Mulu' Wetam the First People: Cupeno Oral History and Language

Mulu Wetam: the First People is a collection of oral histories, myths accounts of the old religious ceremonies, reminiscences of individuals, stories for children, and songs of the Cupeno people of Southern California. The texts are presented in both English and Cupeno, and a dictionary and grammatical sketch of the Cupeno language is included for linguistic scholars, students, and the more sophisticated general reader. The editors have spent more than a decade collecting material which testifies to the richness of the oral literary traditions of the Cupeno Indians, who inhabited the mountain valley in which Warner s Hot Springs (formerly Cupa) is today situated. Their anthology makes available for the first time a broad range of traditional folk stories and songs of the Cupeno. The editors were aided in their work by many Indian authorities on the language and culture of the Cupeno. In addition, the collection contains the previously unpublished stories and histories collected by Paul-Louis Faye in 1919, 1920, and 1921, which for many years remained forgotten and hidden away in old files of the Lowie Museum of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. This volume of the literature of the Cupeno provides an abundant fund of material that will prove invaluable to anthropologists, linguists, historians, school teachers, and everyone interested in the California Indian.