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</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal"><b><span style="font-size:24pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">Smithsonian archives preserve lost and dying languages</span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;line-height:normal"><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/posttv/national/scientists-study-rare-languages-to-unlock-secrets/2014/01/17/aceaee5c-7fb8-11e3-93c1-0e888170b723_video.html"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";color:blue;text-decoration:none"><span style><img src="file:///C:\Users\user\AppData\Local\Temp\msohtmlclip1\01\clip_image001.jpg" alt="http://img.washingtonpost.com/rf/image_606w/2010-2019/WashingtonPost/2014/01/17/National-Enterprise/Images/Screen_Shot_2014-01-17_at_3.47.02_PM.jpg" border="0" width="606" height="340"></span></span></a><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif""></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal"><b><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">Video: </span></b><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">Eighty percent of the world's languages are spoken by very
small communities, leaving whole knowledge systems hidden from the global
understanding. <br></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif""><br></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal"><b><span style="font-size:13.5pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">By
Guy Gugliotta, Published: January 20 <a href="mailto:health-science@washpost.com;?subject=Reader%20feedback%20for%20%27Smithsonian%20archives%20preserve%20lost%20and%20dying%20languages%27"><span style="color:blue">E-mail the writers</span></a> </span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">Daryl Baldwin learned about the
Smithsonian’s National Anthropological Archives when he was trying to find out
more about his Native American heritage and the language of his tribe, the
Miami of Oklahoma.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">He was 28 and working construction
in Ohio when he came across some Miami words his late grandfather had written
in his personal papers. Baldwin knew nothing of the language except some
ancestral names, but the words piqued his interest. There were no Miami
speakers left, but a friend mentioned the archives, an immense hoard of
recorded voices, documents and other materials describing more than 250
languages from all over the world.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;line-height:normal"><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/handout-photo-191/2014/01/16/6b040892-7c8f-11e3-97d3-b9925ce2c57b_modal.html"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";color:blue;text-decoration:none"><span style><img src="file:///C:\Users\user\AppData\Local\Temp\msohtmlclip1\01\clip_image002.jpg" alt="http://www.washingtonpost.com/rf/image_296w/2010-2019/WashingtonPost/2014/01/13/Others/Images/2014-01-13/003273001389644111.jpg" border="0" width="296" height="197"></span></span></a><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif""></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">(Harris & Ewing/National
Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution) - Blackfoot chief Mountain
Chief listens to a song and interprets it in sign language to ethnologist
Frances Densmore of the Bureau of American Ethnology. The session took place in
1916 at the Smithsonian Institution.</span></p>
<p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:0.0001pt;text-align:center;line-height:normal" align="center"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif""> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">The archives had been accumulating
for more than 150 years, the findings of scholars, explorers, soldiers and
travelers, and was now stored in a vast warehouse on a grassy campus in
Suitland. It included copious material on about 200 Native American languages,
many of them endangered, and a considerable number, like Miami, with no
remaining native speakers.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif""><br></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">Eventually Baldwin made the trip to
see what the archives had on his ancestral language. There was plenty. With the
archives’ help, he taught himself Miami and has been speaking and studying it
for 24 years. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal"><b><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">Preserving voices</span></b></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal"><b><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif""><br>
</span></b><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif""> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">The archives have the equivalent of
two miles of shelves of dictionaries, word lists, field notes, journals,
manuscripts, correspondence, reports, maps, catalogue cards and printed memorabilia.
There are more than a million photographs, 20,000 works of indigenous art, 8
million feet of original film and videotape and more than 3,000 sound
recordings of various languages: wax cylinders, aluminum discs, reel-to-reel
tape, cassettes and CDs. The Cheyenne, from the Great Plains, are represented
by 149 grammars, manuscripts and other items. There are two papers describing
the speakers of Yapese, from the island of Yap, in Micronesia.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">The Native American materials date
to the 1850s, when the early Smithsonian mailed questionnaires to army forts
and trading posts on the western frontier, asking settlers and travelers to
compile word lists so the young United States could learn and preserve
indigenous languages whose future, even then, was threatened. These
fill-in-the-blanks circulars start with nouns (“God,” “devil” and “angel” are
the first three queries) and move on to verbs, adjectives, adverbs and
prepositions. One 1852 form offered more than 300 entries transcribed from the
language spoken by the Ojibwa, or Chippewa, who lived in Michigan, Wisconsin,
Minnesota and Ontario.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal"><b><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">Native American visitors</span></b><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif""> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">When Baldwin began studying Miami in
the early 1990s, few scholars knew about the extent of the archives, or even of
its existence. Today, encouraged by Smithsonian staff and their own leaders,
Native Americans from across the country are visiting it to learn about their
language and heritage.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">“Language is not just one thing. It
has a cultural and community context,” Baldwin said. “We have to get the
knowledge to the community, and the archives are the historical repository
where you can find all the different resources.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">Today Baldwin directs a Miami
language and cultural institute, the Myaamia Center, at Miami University, in
Oxford, Ohio, and is closely allied with the Smithsonian in the National Museum
of Natural History’s Recovering Voices program, which promotes the archives as
a tool in restoring and revitalizing native languages.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">Recovering Voices organizes a
biennial workshop for around 60 Native American delegates to learn about the
archives and attend seminars on how to use linguistics as a teaching aid. Last
year, 19 tribes sent representatives, including the Miwok and Maidu, from
central California; the Pawnee, from Kansas and Nebraska; the Powhatan, from
Virginia; and the Nipmuck, from Massachusetts.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">The archives constantly receive new
material and each addition offers new insights, some of which have nothing to
do with language.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">When head archivist Gina Rappaport
examined 700 photographic negatives from Edward S. Curtis’s iconic 20-volume
“The North American Indian,” completed in 1930, she found that Curtis,
primarily an art photographer, had doctored some raw negatives to remove
troublesome but revealing incongruities. The raw negative of one famous image
had a Hopi woman standing on top of an adobe building holding an open umbrella.
The printed photo had no umbrella. Another raw negative showed two men in
ceremonial dress with an alarm clock on the ground between them. In the
published photo, the alarm clock had disappeared.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">But the core of the archives are
collections gathered by such tireless researchers as John Peabody Harrington,
whose work takes up 683 feet of shelf space and has information on more than
130 indigenous languages he documented in the early and mid-1900s for the
Smithsonian’s Bureau of American Ethnology. For Baldwin, the key materials were
notes and reports by Swiss-born linguist Albert Samuel Gatchet, who, in the
years straddling the beginning of the 20th century, documented Miami vocabulary
and compiled a grammar.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal"><b><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">Learning a ‘lost’ language</span></b><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif""> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">Baldwin left construction work,
enrolled in the University of Montana and eventually earned a master’s degree
in linguistics. “There was still a lot of rhetoric in graduate school about
‘lost’ or ‘extinct’ languages,” Baldwin recalled. “But I always felt that if
there were materials and communities that were interested, there was no such
thing.” So he and his wife home-schooled their four children in the Miami
language and proved that it was not extinct. All use Miami in their family
life, and the Miami tribe of Oklahoma hired Baldwin’s eldest son, Jarrid, 23,
as a language instructor.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">Baldwin and linguist David Costa,
the friend who first directed him to the Smithsonian archives, have built on
the work of Gatchet, but after more than 20 years have only looked at only
30 percent of the available material.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">When Recovering Voices began in
2009, it sought not only to help bring Native Americans in contact with
threatened languages but also to “learn why languages cease to be spoken,” said
program manager Ruth Rouvier. “Why does it happen, and what can we do about
it?”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">Rouvier is a disciple of Leanne
Hinton, a University of California at Berkeley linguist who in the early 1990s
was one of the first to focus on vanishing Native American languages and ways
to keep them alive. She created a project called Breath of Life, bringing
indigenous Californians to Berkeley to use the university archives. This
concept — letting the research serve the people from whom the material was
collected — has spread widely and lies at the core of Recovering Voices.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">“I’ve been a Breath of Life
instructor, and it is very important that people have access to these heritage documents,”
said Baldwin, whose Myaamia center leads planning for the next Recovering
Voices workshop. “There’s not only the ‘wow!’ factor. There have been instances
where people found material on specific ancestors and have even heard a
great-grandmother’s voice. The work is not just about language, but about
recovering pieces of your identity.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">What gives the archive an even
greater impact, perhaps, is that the experts who collected the documents
probably never thought they would be used again. “They recognized that
languages and traditions were being lost, and they documented them for
posterity,” Rouvier said. “I wonder what they would think now.”</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal"><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif""><br></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal"><i><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"">Gugliotta, a former Washington Post
science reporter, is a freelance writer based in New York. <br></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height:normal"><br><i><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif""></span></i><span style="font-size:12pt;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif""></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/smithsonian-archives-preserve-lost-and-dying-languages/2014/01/17/2a2c3218-74a1-11e3-8b3f-b1666705ca3b_story.html?tid=auto_complete">http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/smithsonian-archives-preserve-lost-and-dying-languages/2014/01/17/2a2c3218-74a1-11e3-8b3f-b1666705ca3b_story.html?tid=auto_complete</a></p>
<br clear="all"><br>-- <br>=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+<br><br> Harold F. Schiffman<br><br>Professor Emeritus of <br> Dravidian Linguistics and Culture <br>Dept. of South Asia Studies <br>University of Pennsylvania<br>
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305<br><br>Phone: (215) 898-7475<br>Fax: (215) 573-2138 <br><br>Email: <a href="mailto:haroldfs@gmail.com">haroldfs@gmail.com</a><br><a href="http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/">http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/</a> <br>
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