LET'S  SPEAK  KUMEYAAY

My name is Samuel Brown.  I am reservation born and bred.  I am a resident enrolled member of Viejas Band of Kumeyaay Indians and I look like an Indian. Some people are Indian but you would not know unless they told you. My parents, grandparents and so on back were Kumeyaay Indian and I am considered a full blood 100% but I am positive there were other types of people back there somewhere. Some males, in my family, lose the hair on the top of their heads and I am thinning out so?   Both my parents spoke our language but they spoke different dialects.  They both came from the Capitan Grande Reservation but my late Mother came from one village and my Father another village.  Here lies a great language debate.  Which is the TRUE language.  I don't really want to get involved in this debate so I will just use the dialect spoken by the Brown family of the Viejas Band. This might not be really true since I did learn from my Late Grandmother and she spoke Mesa Grande. Someone pointed out to me that my Dad and I do pronounce things differently. Well, at least I am trying to do something. My first language is English but I have picked up bits of our language since I was a child.  I can pronounce words without an American English accent.  When true native speakers hear me talk they think I know more than I do because I sound like I do.  Bio of Sam

The number of fluent speakers on each reservation can be counted on one or maybe two hands.  The phrases presented here are my attempt to preserve some of the language.  If you learn the few phrases here you know more language than most people today.  All the spelling is just my guess (including English).  I am adding stuff to this all the time.

Since the advent of the Casinos several tribes are attempting to preserve their language. A lot of resources are not utilized and are lost. I just found out a tribe has a very expensive sound/video studio that was built five years ago, with a grant, but never utilized. I guess it is just gathering dust and now their equipment is out dated. Too bad but that happens a lot.

This web site cost me $25 a year to operate. There is also time and effort, but that is just elbow grease. Oddly I thought some other tribes might want to do something like this for their tribe but so far no one has contacted me or asked how I do this. So, I will just keep truck'n away and having fun doing this.

Click here for a link to a book that has a Kumeyaay as a central character. It is a romance novel and I read it but don't tell anyone that I did. It does have a lot of cultural things in it. It is named Dreamquest.

If you have time, go to YouTube and enter howkasam, some other stuff of mine will be there.