Researcher gives the Chumash a gift: their heritage (fwd link)

[Phillip E Cash Cash]

Researcher gives the Chumash a gift: their heritage

John Peabody Harrington relentlessly studied Indian families for
decades. Today, a 71-year-old woman who considered him a pest is
grateful for his intense scholarship.

By Steve Chawkins
January 31, 2010
USA, The LA Times

Everyone thought the tall, strange white man was some kind of genius.
But to teenage Ernestine De Soto he was a giant pain in the neck, a
nosy, "Ichabod Crane-like" character who drew her mother's attention
from its rightful place -- on her.

John Peabody Harrington studied De Soto's Chumash family for nearly 50
years, pumping her great-grandmother, her grandmother and her mother
for the tiniest details of their lives. Everything fascinated him: the
Chumash names of places mostly forgotten, of fish no longer caught --
even, to the family's puzzlement, of private parts never discussed in
polite company. A brilliant linguist and anthropologist, Harrington
had been just as relentless with countless Indian families throughout
the West, but that didn't impress the young Ernestine.

"I was just a brat to him," she said. "He'd never speak to me if he
could help it."

Toward the end of his life, Harrington was ravaged by Parkinson's
disease, and De Soto's mother spoon-fed the lonely old man. Sometimes
De Soto's 5-year-old daughter would tickle his feet. In a few months,
he would die, poor and obscure, most of his obsessively collected
notes gathering dust in barn lofts and attics. But over time his work
would profoundly influence De Soto and many other Native Americans
whose heritage was on the verge of vanishing.

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http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-ernestine31-2010jan31,0,2405463,full.story