American Indian Culture and Research Journal

If comprehensive findings would turn speculation into fact, and those facts would identify an important scientific reality, then a wider, more diverse audience should be better apprised. By revisiting a less well-known published study, this brief review article has just this in mind. Its focus is on the linkage between language and migration as related to the place of origin of the Indians of central California. I would point out that this journal is not the obvious outlet for studies in Indian language and linguistics; to date, only a half dozen articles have been published. Thus I would not expect that linguistic scholars would turn to this journal to report their findings. Yet a larger readership should be informed because The Discovery of California is more than a linguistic treatise, for it demonstrates how comparative historical linguistics as the paramount research tool, supplemented by ethnography, archaeology, and field investigation, has ascertained that contemporary indigenous Asian peoples in Siberia are relatives of Penutian stock in central California. Keep in mind that I am not a linguistic scholar and must leave the final evaluation of this work to others. But the book needs to be put “out there”, as it were, so that its findings receive appropriate evaluation. Over the decades—indeed, since the nineteenth century—there has been considerable speculation, debate, and published theories and findings as to the Asia-to-North America migrations of the ancestors of contemporary Native Americans.