California: Saving Long-Gone Native Tribal Languages

[Harold Schiffman]

Saving Long-Gone Native Tribal Languages
By JULIANA BARBASSA,Associated Press Writer AP - Sunday, February 24

DAVIS, Calif. - The first time Jose Freeman heard his tribe's lost
language through the crackle of a 70-year-old recording, he cried. "My
ancestors were speaking to me," Freeman said of the sounds captured
when American Indians still inhabited California's Salinas Valley. "It
was like coming home." The last native speaker of Salinan died almost
a half-century ago, but today many indigenous people are finding their
extinct or endangered tongues, one word or song at a time, thanks to a
linguist who died in 1961 and scholars at the University of
California, Davis, who are working to transcribe his life's obsession.
Linguist John Peabody Harrington spent four decades gathering more
than 1 million pages of phonetic notations on languages spoken by
tribes from Alaska to South America. When the technology became
available, he supplemented his written records with audio recordings _
first using wax cylinders, then aluminum discs. In many cases his
notes provide the only record of long-gone languages.

Martha Macri, who teaches California Indian Studies at UC Davis and is
one of the principal researchers on the J.P. Harrington Database
Project, is working with American Indian volunteers to transcribe
Harrington's notations. Researchers hope the words will bridge the
decades of silence separating the people Harrington interviewed from
their descendants. Freeman hopes his 4-month-old great-granddaughter
will grow up with the sense of heritage that comes with speaking her
ancestors' language. "When we lose our language, we're getting cut off
from our roots," he said. "The world view that our ancestors carried
is quite different from the Euro-American world view. And their
language can carry that world view back to us."

Although it will be years before all the material can be made
available, some American Indians connected to the Harrington Project
have already begun putting it to use. Members of Freeman's tribe
gather on their ancestral land every month to practice what they've
learned _ a few words, some grammar, old songs. "The ultimate outcome
is to get it back to the communities it came from," Macri said. By all
accounts, Harrington was a devoted, if somewhat eccentric, scholar.
Sometimes he spent 20 or 30 minutes on one word, saying it over and
over until the person he was interviewing agreed he'd gotten the
pronunciation correct, said Jack Marr, who met Harrington as a
12-year-old boy and worked as his assistant into his 20s.

"They trusted him," Marr said of the Indians they worked with. "A lot
of people, if they tried to walk in and say 'I want to record you,'
they'd get thrown out. But not Harrington. I think people recognized
that we were doing this for posterity." Harrington's sense of urgency
animates the letters he sent to Marr nearly every day. "Rain or no
rain, rush," Harrington said in one letter. "Dying languages depend on
you." However, that same drive has confounded efforts to pass the
words down to new generations. For instance, Harrington was so focused
on gathering information that he spent little time polishing his work
for publication, according to Marr. He hated wasting precious time
being cooped up in an office.

And he was so deeply mistrustful of other researchers that he stashed
much of his research as he traveled, deliberately keeping it out of
reach of his colleagues. He kept even his employers at the Bureau of
American Ethnology _ now the National Anthropological Archives _ in
the dark about where he was and what he was doing, routing his mail
through Marr's mother to cover his tracks.
After his death, the federal archives received boxes of Harrington's
notes, recordings and other material from people who found them in
barns and basements across the West. It took the archives until 1991
to transfer the voluminous notes to microfilm.
While linguists, archaeologists, botanists and others have spent the
years since combing through the files, Macri says the trove of
information has remained all but inaccessible to members of the tribes
themselves.

The Harrington Project was created with the goal of returning the
words to the people who can imbue them with life again, as well as
making the material more accessible to scholars. The researchers are
teaching tribal members across California how to read Harrington's
cramped handwriting and decipher his notation system. Macri's team
focuses on the more than 100 California languages Harrington
catalogued, such as Wiyot, Serrano and Luiseno, for which there are
few other records. "It would be hard to exaggerate the linguistic
diversity that existed at one time in California," Macri said. "It was
more common to be multilingual than not."

Jacob Gutierrez, a member of the San Gabriel Band of Mission Indians _
"Pipiimaram," in the tribe's own language _ has decoded all the
material Harrington gathered on his people _ over 6,000 pages, and is
now working on information about their linguistic neighbors.
"I find it to be the most rewarding work I have ever done," he said.
"Every new word, story or song is an absolute treasure for me and my
people." Karen Santana, who started working on Harrington's notes
about her Central Pomo tribe while she was a student at UC Davis, is
drawing plans for a dictionary with phonetic spellings. "I want to
develop a system that will make sense to others," Santana said. "It's
a lifelong goal, publishing something so that my tribe can refer to."

Marr said Harrington would have been satisfied to see languages born
again from his notes and recordings. "But he would have felt very sad
he didn't get more. He always wanted to do more."

___

On the Net:

Harrington Database Project: http://nas.ucdavis.edu/NALC/JPH.html

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