1. From papers in the ethnographic collection of the Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley (Valory Index, #23). The manuscript report is reproduced here in its entirety.

2. According to Catherine Callaghan, Ascensión Solarsano de Cervantes was J. P. Harrington's principal Mutsun (San Juan Bautista Costanoan) consultant. She was dying of cancer in the late 1920s but was still able to recall almost everything.—hwl

3. The phrase comes from a letter Harrington wrote in 1941 to his young neighbor and assistant, Jack Marr (who was just a teenager at the time). In full, and retaining Harrington's urgent underscores (now in italic), the passage reads:

You've been a good friend if ever I had one, you just rushed at the work. You know how I look at this work, you and I are nothing, we'll both of us soon be dust. If you can grab these dying languages before the old timers completely die o, you will be doing one of the few things valuable to the people of the remote future. You know that. The time will come and soon when there won't be an Indian language left in California, all the languages developed for thousands of years will be ashes, the house is afire, it is burning. That's why I said to go through the blinding rain, roads or no roads, that's why I thanked God when you tried to cross the Mattole River, haven't I gone back even two weeks later to find them dead and the language forever dead?

4. The Gold Rush, which a ected primarily the northern half of the state, followed upon a previous sixty-five years of Indian exposure to the Spanish mission system, whose main influence extended over the southern half of the state.

5. I am grateful to Catherine Callaghan for her help in making this translation. In return for her assistance, she has prevailed upon me to make the following corrections to the Costanoan language data reproduced here verbatim from Mason's unedited fieldnotes. (As she says, there may never be another opportunity to set this particular record straight.)

Corrected (and converted to modern orthography, where { represents a glottal stop and doubled characters represent length), these forms should read:

OPENING WORDLIST

WORDS FROM TEXT

CLOSING WORDLIST

6. Unfortunately, it is not entirely clear just who Doña Josefa is addressing in this text.

7. The whole concept of preserving a culture—or a literary tradition or a language—on paper is a vexed one. What does it mean to “preserve” a tradition? To what extent is the page merely the literary and cultural scholar's equivalent of formaldehyde? There has long been a tendency—a pernicious weakness, in truth—among American and European scholars steeped in the hyperliteracy

8. There's a fundamental di erence, it seems, between the way a scholar thinks of preservation and the way a Native performer does: for the former, the goal is documentation, a record of what went on or what was said; for the latter, the goal is continuation—a preservation of the continuity of tradition and, most important of all, the people themselves, who bear that tradition into the future. This di erence comes about not because the scholar is by nature indi erent, but simply from a di erence in the underlying interests of scholars as opposed to Native peoples. It's no secret that a great deal of frustration and resentment has grown up in the chasm of this divide during the last few decades of interaction between these two parties, each of whom tends to view the other in a kind of client or worker relationship—researchers and “their” consultants, Indians and “their” researchers—and is surprised to feel underappreciated or exploited as a result.

9. A concise summary of the history and influence of this research program may be found in Robert Heizer's essay “History of Research” in the California volume of the Smithsonian's Handbook of North American Indians (1978), which he edited.

10. Absence of this rigor results in the myriad well-intentioned but bogus collections of Native American oral literature, such as Bertha Smith's Yosemite Legends (1904), which Stephen Medley, annotating a bibliography at the back of the recent and lovely Legends of the Yosemite Miwok (La Pena et al. 1993), describes as follows: “This is an attractively designed and presented selection of six Yosemite legends of suspect origin. Using Hutchings (1860) as a primary source, the author demonstrated her skill at the art of turning a short, concise legend into a longwinded and romantic epic. The writing is stylized and reflects a Europeanized concept of Native American thought” (94).

11. It must be said that when anthropologists and linguists took down texts in English before the advent of recording devices, they were not always so faithful to the word of their texts, feeling free—in ways they did not with nativelanguage texts—to silently edit or recompose the words of their narrators. One is far less sure with English-language narratives (often signaled by the use of the words myth or tale in the title, as opposed to text) that they have not passed through the grammatical and stylistic filter of their collectors. Such filtering is always for the worse, never the better, as far as authenticity is concerned.

12. Though the University of California Publications in Linguistics series, which took over the burgeoning publication of linguistics monographs from the older University of California Publications in Archaeology and Ethnology

13. This list was compiled primarily from Victor Golla's obituary for Mary Haas in the SSILA Newsletter 15.2 (July 1996).