Teaching Oregon Native Languages

Chapter Four: The History and Context of Oregon Tribal Language Archival Collections

94 Chapter Four The History and Context of Oregon Tribal Language Archival Collections David G. Lewis (Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde) and Deanna Kingston (King Island Inupiaq) “[C]onsidering the interest which every nation has in extending and strengthening the authority of reason and justice among the people around them, it would be useful to acquire what knowledge you can of the state of morality, religion and information among them, as it may better enable those who endeavor to civilize and instruct them, to adapt their measures to the existing nations and practices of those on whom they are to operate.” Thomas Jefferson’s instructions to Lewis and Clark1 “Records [of Native American peoples of Oregon] have been scattered, records have been burned, records have been lost.” Naomi Riebe (Upper Umpqua Indian Council)2 Introduction In this chapter, we focus on the archival collections of Oregon Native American language materials and the historical context of their creation. It is due to this history that many of these collections are not located in the state of Oregon, and it is only through the efforts of dedicated tribal members and staff that Oregon tribes have copies of such records. First, we discuss the history of Western scholarship of Oregon Native American languages, and how these collections privileged Western scholars over the Native American communities from whom the languages originated. This is followed by critiques of these archival collections by Native American scholars, followed by Oregon Tribal Language Resources 95 reasonswhythesematerialsshouldbeusedinOregonNativeAmerican language revitalization efforts. We then give a brief overview of the societal context behind the creation of these collections in order to understand the issues that should be considered prior to using them. We finish by giving examples of where these materials are so that readers may more easily locate them. History, Privilege, Action Archival collections of language materials are the primary source materials for contemporary studies in linguistics and for the preservation and restoration of traditional languages by Native American tribes. For many tribes, these primary source materials exist in widely scattered archival collections in universities, museums, and ethnological society repositories. Many of these collections were created at the same time that the fields of anthropology and linguistics were being developed in the United States, and as such, must be considered products of the thinking of that time. In other words, understanding as much of the mindset of the collectors as possible will allow tribes to gain insight into what information was recorded at the time and why. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, anthropologists and linguists created significant archival and artifact collections about Oregon Native American cultures. Their efforts were driven, in part, by two related assumptions held by members of colonizing nations. The first assumption was based upon the idea of “cultural evolution” or “social Darwinism.”As it implies, this idea was related to Darwin’s evolutionary theory, but applied to societies and cultures. Under this theoretical framework, popular from the 1870s to the early twentieth century and exemplified by Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society, social scientists sought to understand their societies’ own distant past by looking at so-called “primitive peoples.” This theory stated that all human societies evolve from a savage state, through barbarianism, to civilization. Morgan, in particular, outlined the characteristics of the different stages. For instance, when looking at economic systems, he assigned the classification of “savage” to those peoples who foraged (hunted, gathered, and fished) their food from their local environment. Barbarian peoples were those doing simple agricultural practices, such as “slash-and-burn” agriculture. Civilized peoples were those who had developed an intensive agricultural system that incorporated irrigation and fertilization strategies for growing their crops and had developed industry.3 This idea—that white society was more civilized than Native American societies—can be seen 96 Chapter Four not only in the writings of whites, but in those of nineteenth-century Native Americans. For instance, one female seminary student at the Cherokee Female Seminary, wrote “O! that all, especially among the Cherokees could but learn the vast importance of a good education. This and this only will place us on equality with other enlightened and cultivated nations.”4 By researching contemporary hunters/ gatherers (i.e., “savages”), early social scientists thought they would gain insights into their own past, so they recorded language, kinship practices, food-procurement strategies, religions and rituals, etc., of these foraging peoples. In other words...