Mary Rowe-Yee was born in 1897 in an adobe house near Santa Barbara, California, the home of her grandmother.
In the late 1890s, Mary was one of only a handful of children brought up to speak any Chumash language.
[4] In her fifties, Mary Yee began to take part in the analysis, description, and documentation of her language, for many years working closely with the linguist John Peabody Harrington, who had also worked with Mary's mother Lucretia García and her grandmother Luisa Ygnacio.
[5] Yee's story appears in the documentary film, 6 Generations: A Chumash Family History (2010) which was co-written by her daughter Ernestine Ygnacio-De Soto.
[9][10] Posthumously, she published a children's book, The Sugar Bear Story (2005), illustrated by her daughter Ernestine Ygnacio-De Soto.