Chasing Voices

California Humanities, a non-profit partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

calhum.org.

and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting Additional Funders include Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival, Fort Yuma Quechan Tribe, Pechanga Band of Luiseno Indians, San Pasqual Band of Mission Indians, and Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians.

(soothing music) - Before Columbus arrived in 1492, American Indians, Native people, the Indigenous peoples in the Americas, their cultures were very rich and vibrant, and had been going on for thousands and thousands of years.

At the time, scholars say maybe about five million to 10 million, maybe as high as 25 million people who were already here when Columbus arrived.

As settlers pushed westward, then what that meant was they were entering Indian country.

They saw these new peoples, these white strangers, as intruders.

There's over 1,500 wars, and battles, and skirmishes, and attacks authorized by the United States government against Indigenous people.

At the time of Columbus, about five million.

Their population, by 1900, will actually drop below 238,000.

A lot of non-Indian people began to believe that it was the vanished American.

That Native people were gonna be a vanishing race.

(somber music) Early anthropologists who were just beginning to be trained in the field, because anthropology was a new field, then began to rush to the West to study Indian languages like John Harrington.

Because they wanted to record the cultures because there would be no more Indians left.

- Time was of the essence, you know.

You had to capture these things and get 'em on record before they all died off.

He wrote me a letter saying, "You and I are nothing."

- [Harrington] We'll both of us soon be dust.

If you can grab these dying languages before the old timers completely die off, you will be doing one of the few things valuable to the people of the remote future.

The time will come, and soon, when there won't be an Indian language left.

All the languages developed for thousands of years will be ashes.

The house is afire.

It is burning.

- And I often think of that letter, because it's very true.

This is the distant future, 70 years later or so.

It's here.

(tense music) (gentle music) (people murmuring) - We are gonna be researching Harrington's notes, finding out how to access them online.

This shows streets where that still exist where we live now and that just shows where they are, and we can relate to that 'cause we know exactly where that is.

- Yes.

- That's your family.

- Yes.

- Chorro Street.

- Chorro Street, between Sycamore and Peach Street.

- You know how they named- - My daddy-in-law lives there.

- And what we're doing here is a workshop called the Breath of Life Language Workshop for California Indians.

And it's primarily oriented toward California Indians who have no speakers left.

But that want a connection with their language.

- Oh my gosh.

- Reel one, what we're looking at, is all oral history.

So it's extremely important, because if we have at least one paragraph it gives us so many more words in terms of creating language, so yeah.

- The Harrington materials, the Harrington field notes that are at the Smithsonian are now available to anybody in the public, at any time.

So long as they got a computer and an internet connection.

(people chattering) - [Kathryn] JP Harrington was a one of a kind American ethnologist and linguist.

- He could pick up languages easily.

He had very good ear for phonetic recording, so his transcription of Native words is extremely accurate.

- [Jack] Harrington developed an almost phonetic plan of recording every particular Indian that he'd run into, get all the information he could before that elderly Indian died off and the language went with him.

- To the last breath, he was right there in your face, gettin' the last word.

'Cause he was so feverishly busy gathering all the information he could before a lot of these older Indians died.

- When it became obvious that JP Harrington was sick, in fact he was on his deathbed, the Bureau of American Ethnology, that's what JP Harrington was working for, they knew he had extensive notes all over the country, including two warehouses in Washington DC.

And Mary R. Haas, my mentor, asked if I would undertake this task, and I was quite honored.

When I opened up those boxes, I found Harrington's life.

(soothing music) - He was a Yankee.

He was born in Waltham, Massachusetts in 1884.

His father's name was Elliot Augustus Harrington, and Harrington's a very old New England name.

And his mother's name was Mary Lydia Peabody.

Now Peabody's one of the biggest, oldest names, only it seems she was from a rather middle class branch of the Peabodys.

He didn't come from kind of the upper stratum of Yankee society, but he was superbly educated.

He always talked with a Yankee accent.

1890ish, the family decided to move to California.

They all hopped on the train.

Harrington, he was seven.

He remembers being impressed when they were on this train trip comin' across the country.

But they got to, I believe it was Needles, California, and the Mojave Indians used to stand at the train station and sell pottery, and weavings, and jewelry, and things.

And Harrington remembers seeing Indians, and being fascinated by them.

He was only about seven years old, but he seemed to remember that as being something that was very important in his life.

(singing in Indigenous language) When he was 18 years old in 1902, he graduated from high school.

He said he was already doing field work with Santa Ynez Indians.

You could say that was the beginning of his field work.

It was clear that John was intelligent enough to go to university, and he decided on Stanford.

He did what we would call majoring in classics and German, and Harrington just excelled at Stanford.

He was recommended to take the exam for a Rhodes Scholarship, one of the most prestigious scholarships in the world to go to Oxford and study.

Instead he went to Germany to study.

- He learned phonetics.

He was a very good phonetician.

He'd transcribe the sounds of speech almost at dictation speed.

When he returned, there wasn't any major work being done on California languages, except through the University of California in Berkeley.

Whom he apparently approached, but A.L.

Kroeber who was in charge of the program preferred to work with his, either do it himself or work with his own students.

And I don't know the full story, but he seems to have kind of pushed Harrington away.

So what Harrington did was find a job as a schoolteacher to support himself.

And then in any time he had available, weekends, summer vacations, spring break, whenever he was free, he worked with elderly speakers of the Indian languages.

- [Harrington] April 21, 1914.

My dear Lummis, I have never in my life made such a haul of absolutely wonderful and forever unique Indian information as during the past week here at Highland.

We have been able to repeople all Los Angeles County with a race which is well nigh extinct, and make a record of a language which has not been spoken for nearly a century.

- He's teaching high school, 'cause he needs a job, and then he goes to summer school at Berkeley.

Kroeber was a kingmaker in his own way.

He decided who did what in California.

He kind of divided up the territory, and he had already worked on Chumashan, which of course is Harrington's great love.

But Kroeber decided if you want to work on something, forget the Chumash.

Go and work on Mojave.

So he sent him down to Mojave, or Needles.

- [Harrington] Leaving San Bernardino at night, we climb through the Cajon Pass, and descend the northern slopes of the San Bernardino range.

We soon reach the desolate sink of the Mojave River, and from there, until morning, glide across tracts of sandy deserts until at last we climb through a gap and find ourselves at Needles, by the Colorado River, in the land of the Mojave.

June, 1907.

This is the first Indian language I ever recorded.

Informant, a young Mojave woman at Needles.

(gentle music) - There is a handful of fluent speakers left here on the Fort Mojave Indian Reservation it's very hard to say that there's only a handful left.

That our language is endangered, and our ways of life are endangered.

- The only time I get to see her talk this is when you guys bring her, when you guys come.

(speaking in Mojave) - [Woman] Oh yeah.

(speaking in Mojave) - [Interviewer] There was this man that came through here a long time ago.

White man by the name of Harrington.

And he took a lot of notes on the Mojave language.

- Uh-huh.

- [Interviewer] Back in the, like 1907.

- Oh, I wouldn't know that.

- [Interviewer] You never heard of him?

- I never heard of him.

(gentle music) - When he was out in Mojave, Harrington got typhoid, and he was in the hospital for a couple weeks.

He almost died out in the desert there at a hospital.

There was another time he wandered out in the Mojave Desert looking for somebody.

He got lost, and it was in the LA Times, you know, this linguist had been found almost dead out in the Mojave Desert.

Then finally in 1915, he got his job as an ethnographer at the Bureau of American Ethnology.

I think if they had known when they took him on that he wasn't about to be an armchair anthropologist back in Washington DC nine months of the year, you know, it might have been different.

But he managed to stay in their good graces, and he would only come back there when they would hold his paychecks up, you know.

Say you've gotta come back and collect them yourself.

- He would be assigned a topic from the Bureau.

Go to Southern California and study traditional houses.

So he would come to Southern California and do that, but then on the side, working with these people collecting additional notes, but then turn in his assignment on the housing, but keep all his other notes on the side.

So he was just constantly working nonstop.

- He was a man that worked 18 hours a day regularly.

Never had a telephone, so he couldn't be interrupted.

(film reel whirring) - [Harrington] After lunch, we drove on about a mile further up the valley and found the Rincon Indians just coming out of a council.

Among these Indians was Juan Escalac, a man about 60 years old who spoke very beautiful Spanish and is a sort of leader among the Indians.

He said he knows all the place names around Rincon.

(soothing music) - Harrington was here from 1925 to 1938, off and on, you know between his different tribal communities.

One of the things about Harrington, he loved to name places.

Thank goodness that was his pet peeve.

So he's seen all this landscape, and as he's going through the landscape, the informant, the people that are with him are saying this is that place.

It's (speaking in Luiseo).

It comes from (speaking in Luiseo) which is soapstone, you know, hill.

He's just taking this imperfect information, that others would consider imperfect, but it's the real information.

You know, it grounds it in an older time.

I mean, I can't go a mile in town without seeing this invisible name above the place, like on our maps.

We call it the Harrington database, but you know, really the database comes from the ancestors, and those are the informants.

They had the wherewithal to speak to this man, and very private and very ceremonial, very religious, and they're sharing with him.

- I have letter after letter where he emphasizes this, get to them now because when they die, the language goes with 'em.

The younger ones are not learning the language.

They're certainly not learning the language, or the old ancient stories, or songs from days gone by years ago that have been passed down by word of mouth over thousands of years.

- The entire Western hemisphere was really American Indian peoples' lands.

(somber music) After the so-called Indian Wars, General Philip Sheridan who was the commander of the US military in the West introduced something called a winter campaign.

And that meant was to attack Native people during the wintertime.

It would be cold, snow on the ground.

If they could find Native people, they could easily defeat them there.

There was also another campaign, scorching the earth.

Which means total war.

And the idea of total war is to capture women and children, but also to destroy all the crops, and destroy the communities.

In the late 1800s, then they're forced onto reservations and they're placed into poverty.

Ill conditions, a lot of diseases.

Flu and cholera and even measles.

And the term is not used yet, but we can apply this term of the 20th century to this time, it's prisoners of war.

There are some tribes who lost their entire communities, and in particular, California is one of them.

The gold rush in California in 1848 when gold was discovered, it's that that speeds up westward expansion and the pushing of Native people to the side, and so that really depletes the Indian population.

If you look at that from the American Indian point of view, it's really a form of genocide.

- [Leanne] The boarding schools, that was where the survivors were sent to be assimilated.

- And even now, some of the families didn't wanna teach the young ones because they remember boarding school.

They remember the punishments, like my grandmother does.

And my auntie did.

And what they said to them, and how they whipped them, even if they said one word in Mojave.

- But most important, I think that people need to understand that our language was taken from us.

We were not allowed to speak it, and that's why it's gone.

It's not gone because we didn't wanna speak it.

It's gone because it was taken from us.

- The Creator gave us all these things.

The land, the water, the air, and told us how to live.

And gave us our natural order, you know, commandments of who we are, and what we are.

And that was in that language.

(emotional music) - [Harrington] Dear Mr. Hodge, to show you how much I have the success of this work at heart, I have purchased a new Ford touring car for the sole purpose of collecting Indian place names and facilitating this work.

It is a dandy, and in this car I shall be able to take a number of the old informants to visit important places incidental to other pressing work.

The collecting of these place names is an important phase of the ethnology and archeology here.

- [Victor] Kroeber, like most anthropologists of the time, liked to declare that a language was dead.

And Harrington delighted in finding speakers of languages that Kroeber at Berkeley hadn't found.

(engine puttering) There's always the possibility that somebody's gonna turn up if you only ask enough people in the Native community so that you can find that person.

- He had a charm that he could turn on.

He could walk into a room full of Indians that he'd never seen before, and the first thing you know, he's sitting down, asking them what this word, or that word meant, and how do you pronounce it?

- [Victor] He didn't want to be a professor of linguistics, or anthropology.

He kept away from professional colleagues.

And so he ended up being this mystery man.

- I met Dr. John P. Harrington in 1932 when he moved into the duplex next door to my family home in Santa Ana, California.

From there, he started to train me to run his recording machine.

I would work in his house half the day, and he'd pay me 25 cents a day.

Sometimes he'd forget, but that was not bad money for a 13 year old or so starting out in 1933 and in those years.

- [Harrington] Dear Jack, remember, this is slow, careful work ferreting out the ones that know the stories and ancient myths.

Some that say they don't know them know lots of them.

Some that say they don't talk the language, talk plenty of it.

If you can't get stories, get songs and get talk, talk, talk, bushels of dictation about anything in the world in Indian.

Keep the turntable whirling all day and evening, any kind of talk.

(gentle music) - [Kathryn] It was during this time that he met and married Carobeth.

- [Victor] She took his class in phonetics at what's now San Diego State, I guess.

She was the best student in the class.

She showed real promise as a phonetician.

- [Kathryn] I mean the fact that he got married at all is quite astounding.

- [Catherine] And she was initially very much impressed with his dedication.

And the fact that he would come into the classroom like a god on a thundercloud.

- [Carobeth] When he walked into the rather dim classroom, on the first morning of summer session, my heart, already strained past endurance, seemed to stop.

I silently and romantically exclaimed that he looked like an angry god.

I had not hoped so soon to encounter one of those mythical creatures.

A scholar, a scientist, who was also young and beautiful.

I do remember arriving in Santa Ynez in spring of 1916.

I have not forgotten the thrill of when Harrington met me, and I knew I was about to share his life, and his career.

The plan had been for me to learn to type fast enough to take Harrington's dictation.

- Carobeth, who was a fantastic ethnographer and linguist, in her own right.

That might have been one of the reasons Harrington married her, so he could use her as a field worker, and record even more languages.

- [Carobeth] Harrington's informant in Santa Ynez was a very ancient Chumash woman.

She must have been 90, or thereabouts.

Harrington had me listen to her Chumash words while he smiled and cupped his ear, and asked her to repeat until her patience wore thin.

She frequently treated him with the indulgence that one would accord a child, or a harmless madman.

(wind whistling) (gentle music) - Maria Solares is our ancestor, my fifth great grandmother who worked with JP Harrington, and gave him pretty much all of the information with regards to our language, our stories, our songs, our customs, our religion, of our people.

She is solely responsible for what we have today.

(singing in Indigenous language) - At the time of European contact, this region of California, the Chumash region, had the highest population density in all of Aboriginal California, and one of the highest population densities in North America.

Right away, the missionaries wanted to establish missions among the Chumash.

And so beginning in 1772, over about a 40 year period, people were gradually baptized and would relocate to the missions, but eventually the introduced European diseases really began to take a toll among children and infants, and so by the end of the mission period, after 50, 60 years of missions being here, there was only about 10% of the population that had been here.

Around the beginning of the 20th century, some of the Chumash languages were no longer spoken.

Others were down to just one or two, or a handful of speakers.

- Maria Solares was born to save the language, I truly believe that.

She was born around the time that the smallpox were around.

They kept her inside a lot, and she has a story of her being inside a lot, not being able to go out to play with the kids because the elders wanted to give her the stories, and the language.

So they knew she was precious.

They knew that somewhere in her life, that she was gonna save our stories, our language, our customs, our traditions, our songs.

- It is my belief that she knew what she was doing.

She knew what she left was gonna be written down, and saved by this man that's coming through to interview her, and spend a lot of time with her.

I don't think their interactions were always pleasant.

He was a very demanding man, from what we can read in the notes.

And it's amazing when we go through the notes, we can kind of hear some frustration in some of the comments that she makes.

So we can get somewhat of her personality through the notes as well.

- One time I saw there was a note where he said, he suggested a possible other way to say something, and she wouldn't okay it, and he wrote something like, "Informant stubbornly refuses to okay my suggestion."

And I thought, dude!

It's her language.

If it doesn't sound right, it doesn't sound right.

(gentle guitar music) (engine puttering) - [Carobeth] Once a week, we drove down to the store for supplies, and to pick up mail.

Harrington was excited to find an invitation to attend a meeting of his colleagues at Berkeley.

Alfred Kroeber was to preside.

Harrington envied his status, his resources, his facility with which he published regularly.

And at the same time, he held his linguistic abilities in something like contempt.

Harrington said, "The whole idea of my going along "was extravagant, unsuitable, and not to be considered."

And he'd be gone four days at the most.

Into the second week, I began to worry.

I was running low on food.

I would not believe any man could bring himself to leave a wife, whom he said he loved, alone in the eighth month of pregnancy without food, money, or transportation, not yet accepting the fact that this man was cast in a different mold.

- He would try to spend as much time as he could in the field, hiding from his superiors and the Smithsonian.

He hated to be stuck in the office in Washington DC at the Smithsonian, and write.

- [Carobeth] Harrington said that he was going to have to stave off the return to Washington as long as possible, but he would surely have to publish.

But he saw no reason why my time should be wasted.

I would therefore take myself to Parker, Arizona to gather all that I possibly could on the Chemehuevi.

The Chemehuevi, he said, spoke a Uto-Aztecan language.

(singing in Indigenous language) - He thought he was probably doing her a great honor by giving her so much responsibility in the work and sending her off to work on languages on her own, by trusting her this much.

He rarely trusted anyone as much as he trusted Carobeth.

It was a very productive decade, but it I think came to a crashing halt for him.

Because he sent Carobeth off to work on Chemehuevi, and set her up with George Laird, who was a very good speaker of Chemehuevi.

And of course, they fell in love and Carobeth was a rather emotionally needy person herself.

She finally found the emotional support she needed, and would never have gotten in quite the same form from Harrington, even if they deeply loved each other and committed to each other, that was just not what he was capable of.

And the divorce was finalized, and then I don't know that he ever saw Carobeth again.

But they did have a daughter, Awona, and her name, by the way, is Tewa.

It's Awonawilona.

He rarely saw his daughter.

She grew up with Carobeth's family.

He was deeply shamed by that, by having to appear in divorce court.

This is not something the family really wanted, you know, to discuss or anything, but that would be the point around 1920, 1921 was when there was a big change in him.

(somber music) As a biographer, I would say that when his real reclusive traits kicked in was after his divorce from Carobeth.

That deeply, deeply hurt him.

- [Jack] He had a deep feeling for secrecy.

- [Harrington] Dear Jackie, tell nobody the slightest thing of your business.

Just say that you are from Los Angeles, that your name is Seeley, also that you have various addresses.

Don't mention my name, or anything about me whatsoever.

Just take the bull by the horns, John.

- The recording machine was a very top secret type of thing, and I was to tell no one anything at all about it, and certainly never give any records that I made of the Indians to anyone.

This is the car that was built by junkyard parts.

Harrington bought a new engine for it that cost $50 installed.

I sure put a lot of miles on it, traveling all over California, Oregon, and Washington with an old recording machine in it.

It was overloaded all the time.

The Indians loved this car.

They loved to ride in it, I guess because the color red was something they liked, because it was a bright, fire engine red.

Harrington had a big old black box that he carried camping gear, and records, and the recording machine.

And on the back of that it read Bureau of Ethnology, and nobody in the neighborhood knew what that was.

They'd never heard the word ethnology.

- [Harrington] Go from Eureka directly to Siletz, Oregon.

Get the street address of John Albert, the last one who knows the Alsea language formerly spoken in Siletz.

Dearest Jack, I've just gotten over crying.

That is, partly over.

This is the worst thing that has ever happened to me.

Now, let's brush away our tears and see what can be done about it.

You know, a paralyzed person often gets over the first stroke.

Find out if he knew the real Chinook language, or only the jargon.

I read the Oakfield letter, and was so happy that you got John Albert to talk that I just screamed and said, "God bless you."

Alsea language, next to Chinook, it is the rarest thing in the world.

John Albert is the only living person who talks it.

Don't tell anybody in Siletz your business, or get acquainted with any gossipers.

Tell them nothing.

- I learned years later, from Arthur Harrington, his nephew, how Harrington became so secretive, and that was because in Santa Barbara, when he was a very young man, he dug into a burial area and he found some bones of what he declared was a Santa Barbara Man and about 20,000 years old.

From there, he got ridiculed by Kroeber, and I don't know if you've heard of Hrdlicka, 'cause there were no Indians at that time known that existed 20,000 years ago.

Kroeber got very irritated with him for not sharing his findings when he'd go from tribe to tribe after that.

Harrington would secretly keep it all to himself.

- [John] Harrington was paranoid, and he just felt like Kroeber would steal his thunder, and he wouldn't get any credit for the work he was doing.

- As we later learned, he kept secret even from the Smithsonian the languages that he worked on, and what he'd done with the notes that he took.

He was an employee of the Bureau of American Ethnology.

He was a government employee, and everything he produced on the job was, by definition, a US government document.

So he was violating the law by hiding these materials, but it was the habit of a lifetime.

It was something that should be kept secret.

It should be kept away from the eyes of people who would steal it, and do the wrong things with it.

What those wrong things were were not very clear.

Probably not even to Harrington himself.

And here we get into the really unpleasant side of Harrington's craziness.

It was the Jews.

Most of the prominent linguist of that period were Jewish.

It was not considered sociopathological earlier in the 20th century.

It was a very fashionable thing to be anti-Semitic in the '20s and '30s.

I think I probably would have strongly disliked Harrington as a person if I'd ever known him.

If only for that reason.

Ironically, Kroeber was not Jewish.

He was from a German-American family, grew up in New York.

And Harrington refused to believe, he was given all kinds of information to the contrary, but he refused to believe that Kroeber was not Jewish.

He must be, because he's my archenemy.

He's the one who wants to steal my stuff.

- [Interviewer] That's a crazy way to think about it, because he had a really tight relationship with the Native people.

- I've thought of this same, kind of contradiction myself on a couple of occasions.

What it seems to me is that Harrington felt no threat from Indian people.

And feeling no threat, he didn't project on them this kind of paranoid fear that he projected on his linguistic colleagues.

And oddly enough, at that time, there was a great deal of racist antipathy focused on Indian people.

To some extent, it still lingers.

But Harrington never, ever so far as I know had a racist bone in his body when it came to Indian people.

And in fact, went out of his way to be part of their lives in a way that most whites of that period would have found difficult, at least.

- Between Harrington and these people, there was a connection that he didn't have with most of the rest of the academic world, or with the Anglo society.

The Anglo society was just telling funny stories about him.

The Indians he was working with admired him.

There seemed to be a respect among the Native peoples for him that the, his own Anglo scholarly community really didn't have for him.

- To walk in as white, and tall, and eccentric that he just fit right in.

I don't care where he was, or who he was with.

I don't think I've ever heard of him being thrown out by any Indian.

- I was working with an Indian in Washington somewhere, and I wrote Harrington and said he had a stroke, and he's dying.

And you can almost feel the tears shake from the letter when I got the letter back from him.

And he says, "How many times have I left 'em, "gone two weeks, and come back and they're dead, "and their language gone with 'em?"

(somber music) - Put it in the garage.

(Gertrude chuckles) That's my number four grandson.

I tried to teach him, but he just smiles at me.

"I know what you're saying, Grandma," that's all he says.

(Gertrude chuckles) "That's the way you're supposed to talk," I said, "Like me," I said.

(speaks in Mojave) I am half Mojave.

My father is not Mojave.

That's what I said.

(David chuckles) - It helps to say a few words in Mojave, because most of them, my kids are half.

They're half this, half that, and they have to talk English.

And I try my best to hang in there.

- But most of the time, even though she didn't feel good, she would get up, and she would come out and even still try, because she knew that time was short.

- [Interviewer] Harrington, he recorded about 30,000 pages of notes on the Mojave language.

Would you like to see what's on those?

- Yeah.

I would like to hear it, and see what they said.

- [Interviewer] What does (speaks in Mojave) mean?

- (speaks in Mojave) means big.

- [Interviewer Big?

- [Gertrude] (speaks in Mojave) is big.

Everything, anything that's big, (speaks in Mojave).

- [Interviewer] Uh-huh.

Spirit mountain, how would we say that?

- Spirit mountain?

- Yes.

(speaks in Mojave) - Every day I try to have the recordings out.

It makes me happy and sad, I will say, to hear her voice, and to hear her talking.

- I don't know that too well, you know.

What they call that.

- [Interviewer] Okay.

- [Gertrude] And some of them that I don't remember, and some of them come back to me.

Some that I have forgotten.

- Okay.

- And getting old doesn't help, either.

- Yeah.

It broke my heart to see that she tried so hard to give everybody what they needed before she left us.

She was a treasure of ours, one of the treasures.

And to lose such a great treasure, we don't know what we're gonna do no, you know?

I have the recordings, I have all that, but it's up to me, she said, to give it.

- I think it probably was a godsend for Harrington, for him to even have that type of concern about, you know, language survival.

And he probably may have seen what was happening to us as a people.

That you know, everything that we had was taken away, and even to the point where the language, you know, was trying to be erased from us as a civilization and as a culture.

(somber music) - [Donald] Some languages have been lost.

Some communities are gone, but as long as there's a committed effort and devotion to revitalize languages, then that's going to be very important to Indian people themselves, and to their ideas and expression of their worldviews.

- I always kind of go back to my, you know my father.

My grandmother.

And they've always made sure we knew that we were Indian.

And, sorry.

Sorry.

(Nakia sniffles) And that we should be proud that our people struggled, and to wake up every morning and to know no matter where you are, or where you go in life, that you come from a strong people and your roots go deep into this earth and to always know that the elements of this world today come down on you that you just have to root yourself.

- It's not an easy process to bring back a language when all you have is field notes, and recordings.

It takes a long time.

It takes a really dedicated person to do it.

(gentle music) - In 2003, the tribe approached me and said, would you like to create a language program for us?

We'd like to bring the language back.

Well, that's a dream come true.

- Dr. Applegate translated Harrington's notes when he did his dissertation in linguistics, and from there, we've created a dictionary of stories, and we work directly with Harrington's notes.

We've used it to bring our language back to our people.

(speaks in Isleo Chumash) - Oh okay, but here we go.

Suddenly it gets more interesting.

So oh, okay, can you make that out?

Do you get the root of that?

(speaks in Isleo Chumash) Yeah, yeah.

He (speaks in Isleo Chumash) is, exactly.

(speaks in Isleo Chumash) is like with a cord or a rope, so (speaks in Isleo Chumash) is he- - Grabbed the rope.

- Grabbed it.

- Or tied it.

- Grabbed it or tied it, but by the feet, yeah.

- It's emotional.

It's emotional because you have the sadness of why am I learning like this?

Why am I learning in this linguistic way?

I wish I had an elder to speak to me and teach me.

It is emotional and you go full circle with it.

- The power in the word.

I often reinforce to them that they're the only ones in the world that speak this language.

They acknowledge that, and they, you know they understand that.

(speaking in Isleo Chumash) It's that sense of empowerment, and entitlement, and it's great to see our youth so well rooted.

Because it carries them far, having that strong foundation of who they are, the ancestors, what they've been able to leave for them, so it helps them.

(speaking in Isleo Chumash) (gentle music) - I'm the daughter of the last speaker of the Barbareo Chumash.

Oh my first memory.

And I was just a kid.

He was just a big, tall, thin Ichabod looking guy, just came right up the steps looking for my mother.

- Ernestine's mother, grandmother, and great grandmother all worked with Harrington.

He recorded firsthand information from these Chumash speakers, so you have a generational survey of Barbareo Chumash, which is almost unheard of in Native American languages.

- And he'd come over about late in the morning.

He made sure he had his meals, because my mom made some of his meals.

And he was comfortable in our house.

I mean, we're a house of 19, and very poor, and it was a very old house.

As I say, two bedrooms, but it had a dining room and there was a doorway opening and there was curtains over it.

And he would have those curtains pulled all the time so nobody could see him if they walked in the house.

And even my own mother said gee, I wonder why.

But that was just his demeanor.

- Mary Yee, who was the last native speaker of any of the Chumash languages, and every day, he would walk over about a block away to Mary Yee's house from the hotel we were staying in.

- My mother, she wasn't able to continue the language once her mother died.

Then Harrington came along, so she was still able to continue her language with him.

Sometimes he'd give me a dollar or two, just to get me out of the house.

And I was an annoyance to him.

He'd sit there for hours on end, and they'd sit together and it was like, I dunno, like family because they'd argue back and forth sometimes over a word.

He finally retired I think late '50s, and he started showing signs of failing health.

So my mother told him, you know, eventually he has to see a doctor.

So after all of the rigamarole, she finally got him to see her doctor.

And he was diagnosed with Parkinson's.

So then he ended up being fed by my mother.

She would make special dishes for him.

You know, 'cause that's one of the things that goes, your swallowing ability.

4:24 p.m. JP says he has been pretty ill last night.

Pain in stomach.

Okay, here we are again, 1/17/59.

4:07 p.m. JP made it here.

Here he is.

Says that he is not any better.

And to the point where she had to bathe him, eventually.

And that's when my other daughter would be tickling his feet and he'd be laughing.

JP says, "Didn't sleep at all last night."

Every time he tried to sleep, his arm and hand shook something awful.

How long will he be coming over?

We don't know.

It's kind of ironic, and justified that in his last year, or years, he was nursed by an Indian that he spent his 50 years with up until the point when he couldn't get out of bed, and that's when they called his daughter to come and get him.

(emotional music) He died a lonely person, I'm sure, down there.

And it wouldn't have been that way if he was here.

- [Harrington] We'll soon be dust.

The time will come when there won't be an Indian language left.

All the languages developed for thousands of years will be ashes.

The house is afire.

It is burning.

- So, is the house on fire now?

Yeah, it's still on fire, but it hasn't burned down.

(Leanne chuckles) (speaks in Barbareo Chumash) - [Ernestine] Well, right now I'm introducing my granddaughter to the language for the first time in her life.

So I'm hoping that she's going to fall in love with it, pick up the torch, and run with it.

- I've always been kind of interested in it.

I'm just busy with life and other things that I finally made the time to come down here and come here, and learn it, and spend time with my grandma.

(speaks in Barbareo Chumash) It was pretty powerful to listen to my great grandma tell the stories, 'cause I never met her.

(speaks in Barbareo Chumash) - Overwhelming.

I hope I can learn it, but there's a lot of stuff that I need to study.

Even the sounds are completely different.

A lot of work.

(plucky music) - None of us had any idea what the extent of that documentation was, but as soon as he died, as soon as he was gone from the scene, we began to find out.

- [Catherine] Box after box after box of his material started arriving from all over the country.

- First off, there was the contents of his house in Santa Ana, and another house in Santa Barbara.

Then, the storage facilities began to report in.

- In the Salinas Valley, there was a Salinan Indian man who had an old chicken coop.

He stored these boxes of notes in the chicken coop.

- To make a long story short, I found that I was saddled not with several dozen boxes of material at the Smithsonian, but with six tons of material to sort through, somehow.

It wasn't just notes on California Indian languages.

Among these packets of material on Indian languages, I found half eaten sandwiches, dirty old shirts.

He did not take adequate care of his personal life.

He sacrificed everything for this calling.

- I've heard estimates of his total tribal languages that he has set down in writing, or recording that exceed 150 different tribes.

(gentle music) - [Kathryn] Over the course of more than 50 years, he assembled more than a million pages of field notes.

Handwritten field notes, mostly.

- [John] John Harrington's notes number, well they're more than a million pages.

Maybe even two to three million pages of notes.

So they're vast, and they were more than one man's career really could encompass to process all this material and to work it up for publication.

(gentle music) - The people who are the language activists now are the ones generally who did not get their language in childhood.

Because their parents, or their grandparents had either had the language taken out of them, so they didn't even know it anymore, or had been punished in the boarding schools so that they made a decision not to use it with their kids so that their kids wouldn't suffer.

And so, but their kids, and their grandkids are saying there's something missing in our lives.

We want our connection back to our culture, and back to our language.

And so, these language activists are pioneers in biculturalism, and bilingualism, and an attempt to refind their Native identity within the United States.

- [Interviewer] Do you think there's, there may be any more notes out there?

- There are certain portions of John Harrington's notes that we know are still missing.

And one hopes that they've been preserved somewhere.

- We always said, well my family, he had this cute, crooked smile, you know, when he, like the cat who, you know, got the canary.

He had this one tooth missing, and when you could see that when he smiled, you knew that's what he was thinking or feeling, and I assume that's what he's doing right now, looking down on us like, yeah, now you get it.

You know?

'Cause a lot of people didn't.

But, the thing about the Indian people is they somehow in their hearts accepted and knew, without any explanations.

- [Harrington] Give not the yawning graves their plunder.

Save, save the lore for future ages' joy.

The stories full of beauty and of wonder.

The songs more pristine than the songs of Troy.

The ancient speech forever to be vanished.

Lore that tomorrow to the grave goes down.

All other thought from our horizon banished, let any sacrifice our labor crown.

- [Announcer] This project was made possible with support from California Humanities, a non-profit partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

calhum.org.

for Public Broadcasting And the Corporation Additional Funders include: Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival, Fort Yuma Quechan Tribe, Pechanga Band of Luiseno Indians, San Pasqual Band of Mission Indians, and the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians.