Samala Texts    

In this section you'll find a few Samala texts with English translations. Hopefully there will be more before long.
All of these texts were narrated by Maria Solares in 1919 and transcribed by John P. Harrington. Here you see them rewritten in the same phonetic transcription that the rest of this website uses.
Microfilm Reel 9 of the Harrington manuscripts contains 138 narratives. These texts include:
descriptions of cures, medicinal formulas, childbirth practices, and techniques for activities such as fishing and gathering pine nuts.
historical accounts of life at the mission, the mission revolt of 1824, personal experiences, and oral histories about various people, places and events in the Santa Ynez Valley and beyond. Text 1 The Bear Hunt at San Emigdio is an example.
traditional Samala oral literature, such as Coyote stories and the tales of the Dog Girl and Crane Woman below.
Items currently in this section:
Catalog of Samala Texts on Reel 9
The Bear Hunt at San Emigdio Text 1 — This text has a line-by-line colloquial English translation, but no word-by-word key.
The Dog Girl Text 95 — This text has a line-by-line colloquial English translation. At the end there is a word-by-word key for the first 25 lines.
Crane Woman  Text 110 — This text has a line-by-line colloquial English translation, with a word-by-word key for about 60% of the lines.

The PDF items in this section are all based on Microsoft Word documents, which are much easier to type and format than regular web pages. However, there's a possible minor problem with the phonetic symbols as displayed (and printed) in the PDFs.
Two of the special symbols don't show up as expected on certain computer systems, so you might see:
¢ the cent sign instead of  — not elegant, but it still refers to the "ch" sound of C wedge.
ï an I with two dots instead of  — the two dots are a lot harder to see than the bar in words such as mk / mïk "far," since they tend to blend in with nearby letters.

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