The Basque History of Shoshone, Idaho

shoshone-basque

The Basques have been an integral part of the history of much of the world, from their role in Magellan’s voyage around the globe to their participation in the Spanish conquests of America. The Basques also touched a lot of the American West, and, while I should by now be accustomed to the pervasiveness of the Basques in the West, I’m still surprised when I hear about the story of places like Shoshone, Idaho.

Shoshone is a small town, just east of Gooding (another center of Basque-American culture). It’s a town I’ve certainly heard of, but have never visited. It turns out that Shoshone was one of the important stops for Basques making their way west after their voyage across the Atlantic and their landing on the east coast. Shoshone, at one time, boasted 7 Basque boarding houses (today Shoshone has a population of about 1400, so that would be about one boarding house per 200 inhabitants, probably the highest density in the country). Today, only 4 survive. But, the pride of that Basque heritage lives on.

Tomorrow, Shoshone will celebrate the 1st Annual Lincoln County Basque Heritage Day. Sponsored by the Lincoln County Chamber of Commerce and the Ben Oneida family, the event will showcase the Basque heritage of Shoshone, featuring a lecture by Prof. Dave Lachiondo of the Center for Basque Studies at Boise State University and a screening of the film Basques in the West. In addition, there will be sheep camps, photo displays, and history displays. The event is free and all are welcome.

Sounds like a wonderful event! It is inspired by the Basque immigrants who helped shaped the history of Shoshone. I’m curious what those boarding houses look like today, and what secrets they might still hold!

 

Get Email Updates of Posts to Buber’s Basque Page

Not hosting my site on WordPress.com, I never noticed this fancy button that allows people to enter an email address to receive notices of posts to the blog. It wasn’t until I saw Hella Basque‘s follow button that I became aware of this feature. I found a plugin that allows and WordPress-driven site to have a similar feature. So, if you want to receive email notification whenever a new posting is made to Buber’s Basque Page, click the “follow” button at the bottom of the page.

Zorionak NABO!

index.5679874652This year marks the 40th anniversary of NABO — the North American Basque Organizations. NABO’s goal is to bring together the Basque clubs of North America (NABO has member clubs in Canada and the United States) to help those clubs in their efforts to preserve and promote Basque culture. NABO is thus a collection of organizations and is able to provide opportunities that individual clubs would not be able to, such as the national Mus tournament and the Udaleku summer camp.

I first encountered NABO about 14 years ago, via my involvement with the Seattle Euskal Etxea. At the time, Bob Echeverria was president. Grace Mainvil, who has been a constant presence within NABO, was treasurer. I remember being overwhelmed by all of the experience that was represented in that room and all of the great ideas that were being tossed around. As with any such organization, NABO had more ideas than it could realistically realize, but it was great simply seeing the energy of the people involved. I remember that there were ideas for a directory of Basques in the diaspora (a very ambitious idea that unfortunately didn’t go anywhere, partially because they tapped me to be involved and I, well, sort of dropped the ball…). I don’t remember many more specifics, but I simply remember being part of something big and grand.

More recently, I’ve been to a NABO meeting a few years back, in Salt Lake City, as president of the New Mexico Euskal Etxea. While some faces have changed (the current president is Valerie Arrechea), others are familiar (Grace is still treasurer), the energy and ideas were as vibrant as ever. One simply cannot forget the energy that John Ysursa brought with him, and the grand visions regarding Basque identity and building the desire for embracing that identity among young Basques in the diaspora.

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Last week, NABO celebrated their 40th anniversary in Elko as part of the 50th anniversary of the Elko Basque festival. Unfortunately, I was not able to attend, but it sounds like, by all accounts, it was a grand weekend.

NABO offers a valuable presence in the Basque community by pooling together the resources and expertise of all of the individual clubs and providing a common voice that can help promote projects that are simply too big for any one club. It also offers a network for Basque clubs and their members that helps develop a national and international Basque identity, where Basques are exposed to other Basques from other parts of North America. Basques in California get to interact with those in Washington DC, Quebec, and Florida. This expands the concept of “Basqueness” in the diaspora, as each of these communities has a different history, from the sheepherder experience, to the jai alai players, to more distant roles in exploring and settling North America. By providing this umbrella, NABO expands and redefines what it means to be Basque.

Zorionak NABO! And here’s to another 40 great years!

Pre-Neolithic Genetics of the Basques

plosone.mtdna.basquesI’m not a geneticist, but I am fascinated by what modern genetics can tell us about the history and prehistory of humans. The Basques are particularly interesting because of the pre-Indo-European origins of the population. As more and more genetic studies are done, I think we will ultimately recreate a detailed map — both spatial and temporal — of the movements of not just the Basques but all human populations.

In a recent paper in PLOS One, a group of scientists from the Basque Country, Santander, and Florida examined mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from a group of people in “Franco-Cantabria” (which I assume is located in essentially modern day Euskal Herria). mtDNA is passed through females and tracing it provides data on the maternal ancestry of the people. The authors find that there is an unbroken genetic lineage back about 10,000 years to the local area. They conclude that their findings “provide robust evidence of a partial genetic continuity between contemporary autochthonous populations from the Franco-Cantabrian region, specifically the Basques, and Paleolithic/Mesolithic hunter-gatherer groups” and “these results give further support to the notion that the autochthonous populations currently inhabiting this region show perceptible signals of genetic continuity with Mesolithic hunter-gatherer groups that took refuge in the Franco-Cantabrian fringe during the last glacial and postglacial periods of Europe.” That is, as far as I understand, the current Basque population is directly connected to the people who inhabited the region at the end of the last ice age.

There still seems to be a lot that is unknown and it is hard to parse all of this data if you aren’t a specialist. But, these genetic studies and what they say about human populations and migration are very intriguing. I’d welcome more informed discussion on this, both what these kinds of studies say about the origins of the Basque population as well as their interactions with the rest of Europe.

The destruction of San Sebastian, recreated via Twitter

  • Today is July 10, 1813. Donostia has been occupied by Napoleonic troops for 5 years.
  • The Marquess of Wellington, commander of the allied troops, reaches Hernani.
  • The British have already landed troops and weapons and ships have begun the blockage. The siege of Donostia begins.

Denis_Dighton_Storming_of_San_Sebastian200 hundred years ago today, the Siege of Donostia began, which ended in the ransacking and devastation of the city by fire (see this Wikipedia article). This was part of a campaign, the Peninsular War (known in Spain as the Spanish War of Independence), lead by the British, to defeat Napoleon, who, upon taking over France, had named his brother King of Spain. The British forces, lead by the Marquess of Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, had just won the Battle of Vitoria and marched on San Sebastian to both “clear their rear guard” and establish a port for supplying their forces. After about two months of siege, they finally took the city. Discovering all of the “brandy and wine” of the shops, many troops got drunk and attacked the civilian population, burning houses, killing people, and raping women.

As an experiment in historical education, Euskomedia is recreating the Siege and Destruction of Donostia via Twitter. Two Twitter feeds, 1813tik in Euskara and 1813tik-es in Spanish, will relay the siege over the coming weeks to provide “real-time” updates on this historical event.

I think this is an awesome idea! It is a very cool way of using modern social media to educate people about history. It tries to capture the power of social media — the way it has been used in revolutions and uprisings in, for example, the Middle East — to recreate dynamic historical events of the past. I think this might be an excellent educational tool and I hope it catches on. The US just marked the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg — something like this would have been a cool way for people to be more directly engaged in that anniversary.

I only wish they had an English Twitter feed as well!

Regarding the weirdness (or non-weirdness) of Euskara

Yesterday I posted about another blog that ranked languages in terms of “weirdness”, which made the claim that Spanish, German and English were much weirder, in comparison with other languages, than Euskara. Well, another blog, this one from the Language Log at the University of Pennsylvania describes some issues with this analysis. In particular, a number of the comments on that blog delve into a lot of questions (as an aside, I am extremely envious of the 54 comments that posting has received! 🙂

They point to limitations of the WALS database, the fact that the analysis only used 21 factors in its weighting, and that defining weirdness is a bit arbitrary.

Just thought, for the sake of rigor, I should share this discussion.

Maybe Euskara isn’t so weird, maybe English is the weird one?

Picture 1One of the people who follow Buber’s Basque Page on Facebook (thanks Rachel!) sent me this link to a blog post that evaluates the weirdness of languages. I’m not a linguist, so I can’t really comment on their methodology, but it seems that what they’ve done is compared all of the languages that are assessed in the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS). What WALS does is classify languages based on a number of criteria, including the types of sounds (consonants vs vowels, types of consonants, etc), the number of genders, the types of articles, and how tenses are created (for a full list of the categories and how Basque fits, see this page). What Idibon did was compare all of the categorized languages in 21 of these categories and determine which ones deviated the most from the average and which ones did not.

What is very surprising is that, in this measure, Basque is not at all that odd. It has properties that are very common across languages. It ranks in the top 10 of least weird languages. In contrast, languages like Spanish, Dutch, German, and English rank high in the weirdness index. It seems that some of the most spoken languages in the world are also some of the weirdest, in terms of their structural properties.

This is pretty surprising, to me at least. However, it does conform to the idea that Basque isn’t necessarily hard, it is just hard for an English speaker, because it is so different.

Hella Basque is Hella Blog

Writing a blog, putting posts out there on a regular basis, requires dedication. Writing a blog that pulls in readers and engages them requires charm and wit. Hella Basque has both. Billed as “youthful musings on Basque American culture and community,” Hella Basque is the work of Anne Marie, a young Basque-American who has been immersed into Basque-American culture for many years and is now pouring out those years into a blog that is both insightful and a delight to read. Hella Basque has posted about the band Amuma Says No, the Top 5 Things Not to Say to a Girl’s Aita (I will have to note these down for the very distant future when my little girl gets to that age),  and You Know You’re Basque American When… (which has been shared many times on Facebook), among other topics.

Hella Basque has only been posting for a few weeks, but the writing and the choice of topics makes it a top choice among Basque blogs. I highly recommend it!

Big Basque News: Basque World Heritage Site and .eus Basque Internet Domain

Two big news items related to Basques this week.

redbay20nw1First, long time contributor David Cox, who also happens to be Canadian (we don’t hold that against him), sent this article about the possibility of the Red Bay National Historic Site in Labrador becoming a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Canadian Officials are currently lobbying UNESCO to make that site, and another in Canada, World Heritage Sites. Red Bay is home to a 16th century Basque outpost on the eastern coast of Canada. Drawn initially by cod, it seems, the Basque sailors found whales as well and setup the site to process the whales. The site has been excavated and a cemetery, a number of ships both large and small, and processing stations. The article points out that the establishment of this processing center in Canada marked the beginning of commercial whaling and that establishing it as a World Heritage Site would indicate “that the story of the Basque Whaling in Red Bay is a story that should be protected and presented for all humanity.” To get a feel for what it might have been like for Basques living in Labrador in the 1500s, check out the Last Will and Testament of Juan Martinez de Larrume.

logo_enSecond, as some of you may now, there has been an effort for quite some time now to get a top-level domain (think .net, .com, .edu, .es) on the internet for things Basque. I’ve featured a link in the top right corner of my page to the group that is advancing this cause, The PuntuEus Foundation. A couple of weeks back, ICANN, the organization that decides these things, approved the creation of the .eus domain. Now, there is a corner of the web dedicated to things Basque. If a site ends in .eus, you will know it is Basque related. Having a domain like .eus will aid groups in promoting Basque culture and language. Thanks to Pedro Oiarzabal for pointing this out to me. Zorionak PuntuEus!

Marraskiloak: Christmas Snails

journal.pone.0065792.g002My wife sent me this interesting article about the migration of snails to Ireland. The article, which summaries this study in PLOS ONE, concludes that a specific species of snails made its way from the Eastern Pyrenees to Ireland maybe 8000 years ago. Granted, today, the eastern part of the Pyrenees is not Basque — it is Catalan — but 8000 years ago, who knows for sure. Likely, there was some Basque influence in the region, or at least proto-Basque influence, as described in this Wikipedia article. One might conclude, then, that somehow Basques, or proto-Basques, brought snails from the Pyrenees to Ireland as they explored and maybe settled Ireland. Maybe snails have something to tell us about the wanderings of prehistoric Europeans.

This, of course, brought to mind a story about snails. I first visited the Basque Country, during the 1991-92 school year as a student in Donostia. snailsSo, this was my first Christmas away from home and my dad’s family — his sister, her husband, and two kids — invited me to join them in Peñíscola for the holidays. Having nothing else to do, I of course said yes. In preparation, we went into the hills outside of Ermua and collected marraskiloak — snails. It seems that snails, cooked in a tomato-based sauce, is a Christmas tradition, at least with my dad’s family, if not more widely. We took the snails with us to Peñíscola and, on the big day, my aunt prepared them, much like in the photo (swiped from this site). To eat the snails, you grabbed a shell and dug out the “meat” (I’m not really sure I want to use that word in association with snails, but I guess that’s what it technically is…) with a toothpick. You then plopped the “meat” into your mouth, chewed it up, and went for another.

Now, I don’t really recall how they tasted — it’s been over 20 years — but I do remember that as I was eating them, I ate one that tasted funny, even for a snail. Compared to the others, it just tasted off. However, not knowing better, I ate it and continued on to a few more. It wasn’t long before my stomach was rebelling against me, and not simply for eating snails in the first place. That one snail exacted revenge on my poor Americanized tummy for it and all of its comrades that had been sacrificed for our Christmas meal. Or maybe it was for dragging its ancestors to cold Ireland.

Needless to say, that was the last batch of snails I’ve had the pleasure of trying.