CCG Year of Engagement Podcast #3: Returning to Our Roots

The Community Collections Grants from the American Folklife Center support contemporary cultural field research within diverse communities. Through this grant program, the Center offered fellowships to individuals and organizations to work within their communities to produce ethnographic cultural documentation, such as oral history interviews and audio-visual recordings of cultural activity, from the community perspective. As part of the 2025 CCG Year of Engagement, the Center has produced a subseries of the Folklife Today podcast focused on interviews with the project teams behind these wonderful community documentation projects. In this third episode, I sat down with Laura Grant, who led the documentation for the Returning to Our Roots: Traditional Nüwa Harvests CCG project.

Download the full episode here.

Although their CCG project began in 2024, Laura Grant’s connection with the Kawaiisu community at the heart of the project began over 20 years earlier, when she began working for the Owens Valley Career Development Center in Bishop, California and was tapped to help with regional language revitalization. While traveling throughout five counties in California, Laura met Kawaiisu community member Julie Turner. “She was very avid about learning video production, and I am really into that,” Laura laughed. The meeting between the two morphed into a long friendship and working relationship, as Laura and Julie worked to document Kawaiisu language, history and culture.

In those early years, the two worked closely with Julie’s father, Luther Girardo, and her aunts, Lucille and Betty, completing digital video projects that recorded traditional stories and plant practices. In 2021, when Luther passed on, the Kawaiisu community’s language revitalization efforts paused. “There was a big lull,” Laura shared. “It was pretty tragic and everybody felt pretty hurt and it took a while for everybody to get their feet under them again.”

AFC’s Community Collections Grants ended up being the push needed to get the language and culture documentation started again. Lucille, Luther’s sister, remains involved with this incarnation of the work and is the tribe’s only remaining first language speaker of Kawaiisu. Due to her age, Lucille was not able to accompany the group out into the field when the group was documenting the actual harvesting process, but she remains connected to the rest of the community through the magic of platforms like Zoom.

The field sessions, Laura explained, help to ground the language instruction that takes place over digital platforms. “We do the field work and it’s very engaging for multiple generations of families in the field together and they’re there on the land in the fields of flowers, crossing creeks and marching through the fields and looking through the plants and getting sunstroke and traveling hundreds of miles. And it’s a shared experience that’s very engaging and it goes on for days. And then when we switch to the Zoom environment, that shared experience is kind of the glue that holds us together while we do the more technical interaction through Zoom.”

Aside from the potential for sunstroke and the difficulty of scheduling time for a community that often lives far from their traditional homelands to come together, the field work expeditions also provided an unexpected challenge — the youth’s excitement:

“For me, a lot of the challenges were the herding cats, you know, everybody was so energized and so excited that we would get to this one location and it was a beautiful green hill with yellow wildflowers all over it. And we were going to go up and see the old grinding rocks where their grandparents used to grind acorns and all the young people just took off running and went over the hill. We didn’t know where they went. It’s like, oh, we’ll just wait for them to come back and now we can film.” Laura laughed, remembering the moment. “Where did they go? It was like the green hills and the Wizard of Oz and off they went over the horizon.”

When asked about the impact of doing this project, Laura said “I was really impressed with how the young people expressed themselves when talking about their desire to do these things and their desire for these things to be known by the greater American public. They were very fiery. And I was so glad that we were there to record their words. […] And the way they speak is just so eloquent, about their desire for their learning of these Nüwa ways and their traditional languages and how strongly they feel about having this material available publicly so that the American people will know about the Kawaiisu.”

For the complete interview with Laura Grant, visit the Folklife Today podcast page or click here for the full episode.

[Note: The intro/outro music for this episode comes from another CCG project – Sonidos de Houston: Documenting the City’s Chicano Music Scene. The clip features an instrumental medley performed by Avizo during an open-air concert documented in the course of the CCG project.]

Other Resources

Check out these articles about the Returning to Our Roots CCG project, from the Tehachapi News:

• “‘Returning to Our Roots’ project brings Native people to Walker Basin,” by Jon Hammond, details the Kawaiisu community’s first gathering trip to Yaatiip
• “Acorn granary: the first new one in more than a century,” by Jon Hammond, describes the CCG project’s final public program in April 2025

Interested in learning more about the Kawaiisu language and traditional plants? Make an appointment for the Main Reading Room and read these books from the Library’s General Collections (books are housed off-site and require request in advance):

• Kawaiisu: a grammar and dictionary with texts – Maurice L. Zigmond, Curtis G. Booth, and Pamela Munro
• Kawaiisu ethnobotany – Maurice L. Zigmond