Late linguist saves dying tongues

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,” said Freeman of the sounds captured when American Indians still inhabited California’s Salinas Valley. “It was like coming home.”

Although the last native speaker of Salinan died almost half a century ago, more and more indigenous people are finding their extinct or endangered tongues, one word or song at a time, thanks to a late linguist and some UC Davis scholars who are working to transcribe his life’s obsession.

Driven to record the native languages he saw disappearing all around him, 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 record with audio recordings -- first using wax cylinders, then aluminum discs.

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 phonetic notations. Once entered into a database that tribes can access, researchers hope the words will bridge the decades-long silence separating the people Harrington interviewed from their descendants.

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 of their language -- a few words, some grammar, old songs.

“The ultimate outcome is to get it back to the communities it came from,” Macri said. “There is so much cultural knowledge embedded in language.”

By all accounts, Harrington, who died in 1961, 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.

The Indians they worked with trusted him, Marr said. “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.”

The linguist’s sense of urgency animates the letters he sent to Marr nearly every day.

“Rain or no rain, rush,” Harrington said in signing off one such dispatch. “Dying languages depend on you.”

But the same impulse that made him successful -- in many cases his notes provide the only record of long-gone languages -- would also confound later efforts to pass the words down to new generations.

Harrington was so focused on gathering information that he spent little time polishing his work for publication, according to Marr. He hated being “cooped up” in an office, wasting precious time on papers, Marr said. Deeply mistrustful of other researchers, 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 began receiving boxes of material Harrington had stored away from people who came across it in barns and basements across the West. They were stuffed with old clothes and religious artifacts, notes and recordings, and even the buns and crackers Harrington kept in his pockets so he wouldn’t have to waste time looking for meals.

Decades of sorting and categorizing followed. The National Anthropological Archive finally finished transferring Harrington’s notes to microfilm in 1991.

Linguists, archaeologists, botanists and others have spent the years since combing through the files. But microfilm readers are expensive, and reading the notations requires some training, said Macri.

So the treasure trove of information on lost native languages remained all but inaccessible to the people with the greatest interest in reviving them -- members of the tribes themselves.

The Harrington Project was created with the goal of returning the words to those 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 the notation system he devised, then sort the information into searchable categories.

For now, Macri’s team is focused on the more than 100 California languages Harrington cataloged, such as Wiyot, Serrano and Luiseno, for which there are few records other than Harrington’s work.

“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 been working on the project for 2 1/2 years. He has decoded all the material Harrington gathered on his people -- more than 6,000 pages, and is now working on information about their linguistic neighbors to the north.

“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.”

Gutierrez has developed a rudimentary map of villages where his language was spoken by charting Harrington’s travels with the mileage and route information he left.

At gatherings with other tribe members, he’s also sung religious songs unheard for decades.

Karen Santana, who started working on Harrington’s notes about her Central Pomo tribe while she was a student at UC Davis, is now drawing plans for a dictionary with phonetic spellings that could help tribe members sound out long-forgotten words.

“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.”

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.”

Wondering aloud whether Harrington would have been satisfied to see languages born again from his notes and recordings, Marr said, “It’s gratifying.”

“But he would have felt very sad he didn’t get more. He always wanted to do more.”