[lg policy] Smithsonian archives preserve lost and dying languages

Tue Jan 21 19:52:50 UTC 2014

*Smithsonian archives preserve lost and dying languages*

[image:
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]<http://www.washingtonpost.com/posttv/national/scientists-study-rare-languages-to-unlock-secrets/2014/01/17/aceaee5c-7fb8-11e3-93c1-0e888170b723_video.html>

*Video: *Eighty percent of the world's languages are spoken by very small
communities, leaving whole knowledge systems hidden from the global
understanding.

*By Guy Gugliotta, Published: January 20 E-mail the writers
<health-science at washpost.com;?subject=Reader%20feedback%20for%20%27Smithsonian%20archives%20preserve%20lost%20and%20dying%20languages%27>
*

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.

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.

[image:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/rf/image_296w/2010-2019/WashingtonPost/2014/01/13/Others/Images/2014-01-13/003273001389644111.jpg]<http://www.washingtonpost.com/handout-photo-191/2014/01/16/6b040892-7c8f-11e3-97d3-b9925ce2c57b_modal.html>

(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.

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.

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.

*Preserving voices*

 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.

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.

*Native American visitors*

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.

“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.”

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.

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.

The archives constantly receive new material and each addition offers new
insights, some of which have nothing to do with language.

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.

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.

*Learning a ‘lost’ language*

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.

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.

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?”

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.

“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.”

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.”

*Gugliotta, a former Washington Post science reporter, is a freelance
writer based in New York. *

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

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 Harold F. Schiffman

Professor Emeritus of
 Dravidian Linguistics and Culture
Dept. of South Asia Studies
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305

Phone:  (215) 898-7475
Fax:  (215) 573-2138

Email:  haroldfs at gmail.com
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/

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