New Virtual Finding Aids for Two Linguistic Anthropology Collections

Linguistic Anthropology is the study of the effects of communication—in all its diversity and forms—on society and whether differences in language and its usage relate to differences in the way the world is perceived and understood.¹ The two anthropologists discussed in this blogpost whose materials are at the National Anthropological Archive studied different aspects of communication. Garrick Mallery focused on sign language and pictorial representations, while William A. Smalley focused on the written language.

Garrick Mallery (1831-1894)

Pen & ink drawings of Native American sign language prepared for use in the BAE 1st Annual Report (1879-1880), MS 2372 Garrick Mallery Collection on Sign Language and Pictography, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution.

Garrick Mallery pioneered the study of sign language and pictographs. He developed an interest in Native American sign language and pictography while serving in the Union Army during the Civil War and was one of the first ethnologists to join the Bureau of American Ethnology in 1879. Under the BAE’s auspices, he collected and examined sign language vocabulary from Native American groups throughout the U.S. and Canada. He additionally related the Native American sign language he documented to examples from the wider world, both of hearing individuals and the deaf.

Plate of Neapolitan gestures prepared for use in the BAE 1st Annual Report (1879-1880), MS 2372 Garrick Mallery Collection on Sign Language and Pictography, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution.

Mallery completed several publications on the topic of Native American sign language throughout the 1880s, notably Introduction to the Study of Sign language Among the North American Indians (1880), A Collection of Gesture- Signs and Signals of the North American Indians (1880), and "Sign-language among North American Indians Compared with that Among other People and Deaf-mutes," which appeared in the BAE 1st Annual Report (1881). Many of these publications (some annotated by collaborators) are included in MS 2372 Garrick Mallery Collection on Sign Language and Pictography.

Although he is most widely known for his work with sign language, he also performed extensive research into Native American pictography, with a particular interest in Dakota and Lakota winter counts and petroglyphs (examples of winter counts and copies of petroglyphs are included within the collection).

Battiste Good’s Winter Count (page 19), MS 2372 Garrick Mallery Collection on Sign Language and Pictography, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution.

William Smalley (1923-1997)

Like Chris Gjording, whom I discussed in my last blog entry, Smalley coupled anthropology with Christian ministry. The child of missionaries, he was born in Jerusalem in 1923. He developed an interest in anthropology while an undergraduate at Houghton College because he felt that was relevant to missionary work. He attended the Missionary Training Institute (1945-1946), the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) at the University of Oklahoma (1946-1947) for training in linguistics for Bible translation, and Columbia University’s graduate program in anthropology with a concentration in linguistics. Smalley worked on language analysis problems in the southern region of Vietnam when he was sent there by the Christian and Missionary Alliance in 1950. After Vietnam, he was sent to Luang Prabang, Laos, in 1951. While in Laos, Smalley developed the Hmong Romanized Popular Alphabet (RPA) with Reverend G. Linwood Barney and Father Yves Bertrais. He and his wife returned to the United States when civil war broke out in Laos in 1954. His dissertation focused on his work on the Khmu’ language and he received his doctorate from Columbia in 1956. His dissertation was later published, in abbreviated form, in 1961 as Outline of Khmu' Structure.

Sayaboury Script. The William A. Smalley papers, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution.

His work with the Hmong language continued after he became a professor of linguistics at Bethel University in 1978 and found the large Hmong community in the Twin Cities. He studied the adaptation of the Hmong to life in America with the University of Minnesota Southeast Asia Refugee Studies Program, publishing "Adaptive Language Strategies of the Hmong: From Asian Mountains to American Ghettos" (1985) and "Stages of Hmong Cultural Adaptation" (1986). Smalley also continued his study of the Hmong written language, as new scripts had been developed since his participation in the creation of RPA (such as Sayaboury Script, pictured above). He was particularly interested in the Pahwah script, which had been created by Shong Lue Yang in Laos. In addition to studying the script, he studied its creator, and published two books on the subject: Mother of Writing: The Origin and Development of a Hmong Messianic Script (1990) and The Life of Shong Lue Yang: Hmong "Mother of Writing" (1990), both of which he co-authored with Chia Koua Vang and Gnia Yee Yang.

Smalley also studied the languages and dialects of Thailand. He lived in Thailand from 1962 to 1967 and from 1969 to 1972 while working as a translation consultant for the American Bible Society and as a translations coordinator and consultant for the United Bible Societies. He later returned to Thailand as a Fulbright research fellow in 1985 and 1986. He published Linguistic Diversity and National Unity: Language Ecology in Thailand (1994); "Thailand's Hierarchy of Multilingualism" (1988); and "Language and Power: Evolution of Thailand's Multilingualism" (1996) as a result of his work there.

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¹ “Linguistic anthropology,” Encyclopedia Britannica, accessed September 2, 2020, https://www.britannica.com/science/anthropology/Linguistic-anthropology.

Katherine Christensen

Contract Archivist, National Anthropological Archives

The Science of Language Revitalization

Recovering Voices aims to make the Smithsonian’s collections more accessible and create opportunities for language and knowledge revitalization. We host workshops, symposia, seminars, and public events on a variety of topics, in collaboration with our partners within the Smithsonian and around the world. One of the largest programs we organize is the National Breath of Life Archival Institute for Indigenous Languages.

Over the past four iterations of the National Breath of Life, participants have contributed towards shaping the concept of a community researcher. They come from various professions, trades, and academic backgrounds, traveling together from their home communities to work on revitalizing or reclaiming their native language. They are, at the same time, cultural experts and advocates of language and cultural conservation. They are scholars of their language. After 2 weeks of linguistics instruction, they demonstrate a sound understanding and command of a number of linguistic tools and methodology, naturally draw on them, and actively utilize this science throughout their research projects.

The fourth National Breath of Life, hosted by the Smithsonian Institution and the Myaamia Center, successfully concluded on Friday June 9, 2017. The workshop ended with each group of community researchers presenting their final projects, demonstrating what they had learned and discovered, and what their research plans would be beyond Breath of Life. The 2-week institute and the final project presentations were evidence of the high caliber of knowledge, expertise, and scientific rigor acquired by Breath of Life participants.

Photographs held by archives are sometimes/many times/just as important as the manuscript materials. The Haida language group took some time to study photographs of historic Haida villages. Photo by James Di Loreto.

For their final project, the Hupa group chose a seemingly simplistic project to translate the meaning of a number of the Breath of Life participants’ names into the hupa language. The project turned out to be everything but simplistic! To achieve this, the researcher carried out an analysis of sociocultural particulars (death taboos, sociocultural roles), cultural values and equivalents across cultures (ethnographic analysis), community origins and archeological evidence for it (i.e. carved writing on stone at community house dated 10,000 years), as well as cross-linguistic etymological research. The project required knowledge of specialized vocabulary and sentence structure in the Hupa language.

For their final presentation, the Haida language group told a story in Haida. Photo by Ashleigh Arrington.

The Haida participants presented a Haida narrative from the archives, connecting it to new learnings about Haida grammar and culture, which they in turn presented with the help of photos from the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) collections. To do this, the research team determined that they needed to jointly transcribe into Haida the practical orthography in a text from the J.R. Swanton 1900-1901 materials in the National Anthropological Archives (NAA) collection - (Stiidgaa Ḵ’amaalaa #22), and identify grammatical forms of particular interest that are not commonly known. Finally, they highlighted interesting cultural contexts of the story as it relates to place, artifacts, and knowledge. This project demanded analysis of orthographic representation in archival documentation and an understanding of current orthographic practices, as well as careful analysis of syntax and semantics across two very structurally distinct languages. All of this accomplished in just a few days’ time.

Getting down to business, Myaamia Center and Recovering Voices staff meet with the Tututni group working on the RVIDA pilot. Photo by Judith Andrews.

One important mission of BOL is setting the researchers up for success post-BOL. After four years of workshops and follow up with participants, Directors Gabriela Pérez Báez and Daryl Baldwin recognized a need for a very precise tool that community researchers could use beyond BOL to manage the copious data that emerges from the archival research. In response to this need, this year BOL piloted the Recovering Voices Indigenous Digital Archive (RVIDA). Baldwin and Pérez Báez are now actively planning a roll out of RVIDA to be available to communities across North America.

Classroom instruction makes up only part of what the Breath of Life Community researchers learn during the Institute. Photo by Ashleigh Arrington.

It could be said that Breath of Life represents a snapshot of a growing trend in language reclamation and revitalization in North America and globally. Tribes and communities are seeking opportunities and support, and seizing them to both prevent further loss of culture and language, and to rebuild their communities and the language they share. Breath of Life is one program, held every two years, attempting to meet this growing demand and provide the training groups need to get to the next level. It is the hope that the Breath of Life model will continue to serve language revitalization and inspire the next generation of community research scientists.

Sarah Baburi, Recovering Voices Program Assistant
Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History

Stories from Ethnographic Field Diaries in the Edward C. Green Collection

On October 27, 1971, anthropologist Ted Green was on the way to the airport with his wife and one-year-old son to begin his doctoral field research among the Matawai Maroons in Suriname. “1st day must be worst in anthropological history,” he wrote as the first line of his fresh field notebook. “Attaché case and tape case lost en route to airport containing everything. I’m set back a year, if indeed I can start work at all now. Complete despair.” In the cases were traveler’s checks, letters of introduction, and the family’s medications – essential items for a long foreign stay. More bad news was to follow: “Other things screwed up: house promised not available, museum friend has emigrated, etc. etc.” Fortunately for Green and his family, the cases were found the next day and sent on to meet him in Suriname. “Awoke this morning to learn via phone from Washington that both cases found…Fantastic good fortune. Contents were priceless, irreplaceable,” Green noted.

A page of a field notebook, Suriname, 1971, Box 4, Edward C. Green papers, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution.

Green would spend the next two years in Suriname with his family, documenting the Matawai dialect of the Saramaccan language and Matawai kinship structures. (Green’s dissertation, completed in 1974, was entitled “The Matawai Maroons: An Acculturating Afro-American Society.”)

Ted Green in Suriname, 1974, Box 3, Edward C. Green papers, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution.

The field notebooks he kept during this time now reside among the Edward C. Green papers, c. 1970-2016 at the National Anthropological Archives (NAA). In addition to standard field note fare – such as interviews, observations, and analysis – Green’s field notebooks capture intimate moments where his professional life as a doctoral student intersected with his personal life as a husband and father. Green’s young son borrowed his father’s notebooks for handwriting practice. Scrawls and loops in earlier notebooks turn into doodles in later ones, with big block-lettered “TIMMY” scratched across pages. The antics of the family dog, Karl, make the cut as well, as do the concerns and ethnographic observations of Green’s first wife, Shannon.

In December 1971, Green wrote, “We flew to Jacobkondre because we were afraid the boat trip would be dangerous for the baby…Gaddan [Jarien Gaddan, a member of Parliament] and the village (missionary) schoolteachers were quite interested in us. We were given a house by the airstrip, the upstairs of which is used for radioing Paramaribo. Then Gaddan and the plane left. A number of children came over to look at Timmy and our big dog, and soon they were all playing.” Perhaps no notebook entry is so dramatic as the opening salvo, but the diaries nevertheless capture the intimate and messy process of ethnographic field work – including the loss of traveler’s checks and their miraculous recovery!

Three field notebooks, Suriname, 1971-1972, Box 4, Edward C. Green papers, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution.

The Edward C. Green papers, c. 1970-2016 were processed with funding from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. The collection is open for research at the NAA. A finding aid for the collection is available on the Smithsonian Online Virtual Archives (SOVA). Sound recordings in the collection, including field interviews among the Matawai, are currently being digitized process so they can be made available online within the next year.

Kate Madison, Processing Archivist
National Anthropological Archives

Flash Forward Friday: National Breath of Life Institute Coming this June!

2015 National Breath of Life participants. Photo by Judith Andrews, Recovering Voices, Smithsonian Institution.

In June of 2017 the National Breath of Life institute for indigenous languages will be coming back to our nation’s capital for the fourth time! The two week, hands-on workshop provides native community members access to archival materials that can help revitalize lost and endangered languages.  Along with the National Anthropological Archives (NMNH) and the Library of Congress, the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) Archive Center has been happy provide access to the language and cultural materials in our archival collections as a part of this program.

Breath of Life not only brings to the forefront the importance of maintaining and making accessible archival collections, but for us at NMAI has also been a jumping off point for communication and collaboration between the archivists at NMAI and the native researchers who come to DC as a part of this program. Since 2011, when the National Breath of Life institute was first held, we have discovered language materials in our collections, particularly in the Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation records, that we didn’t even realize we had. Following the 2015 program, the NMAI Archive Center sent out over 2000 pages of digitized documents from the MAI, Heye Foundation records to native researchers for further study and use in their community projects.

Sky Campbell doing research  at the NMAI Archive Center as part of the 2013 Breath of Life archival institute, 2013. The records he is viewing are part of Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation records. Photo by Rachel Menyuk, NMAI.

I would highly recommend reading further about the program on their website. Applications for the two week program are currently available online and the deadline is November 1st, just in time for the end of American Archives month!

2017 Breath of Life Applications Available

You can read about Sky Campbell’s (Otoe-Missouria Language director) experience in the NMAI Archive Center during the 2013 Breath of Life program here:

Otoe–Missouria Language Director Sky Campbell shares his experience at the NMAI Archive Center

Rachel Menyuk, Archives Technician
National Museum of the American Indian, Archive Center

Waxing poetic: Digitizing cylinder recordings

The National Anthropological Archives has been hard at work over the past two years digitizing our entire collection of sound recordings as part of a push to provide access to endangered language and culture. As the Arcadia Fund-supported project wraps up, we’re digging deep within the collection and coming up with some particularly esoteric recording formats. One of these formats is the wax cylinder, one of the earliest media for recording sound. Anthropologists such as John Peabody Harrington, Frances Densmore, and Jesse Walter Fewkes used this technology to make field recordings of American Indian language and music, lugging phonographs around the country to record speakers and performers. The NAA holds a collection of 13 wax cylinders of American Indian songs and dances, dating from the early 20th century, whose provenance is unknown. Since we don’t have the equipment to play these recordings safely, all our information comes from the labels scribbled on the containers—making for a mystery that can hopefully be solved through digitization.

The NAA’s archival holdings include a collection of 13 mysterious wax cylinders.

A few factors make this format particularly complicated to digitize. For one thing, few archives have cylinder phonographs lying around to even play the cylinders. The phonograph disc (which would evolve into modern-day vinyl records) won the market as early as the 1910s, and cylinders fell quickly out of favor—as a comparison, imagine trying to find a Betamax player in 2080. Another set of difficulties comes with the physical qualities of the format. Wax is soft enough that a few seconds of heat from your fingers will expand the surface and damage the etched sound recordings. Even playback on a period machine can damage the cylinders; many older phonographs had particularly heavy styluses, which allows for louder playback but causes degradation and even gouging in the grooves.

This wax cylinder (housed in an original Edison casing) had cracks and gouges, a sign of the fragility of the format.

These obstacles to access and preservation may be significant, but these recordings looked to be an invaluable resource to anthropologists and others who study languages and culture. Luckily, we were able to turn to an expert: David Giovannoni. David is a specialist in early audio media who owns an Archeophone, a modern machine with a gentle enough playback system that—when operated by a professional!—can safely play and record these wax cylinders. As he mounted the first cylinder, we leaned forward in anticipation as the stylus lowered and music crackled to life. We were listening to turn-of-the-century sound on the era’s own media—it doesn’t get much better than this for an archivist.

The Archeophone will play and transfer any type of cylinder recording, making it invaluable for archives specializing in early sound.

The cylinders turned out to be a selection of mostly love songs and lullabies. Though their origins remain undetermined, announcements at the beginning of the recordings along with the handwritten labels lead us to think they come from Plains and Southwest tribes. This information makes for a start in describing the cylinders, a process that will continue with the delivery of archival-quality sound files. These files will eventually be made available to visitors to the NAA, allowing for research and (hopefully) further identification by the public—all in a day’s work in the pursuit of knowledge through access!

Click here to download and listen to a brief sample of one of the transfers we made, introduced as “Indian Love Song.”

Annie Schweikert, Media Archivist
Human Studies Film Archives

Krio: Creole language of Sierra Leone

Krio, a creole language credited with unifying most if not all of Sierra Leone is thought to have originated during the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and over time developed as a method of communication between newly freed African slaves, as well as returned British and American Blacks, West Indians, and natives originally from the African Coast who settled in the West African nation during the early to mid-19th century.

Sign before entering the British Slave Castle ruins.  Dr. Turner took this image while conducting field work in Bunce Island, Sierra Leone, 1951. Lorenzo Dow Turner papers, 1895-1972, Anacostia Community Museum Archives, Smithsonian Institution, gift of Lois Turner Williams. 

Linguist Lorenzo Dow Turner had a special interest in the Krio language due to its history and structure, and similarity to the Gullah language spoken in America. Turner was fascinated with the origins of the African diaspora in countries like America and Brazil so Turner focused his scholarship on drawing conclusions and highlighting the similarities of commonly associated patterns of speech, processes of thought, and ways of life so typically exemplified in Black communities in the West.

In 1951 Turner conducted fieldwork in Sierra Leone.  In the backdrop of Turner’s visit was the founding of the SLPP, the Sierra Leone’s People’s party, whose members had advocated for the political independence of the Protectorate, and who would later come to dominate the political arena in Sierra Leone late into the 1960s. Present among the throng of political unrest, Turner was not only able to capture the underlining social, political, and economic issues occurring in West Africa but interview one of the most  influential African linguists in Sierra Leone: Thomas Leighton Decker.

In interviewing Decker and other informants, Turner was able to discover and examine the linguistic components of the Krio language, a language that is today spoken by more than 90% of the population of Sierra Leone. In his field notebook, Dr. Turner compiled notes relating to syntax, morphology, and semantic structures as well as the etymology of words and phrases most commonly associated with Krio speaking people.     Later he produced two Krio texts An Anthology of Krio Folklore and Literature, with Notes and Inter-linear Translations in English (1963) and Krio Texts: With Grammatical Notes and Translations in English (1965).

Dr. Turner recorded this unidentified Creole informant  while conducting field work in Freetown, Sierra Leone, 1951. Lorenzo Dow Turner papers, 1895-1972, Anacostia Community Museum Archives, Smithsonian Institution, gift of Lois Turner Williams. 

Dr. Turner also used his research to develop education programs, lectures and courses for students, and he used the political crisis and conflicts in Sierra Leone and various other African states during his travels as a means to build upon his studies. By focusing on the expressions of language found in African proverbs and folklore, Turner was able to open doors that enabled further exploration of African culture.  The results of his fieldwork enabled him to place the importance of various African languages, customs and dialects on par with European languages.

Scroll through the pages of Turner’s Freetown Creole field notebook to transcribe and discover similarities between Krio and other creole languages.

Lorenzo Dow Turner's field notebook, Freetown Creole, Sierra Leone, B.W.A., October 1951.  Lorenzo Dow Turner papers, 1895-1972, Anacostia Community Museum Archives, Smithsonian Institution, gift of Lois Turner Williams.  

Bremacha LaGuerre
Anacostia Community Museum Archives, Volunteer

Cracking the Gullah Code

If you’re a regular reader of the Collections Search Center blog then you know the Lorenzo Dow Turner papers have been the topic of several posts.  If not, here’s a refresher:  Dr. Turner, the first professionally trained African American linguistic, known as the “father of Gullah studies,” proved through scientific research that the Gullah dialect spoken by African Americans living on the coast of the Carolinas and Georgia was a Creole language, heavily influenced by the languages of their West African ancestors.   

Sea-Island Dialect of South Carolina, Lorenzo D. Turner papers, Anacostia CommunityMuseum Archives, gift of Lois Turner Williams [ACMA 06-017.1]

Turner interviewed and recorded over twenty Gullah informants for his research that would later inform his seminal book, Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect.  According to Margaret Wade-Lewis, Turner’s biographer, Professor Turner often made photocopies of his transcribed interviews with various Gullah speakers and provided them to his students as course “handouts.” “Sea-Island Dialect of South Carolina” is an example of Turner’s class materials and gives us a glimpse into his process for cracking the Gullah language code.

The Anacostia Community Museum needs your assistance in making the “Sea-Island Dialect of South Carolina” accessible and available to the public. Visit the Smithsonian Transcription Center and try your hand at transcribing Turner’s interviews!


Jennifer Morris
Archivist
Anacostia Community Museum Archives

The Sound of Digitization

Before (top) and after (bottom) conservation
of a page from Dorsey’s “Comparative Dakota,
Ponca (and Omaha), Osage, Quapaw, Kansa,
Winnebago, Iowa, Mandan, Hidatsa, and
Crow vocabulary 1877” (MS 4800[81])

As with all archives, access is fundamental to the mission of the National Anthropological Archives (NAA). With new support from the Arcadia Fund, the NAA will be working over the next two years on preserving and providing wider access to a treasure trove of primary sources used to investigate endangered language and cultures. This funding will support the digitization of the NAA’s entire sound collection (close to 3,000 recordings) and 35,000 pages of manuscripts. Although an impressive 100,000 digital resources are accessible online, this is still less than one percent of the Archives’ manuscript materials and five percent of sound recording holdings.

The origins of language documentation collections at the National Anthropological Archives begin with the founding of the Smithsonian’s Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE) in 1879. The first research program in the U.S. devoted to the methodological study of Native Americans, the Bureau engaged an extensive network of researchers in highly-systematic data collection to record the past and present ways of life of the North American tribes. Researcher field notes, photographs, and sound recordings document the language, culture, and knowledge of hundreds of indigenous communities throughout the Americas. Language documentation was a major focus of the BAE from its inception, assembled through field work and collecting earlier manuscripts, such as notes from the philologist Horatio Hale, who sailed around the world with the U.S. Exploring Expedition of 1838-42. Later collections reflect a broader interest in languages as the archives' mission expanded to include preservation of historically valuable records documenting cultures worldwide.  

Sound recordings in NAA’s collection contain the poetry, songs, stories, and conversations of endangered language communities around the globe. Approximately half of the recordings were made in North America; the remaining 1,500 contain roughly equal amounts of material from Africa, Oceania, and South America. Much of the North American material was recorded early in the 20th century, while documentation from other regions dates primarily from the 1950s through the 1970s. These materials are on various obsolete and endangered media, ranging from wax cylinders and aluminum transcription disks to various sizes and speeds of magnetic tape. Digitization will move them to the latest standards of electronic media, with provision for regular migration as standards change over time.

Dorsey_01.jpg: The Reverend James Owen Dorsey, n.d.  
To digitize ALL of the Dorsey collection
(67 boxes with an average 200 pages per box)
will take a minimum of three (3) months of full-time work.

The grant will also support the digitization of 20,000 heavily-used linguistic manuscript materials, at a critical point of deterioration. Two of the most used and fragile linguistic collections selected for digitization within the NAA are the papers of Truman Michelson and James Dorsey. Michelson, an esteemed early 20th-century linguist, assembled his materials while documenting the Algonquian languages of North America. Feel free to peruse some of the Truman Michelson PDFs we have made available in SIRIS. Thousands of pages of texts, many written by the first generation of literate Native people, constitute a systematic record of fourteen separate languages, with an excellent representation of different types of Native texts, ranging from personal biographies to historical narratives and ceremonial precepts. The majority of the Michelson material was written on cheap tablets made with highly acidic paper that is now at a critical point of deterioration. Dorsey’s material, assembled in the late 19th century, is primarily devoted to Siouan languages. His papers provide an unprecedented record of a dozen languages from a time when they were widely spoken. Both collections are threatened resources, making the timing of the generous funding from Arcadia particularly important.

We’ll be working hard to get these digitized sound recordings and manuscripts up online in the Collections Search Center, so stay tuned!

Lauren Marr, Program Assistant

National Anthropological Archives

with support from the NAA project team