Harrington Project

[Andre Cramblit]

Preserving California's native languages
DATABASE TEAM DECIPHERS A MILLION PAGES OF NOTES
By Lisa Krieger
Mercury News
Article Launched: 12/24/2007 06:09:25 AM PST


Click photo to enlarge



Martha Macri holds up a reel of microfilm containing written notes by  
J.P.... ( Gary Reyes )


Bringing voices from the grave, volunteers at the University of  
California-Davis are working to decipher nearly a million pages of  
notes from conversations with long-gone Native Californians, reviving  
more than 100 languages from the distant past.
Word by word, they type the scribbled and cryptic notes left by John  
Peabody Harrington, an eccentric and tireless linguist who in the  
early 1900s traveled throughout California interviewing the last  
surviving speakers of many native tongues, including the local  
Muwekma Ohlone tribe.
Their effort to organize a database of Harrington's vast material  
will build a Rosetta Stone for these languages and their dialects,  
creating dictionaries of words, phrases and tribal tales and customs  
that were destined to disappear.
"It is an enormous amount, and it is incredibly difficult to read,"  
said Martha Macri, director of the UC-Davis Native American Language  
Center and co-director of the effort to computerize Harrington's papers.
"He was totally obsessive. We've become a bit obsessive ourselves."
His notes tell tales about rocks of gold discovered on Mount Diablo,  
superstitions ("If any man throws at this eagle rock and hits it, his  
wife will bear him twins") and ordinary customs ("The women are  
carrying tule on their backs.") Most are mere phrases ("itr-rezk,  
used to stab a pig" or "chiqueon, a person who hesitates taking food.")
Harrington's


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work
San Jose native Margaret Cayward is using his notes to study native  
music as part of her doctoral thesis at UC-Davis. "It's helping us  
rediscover old knowledge and values in the music," she said. "Music  
was a major part of life for Californians, with ritual or sacred  
significance."
In Fremont, descendants of the Muwekma Ohlone tribe used his notes to  
create Chochenyo flash cards, puzzles and bingo games for their  
children.
In Macri's office, eight large file cabinets are filled with 182  
reels of microfilmed images of Harrington's work, copied from his  
original papers that are stored at the Smithsonian Institution's  
warehouse in Silver Hill, Md. Each reel, costing $1,000, contains 500  
to 2,000 pages of material.
Seven years into the Harrington project, funded by the National  
Science Foundation, it is about two-thirds complete.
Many of the project's most devoted volunteers are Native  
Californians; one person, alone, has transcribed over 3,000 pages.
"They have changed my life," said Linda Yamane of Seaside, who based  
her book of Ohlone tales, called "The Snake That Lived in the Santa  
Cruz Mountains," on his notes. "Along with a lot of hard work and  
perseverance, they've made it possible to bring back my Rumsien  
(Monterey area) Ohlone language and other cultural traditions from  
the brink of extinction."
Hired in 1915 by the Smithsonian Institution, Harrington spent four  
decades wandering California with unbounded freedom to document  
languages before they disappeared.
It was a time when Native Californians faced fierce discrimination.  
Few elders spoke the languages to children, so little information was  
passed on for future generations.
"They trusted him," said Bev Ortiz, an anthropologist at California  
State University-East Bay. "The tribal elders had the wisdom and  
courage to see that the time would come when it would not be bad to  
be an Indian - and the language would be there for their descendants."
Harrington traveled by car and on foot to find surviving speakers,  
collecting maps, photographs, and plant and animal specimens along  
the way. One camping trip, on horseback, took him through the rugged  
Santa Lucia Mountains.
Gifted in phonetics and lexicography, "he spent more of his waking  
hours, week in and week out, transcribing Indian languages than doing  
any other conscious thing," said Victor Golla of Humboldt State  
University. "No linguist, before or since, ever spent so much time  
engaged in the field collection of primary data."
Hidden from colleagues
Yet Harrington published little of his work. Although he sent back  
reports to the Smithsonian, many of his notes seem to have been  
deliberately hidden from colleagues.
"I think he thought he'd get back to them," said Kathryn Klar, a UC- 
Berkeley anthropologist. "He was a top linguist of his time, and he  
didn't want to be under the thumb of those with lesser training."
After his death in 1961, as Smithsonian curators began cataloging his  
papers, they discovered stockpiles of boxes stored in warehouses,  
garages and even chicken coops throughout the West.
Six tons of material - among them Indian-made flutes, Kachina dolls,  
dead birds and tarantulas, baskets, rocks, empty soup cans, half- 
eaten sandwiches, dirty laundry and two shrunken heads from the  
Amazon - eventually arrived at the Smithsonian, filling two warehouses.
Mixed with the squalor were invaluable photographs, sketches, maps,  
correspondence and expense accounts - along with extensive  
translations, a linguistic treasure of the highest order.
"The collection is an American treasure," Klar said.
For the Harrington project workers, the central challenge is  
understanding material that Harrington never meant to share.
His translations of native words are littered with puzzling  
abbreviations. And his notations do not represent a standardized  
phonology, just impressionistic phonetics. Also troubling is his  
practice of shifting, over the years, the symbols used when  
transcribing sounds into words. The bilingual Harrington wrote many  
translations in old California Spanish, with idiosyncratic spelling.
And much of his material is disorganized, with notes about one  
language interspersed with those of another.
"There was a method in his madness. He was trying to get as much down  
as fast as could," Klar said. "But reading it takes endless patience."
Despite the frustrations, the Harrington project team says its  
efforts are slowly shedding light on a long-lost way of life - and  
educating a proud new generation of Native Californians about the  
ways of their ancestors.
"This is not an academic exercise. It is peoples' lives," said Sheri  
Tatsch, a Native American postdoctoral scholar with the project.
"We're learning not only about the languages, but day-to-day life -  
the culture and customs, the politics. A language is a universe; it's  
family, society, religious practices. When you start pulling it out,  
you start to understand."
"These languages never died," she said. "They were just sleeping."


IF YOU'RE INTERESTED
To learn more about the Harrington project, visit: nas.ucdavis.edu/ 
NALC/JPH.html.
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