| Rumsen | |
|---|---|
| San Carlos | |
| Spoken in | United States |
| Region | California |
| Extinct | ? |
| Language family | |
| Writing system | Latin |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | css |
Rumsen (also known as Rumsien, San Carlos Costanoan and Carmeleno) is one of eight language divisions of the Ohlone (Costanoan) Native American people of Northern California. The Rumsen language was spoken from the Pajaro River to Point Sur, and on the lower courses of the Pajaro, as well as on the Salinas and Carmel Rivers, and the region of the present-day cities of Salinas, Monterey and Carmel. One of eight languages within the Costanoan (alias Ohlone) branch of the Utian family, it became one of two important native languages spoken at the Mission San Carlos Borroméo de Carmelo founded in 1770, the other being Esselen.
The Rumsen local tribe, from which the language name was derived, held the lower Carmel River Valley and neighboring Monterey Peninsula at the time of Spanish colonization. Their population of approximately 400-500 people was distributed among at least five villages within their territory.[1] An early twentieth-century mapping of a specific village called Rumsen on the Carmel River, several miles inland from the Mission in Carmel, may or may not be accurate.[2] Mission registers indicate that "Tucutnut", about three miles upstream from the mouth of the Carmel River, was the largest village of the Rumsen local tribe.[3]
The last fluent speaker of Rumsen (and probably the last fluent speaker of any Costanoan language) was Isabel Meadows,[4] who died in 1939. The Bureau of American Ethnology linguist John Peabody Harrington conducted very extensive fieldwork with Meadows in the last several years of her life. These notes, still mostly unpublished, now constitute the foundation for current linguistic research and revitalization efforts on the Rumsen language.[4]
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The Rumsen were the first Costanoan people to be seen and documented by the Spanish explorers of Northern California, as noted by Sebastian Vizcaíno when he reached Monterey in 1602. Since this first Spanish contact, Manila galleons may have occasionally ventured up the California coastline and stopped in Monterey Bay between 1602 and 1796.[5]
During the era of Spanish missions in California, the Rumsen people's lives changed when the Spaniards came from the south to build the Mission San Carlos Borroméo de Carmelo and the Monterey Presidio in their territory. The Rumsen speakers were moved into this mission and were baptized over the years between 1771 and 1808. They lived at the mission and its surrounding ranches and were educated to be Catholic neophytes, also known as Mission Indians, until the missions were secularized (discontinued) by the Mexican Government in 1834. Some Mission San Carlos Indian people were formally deeded plots at secularization, only to lose those plots during the Rancho Period.[6] See also: Ohlone: History.
At least since the mission era, the people of the Esselen Nation claim close association with the Rumsen Ohlone, through Mission integration and intermarriage.
Dialects of the Rumsen language were spoken by four independent local tribes, including the Rumsen themselves, the Ensen of the Salinas vicinity, the Calendaruc of the central shoreline of Monterey Bay, and the Sargentaruc of the Big Sur Coast. The territory of the language group was bordered by Monterey Bay and the Pacific Ocean to the west, the Awaswas Ohlone to the north, the Mutsun Ohlone to the east, the Chalon Ohlone on the south east, and the Esselen to the south.[3]
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