Fiat Vox

Tyler Lee-Wynant grew up hearing stories about his great-great aunt, Edna Campbell Guerrero. Born in 1907 in Mendocino County, she was a native speaker of Northern Pomo, one of seven languages spoken by the Pomo people who are Indigenous to Northern California. “She was a no-nonsense person,” says Lee-Wynant, a UC Berkeley Ph.D. student in linguistics. “She was an amazing individual. She cared so deeply about passing on what she knew.”For more than 50 years, Guerrero worked with Berkeley linguists to document her language and culture. These recordings are part of the campus’s California Language Archive. In them, she tells stories, describes cultural practices, says vocabulary and conjugates verbs. Whenever Lee-Wynant hears his aunt’s voice, strong and determined, he knows it’s his responsibility to carry on her work. As a graduate student researcher for the archive, Lee-Wynant is cataloging and analyzing a new collection that includes hours of recordings of his aunt, among other materials. “It's su