Cheryl Carter to build the boat.

2010 - The Oakland Museum was organizing a new exhibit of baskets from the various indigenous peoples of California, and found they had no baskets from any of the Ohlone tribes that once populated the broader San Francisco Bay Area. Yamane had been a member of the museum's Native Advisory Council and had actually served as a consultant on the basket collection. The museum commissioned her to make a ceremonial basket in the Rumsien style and by Rumsien methods, which was unveiled to the public in 2012. The piece had over 20,000 stitches and 1,200 Olivella beads made by Yamane. The several thousand feathers on the basket were chicken feathers dyed red, because it is no longer legal to collect feathers from the acorn woodpecker, the traditional source. 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)