Native American Languages, Alive at the Library

This is a guest post by Barbara Bair, a historian in the Manuscript Division. She most recently wrote about Ralph Ellison’s photography work.

Two important collections of Native American heritage have been digitized and placed on the Library’s website, enabling readers and researchers to dig into histories that are not widely known.  

The first, featuring portions of the papers of Indian agent and ethnologist Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, focuses on the culture and literature of famed 19th-century Ojibwe poet Jane Johnston Schoolcraft (Bamewawagezhikaquay) and bicultural collaborations and literary contributions of members of  her Johnston family of Sault Ste. Marie in Michigan Territory.

The second, some of the papers of naturalist and ethnographer C. Hart Merriam, documents California Indian vocabularies collected from Indigenous language speakers from many different tribal heritages during the first three decades of the 20th century, mostly from California and the adjacent borderlands of Oregon and Nevada.

Both collections provide resources that tribal nations, libraries and cultural centers can use for language revitalization and tribal history documentation, part of the Library’s Native American Collections Working Group’s chief goals. They are housed in the Manuscript Division with other Native American holdings.

It’s fascinating material, taking readers back to a different era. Jane Johnston Schoolcraft’s Ojibwe name translates to “Woman of the Sound That Stars Make Rushing Through the Sky.” Born in 1800, she was the daughter of Susan Johnston (Ozhaguscodaywayquay) and the granddaughter of Waubojeeg, the Ojibwe (Chippewa) leader, warrior and storyteller.

Jane began writing poetry as a girl. Her mother and siblings — especially her sister, Charlotte, and brothers William and George — were instrumental in providing English-Ojibwemowin translations and vocabulary  drawn from their multilingual, multicultural networks, including devotional materials and Native American tales and songs.

In the winter of 1826–27, family members helped contribute information for a manuscript magazine by Jane and Henry Rowe Schoolcraft called “The Muzzeniegun; or, Literary Voyager,” which also featured poetry by Jane, sometimes under pen names.

Some of the material gathered, copied or translated by Johnston family members, including draft writings, transcriptions, stories and Anishinaabemowin grammar notes, were collected by Schoolcraft and used in his later publications, including ethnographies and anthologies of Indian tales.

In the last decades of his life, Merriam devoted much of his professional attention to speakers of Indigenous languages in California and the West, gathering information related to linguistic and religious/spiritual matters, material culture and natural history.

The Merriam collection includes over 200 vocabulary word lists documenting information accrued through interviews conducted between about 1902  and 1936.

Merriam used phonetic spellings intended to help later readers to pronounce words that were conveyed orally. The names or spellings he used for Native American groups and words were sometimes subjective and may differ from modern renditions or officially recognized terms and tribal designations used today.

In addition to vocabulary lists, the Merriam collection includes over a hundred hand-colored and hand-labeled maps that approximate the location of linguistic groups in sections of California and nearby regions.

Just as he used standardized government-printed field check-lists for his word lists, adding to them by hand, Merriam reused maps of various kinds, including U.S. Forest Service, topographical and geological maps, adding layers of color wash and labeling indicating language-group information. Today, it reveals worlds long lost to new generations.

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