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Transcription: [00:28:07]
speaker 1: Well, when my grandfather told me this story, there weren't any coyote anymore in the environment. In fact, we have songs honoring the coyote because it's one of the last animals that has survived in the city.
[00:28:15]
So, he carried on the tradition anyway by telling me these things because they were a good way of pointing things out by word of mouth in example but, um, we did go through that.
[00:28:26]
The things in our environment aren't anymore. My grandfather lived in Los Angeles, he was a Gabrolino, um, who there was a hundred and fifty left in 1900, but in 1700, there was 10,000 of them. So, um... you know, he put up with that.
[00:28:41]
He was in urban Los Angeles but he did tell those kinds of stories and tried to carry on the tradition that way.

[00:28:47]
Speaker 2: I think story telling is the real key, really key important thing. There is a great deal of story telling, I'm told, going on down in Indian town right now, as well, to keep things alive.

[00:29:00]
Speaker 3: Yea, but, uh... the thing, the people, like the Marimba make like [[Vangaspar?]].
[00:29:07]
They have the story on how the Marimba start and how the people are giving the heritage of making the marimba and how they find the wood, the exact wood for that, um, it's a- including animals [[chuckle]] but like I don't know if we have time now to say that but the thing in [[Canjoval?]] and it will be a long and probably we can write that and put in the [[chuckles]] Smithsonian... ah, como se dice revista?

[00:29:41]
Speaker 2 and 4: uh... Magazine. [[laughter]]

Speaker 3: Magazine. [[laughter]] sometimes.

[00:29:44]
Speaker 2: I should say, though, that um... they have also relied on learning more about other Mayan groups from people, anthropologists like myself and many others.
[00:29:56]
They have become much more aggressively interested in other communities that they didn't know about when they were in Guatemala and weren't able to visit then but where they're now able to find out about this information and, uh, quiz us all the time about what we may know.
[00:30:11]
So that they realizing that their ancestors, many of their ancestors, are now dead and those ancestors were the people who would normally have taught them, um, are much more aggressively themselves seeking out who might know something about their culture and about related Maya cultures in order to keep themselves well informed.
[00:30:30]
In fact, at about, uh, I was talking about this with the Marimba band last night, around ten o'clock, about how important that was and they were practicing until about two, well I faded out about two in the morning and they were still going over some, uh, somewhat esoteric Marimba moves, uh... that they said that they would have been taught by their fathers or grandfathers had they been with them but now they were going to teach each other.