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28. A Brief History of Collection

SALVAGE

In October of 1914, James Alden Mason, an anthropologist at the University of California at Berkeley, made a brief fieldtrip down to the Santa Cruz area in an e ort to locate speakers of Costanoan, a group of closely related languages spoken, at the time of European contact, roughly from the San Francisco Bay down to Big Sur along the coast and coastal foothills. He was hoping to find fluent speakers who still used the language in everyday life and who could provide him with wordlists and grammatical information and texts—information that could help him answer questions about the structure of the language and the nature of its relationship to neighboring languages and develop a better picture of Costanoan mythology and culture. It wasn't much of an expedition—more of an overnight trip, really—but its outcome speaks volumes about the critical condition of California's native languages, both then and now, and provides insight into the imperatives of the collecting endeavor itself. When Mason returned from his trip, he filed the following report with his department head, A. L. Kroeber.^[1]

REPORT

Reached San Juan in early evening. In morning had a talk with priest of mission and several other oldest inhabitants of the place. All agreed that there were no Indians remaining in San Juan, that the few remaining ones had sold their lands and moved to Gilroy where land seemed to be a little cheaper. Consequently decided to go to Gilroy. Reached there

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about 2.00 and hunted up Acension Solorsan, an elderly Indian woman.^[2] She claimed to know absolutely nothing but referred me to a very old woman, Josefa Velasquez in Watsonville. As prospects seemed a little better there, went to Watsonville and arrived there in early evening.

Wednesday morning went out to see Dona Josefa. She lives out East Lake St. about a half hour's walk out on the road to Morgan Hill, at the first horse trough. Is an old woman born at Santa Cruz in 1833 but reared in the ranches around Watsonville. A stay of several days with her might reveal many important points of interest but she remembers very little and very slowly. Spoke the San Juan dialect originally but has had no one to talk to for many years so forgets most of it. Verified many of de la Cuesta's words which are surprisingly accurate and got a few sentences and other words but very little. Also got a myth herewith included. After several hours of work she professed to know many myths, songs, dances, etc. Returned in the afternoon and, while she continued to insist that she knew many myths, etc., she was unable to recall one all afternoon. I got a few more words, phrases and two Yokuts gambling songs from María Gomez who lives with her. I am inclined to think that with a few days[’] experience the old woman could be induced to tell many myths and songs, possibly in text, but they came so slowly at the beginning I decided it was not worth while trying again.

She insisted that Acension in Gilroy knew more than she, but claimed, like all others, that these two [herself and Acension] were the only living persons who remembered anything of the language and customs. Refugio Castello spoke it well, and so did Barbara Solarsan, the mother of Acension, but these two died no more than three years ago. I could learn of no other old or middle-aged Indian in the whole country.

So Thursday morning I returned to Gilroy to see Acension again. She was born in San Juan in 1855 and her mother, who died only a few years ago[,] spoke the language well. But she [Acension] never knew it well and has not spoken it for years. With di‹culty I got from her a few phrases and sentences, words[,] and corroboration of many of de la Cuesta's words[,] but as she remembered very little, I decided the result was not worth the while and took the afternoon train home. With practice she might be taught to give texts but she undoubtedly remembers very little. She knows much less than Josefa, though her memory is a little better. Jacinta Gonzales died a few years ago.

Attached to this sad report were approximately two pages of elicitation labeled “San Juan words and phrases.” The wordlist was followed by two

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Yokuts gambling songs and a page of desultory ethnological notes—precious little return for the hours spent in gleaning them.

Mason's dejected, disappointed tone is impossible to mistake. Yet what modern reader will not be dismayed that he did not stay with Doña Josefa for as long as it took to rekindle her memory and revive her former fluency? She was one of the last speakers of her language. Whatever myths and legends she might have been helped to recall, whatever songs she might have resurrected, whatever poetry she might have spun from reminiscences long locked away in her rusty native tongue, they are gone now, completely. “Later” is not a reliable option when your best consultant is eighty-one years of age. Surely he gave up too easily.

But when the house is afire, to use J. P. Harrington's famous metaphor, you have to rescue what can best be saved.^[3] Mason judged that his limited time and energies were best spent elsewhere, working with other languages, other consultants, where the knowledge lay closer to the surface. In 1914 in California, a mere sixty-some years—a single life-span, in fact—after the ethnic catastrophe of the Gold Rush, fieldwork was too often an exercise in linguistic and cultural triage.^[4] It is no less true today, and will be again tomorrow: the last, best generation of elders is always just passing through their children's hands.

So Mason returned to San Francisco disappointed in his slim pickings and no doubt depressed at finding yet another age-old California culture in such dire straits. In the midst of his notes, though, lies a scrap of text recorded in the form of a mock letter, unremarked at the time but for an oblique reference to “a few sentences” in the second paragraph of his report. I present the text just as it appears in Mason's report, surrounded by a portion of the wordlist it was embedded in.

kanŝa' wi	I sing
wa' ti$$ ka	I am going
aru·' ta kawa' ti$$	tomorrow I will go
wak$i$ŝaŝ	coyote
u'mu$$	wolf
wa' ti$$ ka u' rŝi$$ kaniŝ e'kwe ni'pa	I am going because you will not teach me
e'kwe kahi' nŝu	I don't know
hi¯nue e'kwe kahi' n∘u	when I don't know
hi' nua kamŝit haiwe'	when will I see you?
e'kwe kamiŝie' te oiŝu hai' we	I will not see you again

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mi' ŝmin noŝo' miŝho'ke hose'fa ko$$' men.e'kwe Dear heart, thee sends Josefa. Says thou not

pe'ŝio hose'fa ŝe katawa·'k haiput$$u'hiŝ remember Josefa of as she every day.

hi' nuakŝe wakiat$$’a'kan miŝ hai'weni Some day she will come, thee to see

kutceke'kwe se'mon a'ram miŝminsire' mensi'tnumak if not dies. Give thy regards thy children.

hu' mit$$ tapu'r	give me wood!
ŝu' nesteka	I am hungry
a' maix
ŝu' nieŝteka	Ah! how I love
hi' nuame t$$a' kan	when will you come?
e´kwe ka meŝ hole nipa	I cannot teach you
ni ekwe semon mumuri	here the flies won't die
xutceknis	dog
ekwe ka pe' sio kanri·'tca	I don't remember my language

A free translation of Doña Josefa's long-lost message runs as follows:^[5]

	Dear heart,
	Josefa sends this to you!
	She says you don't remember her, Josefa,
	as she is every day.
	When will she come to see you—
	before she dies?
	Give me good wishes,
	you and your children!

What prompted Josefa Velasquez to compose this “letter” we'll never know. Probably Mason, in a desperate attempt to jump-start her dormant fluency, had asked Doña Josefa what she would say to family and friends if he were to carry back the message in Costanoan.^[6] Whatever he

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was hoping for, he got a brief, emotional burst from the heart, straight from the ragbag of an old woman's worries and cares. It wasn't much, as texts go, and I’m sure Mason would have regarded his attempt as a failure. But today this little text has acquired such a force of eloquence, of poignancy, over the long years it has lain forgotten in the archives, that it fairly cracked open my brain like a nut when I stumbled across it—a voice from the past, leaping out from the detritus of a musty wordlist's bits and shards. Because it's all there was, and because it rings true, a kind of greatness is thrust upon it, the unintended plainsong of an old woman's words.

California has a rich and spectacular oral-literary heritage, as this book attests. But sometimes literature is simply where you find it, or when. Indeed, in the absence of any form of text at all, the wordlists themselves—mother, father, acorn, sun—take on an importance, a luminosity, well beyond their original mundane intention: they are the atoms of lost poetics.

WORKERS IN THE VINEYARD

Men and women, J. A. Mason among them, have been collecting and analyzing California myth, song, and ceremony for nearly two centuries in an eort to preserve the traditions before they are gone forever.^[7] Yet I don't mean to give the wrong impression in stating this fact. Though commonplace in the discourse of Native American studies, such pronouncements throw the spotlight always onto the role of the fieldworker, the local historian, the interested amateur collector—an “outsider” role typically played by whites of European descent. Such statements tend to ignore the role of the performers themselves, who gave them the songs and stories in the first place. The performers, too, have dedicated their lives to preserving their traditions—but their eorts go back, ultimately, more than ten millennia in California: a hundred centuries of listening, learning, practicing, performing—and yes, refining, forgetting, adapting, and composing anew—the traditions that have passed from one generation to the next across the long reaches of time.

It is a mistake, and a bad one, to think that the act of recording in any way marks the culmination or fulfillment, much less the validation, of any given song or story. The arrival of a folklorist with microphone

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or notebook is not the “moment it's been waiting for”—as if, once it is written down, the people whose culture it portrays can breathe a sigh of relief and turn their attentions to something else. Writing a story down merely makes a record of its passing, like a single line of footprints tracked in the sand along a shore.^[8] We all know just how much and how little that track can teach us. Nevertheless, without the collectors and their passion for writing things down, students of language and oral literature the world over—Native Californians included—would have less to marvel at, take pleasure in, draw wisdom from, and find beauty in.

Prior to the establishment of the University of California's Museum and Department of Anthropology at Berkeley in 1901, there was no systematic program of ethnographic research or collection in California—only a handful of men over the years who, driven by their interests, tried to record the folklore and verbal art of California narrators, and to do so faithfully (at least within the dictates of their era and training) rather than interpretively. Among the most important of these early works are Father Geronimo Boscana's record of Juaneño myth and religious ceremony, Chinigchinich (1933 [1846]); Alexander Taylor's enthusiastic but somewhat erratic series of articles on “Indianology” between 1860 and 1863 in The California Farmer and Journal of Useful Arts (an early California periodical conveniently owned by his father-in-law); Stephen Powers's important, indefatigable early work in Northern California during the 1870s, which culminated in his now badly dated Tribes of California(1877); and Jeremiah Curtin's large collection of Wintu and Yana myths in English (1898). Aside from these few mostly amateur collectors, prior to 1900 we have little but the passing anecdotal reports of travelers, settlers, and journalists, the occasional words and place-names recorded by early explorers (nautical expeditions by Cabrillo in 1542–1543 and Drake in 1579; overland explorations by Portolá in 1769, Frémont in 1846, and others), and the vocabularies and grammars compiled by Franciscan missionaries (for instance, de la Cuesta's early Salinan vocabulary [1825], or the later Costanoan materials [1861–1862] mentioned above in Mason's report).

With the dawn of the twentieth century, we enter a new stage in the documentation of California's native oral literature. Kroeber's Department of Anthropology was founded in 1901 with the specific goal of focusing and accelerating research on California cultures and languages—a goal that matured rapidly and with resounding success.^[9] The next few

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decades saw a great explosion of scholars, students, and independent fieldworkers who contributed significantly to the corpus of California oral literature. In addition to Kroeber himself, these included such nowlegendary collectors as Pliny Earl Goddard, Roland B. Dixon, Samuel Barrett, C. Hart Merriam, John Peabody Harrington, Carobeth Laird, Edward Sapir, Constance Du Bois, Edward W. Gi ord, T. T. Waterman, Paul Radin, James A. Mason, Helen R. Roberts, Jaime de Angulo, L. S. Freeland, Susan Brandenstein Park, Dorothy Demetracopoulou, Anna Gayton, Stanley Newman, Gladys Reichard, Hans J⊘rgen Uldall, C. F. Voegelin, and Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin. A search through the published (and unpublished) work of any one of these researchers will lead the reader directly to important primary sources of California myth, song, and storytelling.

What distinguishes the work of these collectors from those who came before, and from the sundry amateur collectors who have tried their hand at presenting Indian stories in memoirs and magazines, is their attention to the actual words, not merely the gist, of the performances they recorded. All aspired to rigorous Boasian principles of textual documentation, and most had the phonetic training to take down texts in the original language, word-for-word as the narrator pronounced them. As a result of this care, this teneted belief in the primacy of the spoken word, the texts they later published from their fieldnotes are accurate records of actual narrative performances, not ex post facto re-creations of remembered events.^[10] When it comes to the translations, of course, these are subject, like all translations the world over, to the whims of personal and period style—compare, say, Edward Sapir's translations from the Yana, made in 1910, with Jaime de Angulo's translations of Eastern Pomo (#16), made just twenty-five years later. But the texts themselves, the true legacy, stand always in testament to, or judgment of, their translators.^[11]

Most of this early authoritative work was done by hand, laboriously, by taking manual dictation, a process that has stylistic consequences for the performance thus recorded. (See table 2 in the “General Introduction” for a list of the selections in this volume that were recorded by this and other methods.) A few researchers, notably J. P. Harrington, experimented with the early sound-recording technology, such as wax or wire cylinders and aluminum phonograph discs. Because of the awkwardness of the devices themselves—they were expensive, heavy, finicky, fragile,

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limited in capacity, and low in fidelity—machine recording was the exception rather than the rule. Kroeber and his colleagues at Berkeley made a great many recordings at the university, but the early machines were seldom practicable for use in the field (though Jack Marr, one of Harrington's intrepid young assistants, tells some hair-raising tales of trying to backpack phonographs and heavy cartons of aluminum discs across swaying rope bridges in the mountains of Northern California, on assignment from Harrington to reach important narrators).

The side e ects of manual dictation on style are easy to predict: the pen, being slower by far than the voice, forces delivery to a crawl; at this slower pace, it is easy for narrators to lose the thread of their composition; longer, more complex sentence patterns may not be ventured, being rejected in favor of shorter, more direct phrasings that better suit the dribs-and-drabs progress of the dictation; and because it takes so long, there is a strong tendency toward truncation, so that the elaborate rhetorical patterns of episodic and incremental repetition that often characterize oral poetics are suppressed in the interests of economy. (The approach of evening after a grueling day of dictation must have hastened many a grand tale to a premature conclusion.) Time and again, though, in the earlier decades of this century, California's tribal narrators, answering the call of posterity, somehow managed to adjust to the limitations and artificiality of the work, minimizing its deleterious e ects, and to deliver performances that transcended the special circumstances of their recording. In this volume, Jo Bender's “Loon Woman” (#12), William Benson's “Creation” (#16), and Johnny LaMarr's “Naponoha” (#9) all illustrate narrators who rose magnificently above the limitations of the collection methods of the time (though it remains true: we can still never know what performances they might have delivered had they been working with a tape recorder instead of dictation).

Later, when portable recording equipment became widely available, the dictation problem was e ectively eliminated. But comparison of dictated and tape-recorded texts reveals that there is still an enormous range and diversity of style and helps validate the essential (if not the particular) stylistic integrity of the older texts. For instance, Minnie Reeves's crisply told “The Boy Who Grew Up at Ta'k’imilding” (#6a) and James Knight's wonderfully loose, rambling version of “The Dead People's Home” (#19) are both from tape-recorded texts. Similarly, Margaret Harrie's blunt “Coyote and Old Woman Bullhead” (#4) and Joe Homer's

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densely detailed “An Account of Origins” (#27) are both from dictated texts.

Nevertheless, the advent of tape recording ushered in a new era in the collection of California oral literature. Under Mary Haas's direction of Berkeley's new Department of Linguistics, inaugurated in 1953, a new

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generation of researchers, trained in anthropological linguistics, began working the field. The tape recording of texts became the rule rather than the exception. (Nowadays, of course, videotaping is gradually becoming the new standard of documentation.) In 1951 Haas and Murray Emeneau founded the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages (initially as “The Survey of California Indian Languages”), which has sponsored research and archived tapes, fieldnotes, and other linguistic materials through the present day.^[12] Inspired directly or indirectly by Haas and her colleagues and successors, dozens of students and scholars have made a vocation of California languages—among them Richard Applegate, Thomas Blackburn, William Bright, Sylvia Broadbent, Catherine Callaghan, James Crawford, Jon Dayley, Geo Gamble, Victor Golla, Abe Halpern, Jane Hill, Ken Hill, Leanne Hinton, William Jacobsen, Richard Keeling, Martha Kendall, Kathryn Klar, Sidney Lamb, Margaret Langdon, Sally McLendon, Wick Miller, Mauricio Mixco, Julius Moshinsky, Pamela Munro, Mike Nichols, Mark Okrand, Robert Oswalt, Harvey Pitkin, R. H. Robins, Alice Shepherd, Hans Jacob Seiler, William Shipley, Shirley Silver, Len Talmy, Karl Teeter, Russell Ultan, and Ken Whistler.^[13] Most of these scholars, in trying to honor Haas's demanding documentational goal of “grammar, texts, and dictionary,” have made it a point to collect and publish oral-literary texts.

In the end, this storehouse of work recalls for us the hundreds of California singers and storytellers (without whom, nothing) who have dedicated their time and services—their personal repertoires, their cultural insight, their performing skills, and (perhaps above all) their patience—to the program of documentation over the last hundred years and more. Some were undoubtedly attracted to the idea initially by the pay, since it is customary for fieldworkers to compensate their consultants with a modest hourly wage. But truth be known, most would have carried on the work regardless. All too many elders have looked around to find themselves increasingly alone in language, among the last native speakers of their tribes, and they become as anxious as their linguists to help document its richness and repertoire before they themselves pass on.

Most language consultants, young or old, have a keen sense of posterity when it comes to the work they do. As James Knight observed, speaking “through” the tape in an aside while telling “The Dead People's Home” (#19), he had a compelling reason for recording his stories:

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	Because that's how it was,
	that's how they taught me.
	Since they explained it to me that way,
	here's what I’m telling you now.
	Now I’m putting what they told me a long time ago onto the tape.
	So it [the tape] is telling you this.
	My friends and relatives can listen and say,
	“Yes, this is true.”

Besides, singers and storytellers like to sing and tell stories. And the work they do with their field researchers often gives them the opportunity to focus on their art in a new way. Many also enjoy the intellectual pursuit of glossing and explicating their texts once they are recorded, and excel at this kind of linguistic work; others find the “drudge” work of analysis a burden to be avoided if possible. Of course, the sense of posterity “looking over your shoulder” that comes with making a permanent record of a song or story puts a special pressure on the performers. Jean Perry, in her introduction to “The Young Man from Serper” (#3), details the way Florence Shaughnessy would fret about getting her stories just right, reviewing her own work with a critical ear, knowing that the versions she taped were “for the record.” She was not alone in feeling this way.

Unfortunately, we don't always know the identity of the singers and narrators of California's recorded literature. It wasn't always considered important information, owing to an early and flawed theory of folklore that viewed individual singers and narrators as passive and faceless “passers-on” of their traditions rather than as active and potentially idiosyncratic “shapers” of the traditional materials in their personal repertoires. Even so, fieldworkers always had a keen sense of their consultants as individuals, as personalities. Often the information is there, buried in the archived fieldnotes or correspondence of the linguist or anthropologist who collected the materials for publication. We know the names of many, many of the men and women who took the time to dictate or record their best work for the generations to come—names that we should hold in honor. The list is an amazingly long one—and openended, because the work is still going on—but a few among those who have contributed substantial bodies of their own art to the canon of California oral literature are Sam Batwi (Yana), Jo Bender (Wintu), William Ralganal Benson (Eastern Pomo), Annie Burke (Southern Pomo), Ted

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Couro (Iipay Diegueño), Hanc'ibyjim (Maidu), Joe Homer (Quechan), Villiana Calac Hyde (Luiseño), Ishi (Yahi), Killeli (Yosemite Miwok), James Knight (Lake Miwok), George Laird (Chemehuevi), Fernando Librado (Ventureño Chumash), Harry and Sadie Marsh (Wintu), Mabel McKay (Pomo), Grace McKibbin (Wintu), Mike Miranda (Tübatulabal), Rufino Ochurte (PaiPai/Kiliwa), Lela Rhoades (Achumawi), Florence Shaughnessy (Yurok), María Solares (Ineseño Chumash), Robert Spott (Yurok), Tom Stone (Owens Valley Paiute), Lucy Thompson (Yurok), Lame Billy of Weitspus (Yurok), and Mary Yee (Barbareño Chumash).

Individually, each of the people named here, scholars and Indians alike, and so many unnamed others besides, have made significant contributions to the field of California oral literature. Collectively, the combined impact of their labors is enormous, and the value of their legacy, beyond measure.

NOTES

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