Dear Mr. Shatner,
Our town was captivated by your gratitude when the Tognetti family returned your lost wallet. In return, I want to share two Gilroy connections of which you are probably unknown.
First, did you know the helmsman and engineer of the USS Enterprise was almost arrested in Gilroy for Driving While Black (DWB)?
Levar Burton appeared in “Roots” and all seven seasons and four films of “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” However, in 1988, Gilroy police saw him driving a BMW while wearing a bandana and suspected he was a dope dealer. Stopping him at a gas station with guns drawn, they shouted for his ID. Luckily an officer came along who recognized him and spared our city a huge embarrassment.
Second, on your set you heard Klingons speaking a version of the language of Gilroy’s original residents, the Amah Mutsun, part of the larger group known as the Ohlone, previously called Costanoan.
The last known speaker of the Mutsun language was Ascencion Solorsano de Cervantes. Born in 1855, she lived at the Pinnacles then moved to Forest Street in Gilroy. By the early 1900s, she was known as a healer for miles around.
Her house was destroyed by a fire, burning most of the baskets she’d made and her collection of native artifacts. After the fire, she moved in with her parents on Rosanna Street.
Solorsano began working with anthropologists in 1916, when J. Alden Mason came to San Juan to learn about the Mutsun language. In 1922, anthropologist John Peabody Harrington from the Smithsonian Institution came to California to document Native American cultures, and Solorsano was one of many natives he worked with.
In 1929 Ascencion became very ill from cancer and moved to Monterey with one of her children. J.P. Harrington learned of her illness, came to interview her, and even moved into the basement of the house. It’s been said she willed herself to stay alive until she had told Harrington all she could. She finally passed away on Jan. 29, 1930. Her funeral was held in the San Juan Mission, and she was buried in the cemetery beside it.
At the conclusion of his work, Harrington had 67,500 pages of notes on the language and 81,000 pages on the culture. He shipped many boxes of notes back to the Smithsonian, but some wound up at UC Berkeley, and in 1977 when a young linguist named Marc Okrand was considering topics for his Ph.D, a professor told him about the cache of Harrington’s notes
Okrand made Mutsun the focus of his doctoral dissertation, then became involved with developing closed captioning on television for the hearing impaired. In 1982 while doing closed captioning for the Oscars, a friend invited him to lunch at Paramount Studios. The friend knew Paramount needed some dialogue for Mr. Spock to speak in Vulcan, his native language for “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.” Says Okrand, “I didn’t go there to invent a language, I just went for a sandwich.”
Later, producers asked him for an entire language for the Klingons, the bad guys of “Star Trek.” Okrand used Mutsun as the basis for the Klingon language, but didn’t want the Amah Mutsun associated with those bad aliens, so the similarity isn’t recognizable.
Ultimately, Okrand had a role in crafting language for every movie after, including “Star Trek Into Darkness” and in 2001 created the Atlantean language for “Atlantis: The Lost Empire.”
In 2013 members of the Gilroy Historical Society heard Okrand speak at UC Santa Cruz. At the conclusion, he asked for questions, and I was surprised when a man behind me addressed him in Klingon—many “Trekkies” speak the language, and Okrand admits others are more fluent than he.
Ascencion Solorsano lived through and left behind much. At age 5, she watched the last performance of the Mutsun ceremonial dances broken up by armed men on horseback. At 14, she came to the mission to be married to Don Rosario Garcia. Later she was married to Jose Segundo Cervantes. Her obituaries say she had 16 children. Gilroy’s newest junior high school is named for her.
