The result of this relationship with the San Juan Capistrano Mission eventually cost the Juanenos their culture (as it did many other groups). The present day Juanenos had no knowledge of their traditions, beliefs, language, songs or rituals. They borrowed from some groups, but for all intense end purposes, their culture was lost forever. That is until about five years ago.
About five years ago a worker at the Smithsonian made an interesting discovery while working in one of the storerooms. Tucked away under some tarps in a corner of the storeroom were some strange waxy hollow cylinders. What were the cylinders? Well, here we have to back up a moment for our younger audience. Today we have smooth shiny disks about 5" in diameter, and when we put these disks in our "magic boxes" strange and wondrous sounds come out. But years before this we had little thin rectangles (they replace the larger rectangles from earlier period) that we could put into "magic boxes." And before that we had strange grooved flat disks that varied in size. But before all of this took place, the original design; hollow cylinders made of wax were used to record and play back sounds. Of course, we are talking about Edison's invention, the Phonograph.
What were on these old phonograph cylinders? Well, it seems that an ethnographer/linguist took Edison's new invention west. In the west, in California, their research used the phonograph to record sounds. The sounds of an old Juaneno woman who sang her culture's songs and told its tales, myths, and legends. The recordings were pre-recorded on tape to save them in a more stable medium. The Juanenos had their language and their culture back.
