A Comm for Historymemes

Just in California's central valley region, we lost hundreds of languages. Again, post-contact, so we're functionally dealing with a post-apocalypse civilization, but oftentimes tribes were fairly small here and controlled fairly small geographic territories. The Spanish document that travelling, even with guides, was frustrating because their guides would go through four or five languages in an excursion, and would often end up in areas where they didn't know the language.

Yeah, 100%, the amount of knowledge that was lost or just outright destroyed is awful. Most of what we know, we know because the Spanish wrote it down, and IIRC it's known that missionaries would often distort what they heard to fit a Christian narrative in order to make later conversion easier.