Conference on Endangered Languages and Cultures of Native America University of Utah April 8, 2005

Documenting the Documentation: The Case of O'odham* Colleen M. Fitzgerald Texas Tech University [email protected] http://www.faculty.english.ttu.edu/fitzgerald Introduction (1) The O'odham language is a major language in the Southwest, belonging to the Uto-Aztecan family. Speakers of O'odham have several different tribal affiliations, and they may live on either the U.S. (southern Arizona) or Mexican (northern Sonora) side of the border (or both). This includes: a. The Tohono O'odham (or Papago) b. The Akimel O'odham (or the Pima) c. The Hia-Ced O'odham (or the Sand Papago). (2)

Linguistically speaking, the language spoken by all is classified as the Papago-Pima or O'odham language by Saxton et al. (1989) and others. O'odham (meaning 'the people') is term of self-identity that many people use to refer to their ethnicity and their language. The word "tohono" indicates a desert affiliation, while "'akimel" indicates a river/wash.

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The 2000 Census reports 18,326 Tohono O'odham age 5 and over, of those 10,321 (56.3%) speak English only, and 8,005 (43.7%) speak a language other than English. The number of Tohono O'odham speakers represented by the latter number is a decline from the 1990 census, unsurprising given the comparable declines in other indigenous languages of the United States.

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The Tohono O'odham Nation is in the process of building a Tohono O'odham Cultural Museum in Topawa, Arizona, targeted to open in March 2006. Like many Native American nations, the Tohono O'odham wish to repatriate many objects, and the museum will have space to display items deemed appropriate for public view.

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There is also interest in obtaining copies of photographs, manuscripts, recordings and anything that has been published on the O'odham.

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Researchers have been interviewing the O'odham people for a very long time, and the documentation of these interviews exists in sound recordings, in transcripts, in manuscripts, and in publications.

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This documentation exists in many different places. a. Individual researchers hold the materials from their own fieldwork, some of it published. b. Holdings at various university and museum archives. Some has been published.

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Portions of this research have been funded by grants from the American Philosophical Society, the Research Enhancement Fund (College of Arts and Sciences at Texas Tech University) and the Gloria Lyerla Library Memorial Fund (TTU).

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The major issues raised by these collections relate to preservation, access, and publication. PRESERVATION: Sound recordings and paper decay. If the recordings and manuscripts can be digitized, this will allow us to address the preservation of valuable cultural material before it becomes unusable due to deterioration. ACCESS: Many people (Tohono O'odham and researchers) do not know about these different archives. Materials held by individual researchers might be completely inaccessible if they have not been published. Materials held by universities and museums are not locally available. If the recordings and manuscripts can be catalogued and digitized, they could be stored in a format and be accessible locally to the Tohono O'odham (for example, in the new Cultural Museum). PUBLICATION: Innovations in technology have changed what it means to publish something. Computers and the internet mean that materials could be published over the web (with access regulated by passwords), or that materials could be stored on a the hard drives of different computers. Locally available digital files of recordings and manuscripts would mean that any tribal member could print a copy of a text or burn a CD with audio files. It could also be set up to control privileges of the digital material; certain material may be culturally sensitive, and thus should be inaccessible to researchers and/or non-relatives.

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While language documentation does exist for Tohono O'odham, the existing published texts consist of highly conventionalized, traditional genres. Spontaneous narratives and conversations are conspicuously absent. The only publicly available recordings are songs.

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There are significant gaps in the documentation of this language in terms of texts, recordings and a descriptive grammar.

Published Major Documentation (11) Previous research has provided a preliminary description of the language. (12)

Mason (1950), Mathiot (1973) and Saxton (1982) each give grammatical sketches of the language, and Zepeda (1983) provides a pedagogical grammar. None approach the scale of contemporary descriptive grammars.

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O'odham linguists from the community have also contributed significantly to this scholarship: Dolores (1913, 1923), Alvarez and Hale (1970), Hill and Zepeda (1992, 1994, 1998) and Zepeda (1984, 1987).

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Two dictionaries exist, Mathiot (1973 – not in print) and Saxton et al. (1989).

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The text collections represent only a limited set of genres, primarily traditional, conventionalized discourse such as ritual speeches, songs, and coyote tales and creation stories (Russell 1908 [1974], Densmore 1929, Chesky 1943, Saxton and Saxton 1973, Bahr 1975, 1980, 2001, Haefer 1977, 1980, 1981, Bahr et al. 1979, Underhill et al. 1979, and Underhill 1993).

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One autobiography has been partially published in Tohono O'odham (Manuel and Neff 2001). (At least two other biographies have been published, but in O'odham.)

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Three annotated texts exist, Mason (1950), Saxton (1982), and Mathiot (1991).

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The limited types of published genres mean that only two texts represent people telling stories about their lives in the O'odham language: Mathiot (1991) and Manuel and Neff (2001).

Manuscripts and Recordings (much unpublished) (19) Some researchers who have worked with Tohono O'odham or Pima speakers (*marks native speakers) *Albert Alvarez Jane Hill Donald Bahr J. Alden Mason Ruth Benedict Madeleine Mathiot Jane Chesky Pamela Munro Frances Densmore Deborah Neff *Juan Dolores Frank Russell *Susie Enos Dean and Lucille Saxton Colleen Fitzgerald David Shaul Bernard Fontana Anna Shaw Richard Haefer *Dena Thomas Ken Hale Ruth Underhill George Herzog *Ofelia Zepeda (20)

University Holdings a. Arizona State Museum University of Arizona b. University of California at Berkeley (Bancroft, Hearst collections) c. Indiana University d. Arizona State University

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MUSEUM HOLDINGS a. Bureau of American Ethnology (Washington, D.C.) b. Smithsonian (Washington, D.C.) c. American Philosophical Society (Philadelphia)

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What gaps do these holdings fill? a. Hill and Zepeda's work on dialectology and spontaneous personal narratives. b. Hale's textlets, many involving people discussing vocabulary. c. Mathiot's annotated creation and coyote stories. d. Arizona State Museum materials include personal narratives and conversations. e. Venito Garcia Archives is doing ongoing ethnography with elders.

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List of Holdings by Collection, Location and Materials

Collection

Location

Madeleine Mathiot

Buffalo/Fitzgerald as executor

Recordings or Manuscripts Both

American Philosophical Society Arizona State Museum, University of Arizona Jane Hill and Ofelia Zepeda Colleen Fitzgerald Hearst Museum of Anthropology Bancroft Museum Venito Garcia Library Smithsonian Institution Ken Hale Dean and Lucille Saxton Frances Densmore Frank Russell Ruth Benedict Ruth Underhill Donald Bahr Richard Haefer

Philadelphia

George Herzog

Transcribed

Translated

Both

yes, except for the oration yes

partially (not oration) partially

Tucson

Both

no

U of Arizona in Tucson Texas Tech U in Lubbock U of California in Berkeley

Both Both Both

yes no

no (except El Plomo) no no

U of California in Berkeley Sells, Arizona Washington, D.C. Tucson/Zepeda as executor Arizona ? ? Vassar College (various archives) Arizona State U Arizona State U in Tempe; Arizona State Museum in Tucson Indiana U in Bloomington

Manuscripts Recordings Both ? Both Both ?

yes

yes

Both Both

Both

Implications (24) Maintenance and Revitalization: a. Pedagogically speaking, spontaneous narratives may be easier for second language learners. b. Access to audio files with an accompanying O'odham text, plus an English translation. c. Culturally, these materials may contain otherwise unknown information, and there may not be native speakers left who can do the entire creation cycle or who know ritual speeches. (25)

Documentation a. Reinventing the wheel! These materials are a treasure trove in terms of genre diversity, grammatical constructions, lexical items, dialect variation, and language change. b. Linguists in reviews have sometimes commented that this language's documentation is complete. Do endangered languages get perceived differently in terms of this than do major world languages? If people are still working on English with all the existing documentation, then what does this say about all of the other languages?

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Ethical Issues a. Funding, review of proposals, and oversight is done via federal agencies, not indigenous ones. (duplication, approval of projects despite the absence of community involvement) b. Intellectual property: who owns a language? who owns the materials collected by all these anthropologists and linguists? c. Stockpiling the intellect: what are the ethical implications of these collections being untranslated, untranscribed, unpublished, and often inaccessible? d. Who decides what gets published? 4

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This project reflects me coordinating between many of the academics and institutions mentioned here and collaborating with the Cultural Museum, working through the tribal governing structures, like the Cultural Preservation and Education Committees. Ideas, including those from Nation members/governing boards/agencies: a. Coordinate with Tohono O'odham Community College with joint courses taught by linguists and O'odham instructors, so that people can work with archival materials and earn course credit toward degrees, and TOCC instructors gain from the experience. Long-term, perhaps developing distance degrees with Texas Tech University or other institutions so that people can earn a bachelor's or graduate degree working on O'odham linguistics. b. Develop a panel of elders, including a medicine man, to assess whether recordings/manuscripts include sacred or otherwise culturally sensitive material. c. Train O'odham people to digitize, coordinate archival resources. d. Develop legal agreements between researchers/archives and the Nation to safeguard intellectual property rights. e. Create a database with information about who participated in these archival materials, with as much biographic information as possible. f. Store recordings and PDF scans of manuscripts in computers at the Cultural Museum, where tribal members can generate CDs and printouts for themselves. g. Control access to all materials, even those in other archives, so that access is only granted by the Nation. h. List a representative from the Tohono O'odham Nation/Cultural Museum as co-PI. i. Accessible, user-friendly software to allow elders, others to input materials.

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Theoretical implications relate to historical/comparative issues (Langacker 1977, Shaul 1983, in press), the structure of the lexicon, especially reduplication (Hill and Zepeda 1992, 1998; Zepeda 1987, Fitzgerald 1999a, b, 2000), grammaticalization (Fitzgerald 2004), the notion of basic word order (Hale 1992, Payne 1987, Fitzgerald 2003), and phonology (Fitzgerald 1997, 1998, 2002).

References Alvarez, Albert and Kenneth Hale. 1970. Toward a manual of Papago Grammar: Some phonological terms. International Journal of American Linguistics 36: 2, 83-97. Bahr, Donald. 1975. Pima and Papago Ritual Oratory: A Study of Three Texts. San Francisco: The Indian Historical Press. Bahr, Donald. 1980. Four Papago Rattlesnake Songs. Anthropological Research Papers, No. 20, p. 118-126. Tempe: ASU. Bahr, Donald. 1983. A Format and Method for Translating Songs. Journal of American Folklore 96: 380, p. 170-182. Bahr, Donald. (editor) 2001. O'odham Creation and Related Events, As Told to Ruth Benedict in 1927. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Bahr, Donald, Joseph Giff, and Manuel Havier. 1979. Piman Songs on Hunting. Ethnomusicology 23, 247-96. Bahr, Donald M., Juan Gregorio, David I. Lopez, and Albert Alvarez. 1974. Piman Shamanism and Staying Sickness (Ká:cim Múmkidag). Tucson: The University of Arizona Press. Bahr, Donald M. and Richard Haefer. 1978. Song in Piman Curing. Ethnomusicology 22, 89-122. Chesky, Jane. 1943. The Nature and Function of Papago Music. Unpublished M.A. thesis, Tucson: The University of Arizona. Densmore, Frances. 1929. “Papago music.” Bulletin of the Bureau of American Ethnology, no. 90, Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office. Dolores, Juan. 1913. Papago Verb Stems. University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology 10. 241-263. Dolores, Juan. 1923. Papago Nominal Stems. University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology 20:2, 19-31. Fitzgerald, Colleen M. 1997. O'odham Rhythms. Doctoral Dissertation, University of Arizona.

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Fitzgerald, Colleen M. 1998. The Meter of Tohono O'odham Songs. International Journal of American Linguistics 64(1): 1-36. Fitzgerald, Colleen M. 1999a. Loanwords and Stress in Tohono O'odham. Anthropological Linguistics 41(2): 1-33. Fitzgerald, Colleen M. 1999b. Unfaithful Bases and Syncope in Tohono O'odham Reduplication. Paper presented at WCCFL 18, University of Arizona. Fitzgerald, Colleen M. 2000. Vowel Hiatus and Faithfulness in Tohono O'odham Reduplication. Linguistic Inquiry 31(4): 713-722. Fitzgerald, Colleen M. 2002. "Tohono O'odham Stress in a Single Ranking" Phonology 19:2, 253-271. Fitzgerald, Colleen M. 2003. Word Order and Discourse Genre in Tohono O'odham. In Formal Approaches to Function in Grammar: In Honor of Eloise Jelinek. A. Carnie, H. Harley, and M. Willie, eds. Pp. 179-189. Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Fitzgerald, Colleen M. 2004. Language change and Motion Verbs in Tohono O'odham. Paper presented at the Thirty-third Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Association of the Southwest, New Orleans. Haefer, J. Richard. 1980. O’odham Celkona. In Southwestern Indian ritual drama, ed. by C.J. Frisbie. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Haefer, J. Richard. 1977 . Papago Music and Dance. Occasional Papers, Vol. 3. Navajo Community College Press. Haefer, J. Richard. 1981. Musical Thought in Papago Culture. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois. Hale, Kenneth. 1959. A Papago Grammar. PhD dissertation, Indiana University. Hale, Kenneth. 1992. Basic Word Order in Two "Free Word Order" Languages. In Pragmatics of word order flexibility, ed . by D. L. Payne, 63-82. Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Herzog, George. 1936. A Comparison of Pueblo and Pima Musical Styles. Journal of American Folklore 49: 283- 417. Hill, Jane H. and Ofelia Zepeda. 1992. Derived Words in Tohono O'odham. International Journal of American Linguistics 58: 355-404. Hill, Jane H. and Ofelia Zepeda. 1998. Tohono O'odham (Papago) Plurals. Anthropological Linguistics 40:1, 1-42. Langacker, Ronald W. 1977. Studies in Uto-Aztecan Grammar Volume 1: An Overview of Uto-Aztecan Grammar. Arlington: SIL Publications in Linguistics. Manuel, Frances and Deborah Neff. 2001. Desert Indian Woman, Stories and Dreams. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Mason, J. Alden. 1950. The Language of the Papago of Arizona. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum. Mathiot, Madeleine. 1973. A Dictionary of Papago Usage. Bloomington: Indiana University. Mathiot, Madeleine. 1991. "The Reminiscences of Juan Dolores, an Early O'odham Linguist." Anthropological Linguistics 33: 3, 233-315. Payne, Doris L. 1987. "Information structuring in Papago narrative discourse." Language 63: 4, 783-804. Russell, Frank. 1908. The Pima Indians Bureau of American Ethnology, Annual Report 26. Washington, D.C. [Reprinted 1974, University of Arizona Press] Saxton, Dean. 1982. Papago. In Studies in Uto-Aztecan Grammar 3, ed. by R. Langacker. 92-266. Arlington: SIL Publications in Linguistics. Saxton, Dean, Lucille Saxton and Susie Enos. 1989. Dictionary, Papago/Pima-English, O'otham-Milgahn. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Saxton, Dean and Lucille Saxton. 1973. O'otham Hoho'ok A'agitha: Legends and Lore of the Papago and Pima Indians. The University of Arizona Press: Tucson. Shaul, David. 1983. Clisis in Tepiman. Chicago Linguistic Society, Parasession on the Interplay of Phonology, Morphology, and Syntax, 259-270. Shaul, David. In press. Comparative Tepiman. Munich: Lincom-Europa. Shaw, Anne Moore. 1968. Pima Indian legends. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press. Underhill, Ruth. M. 1993 . Singing for Power: The Song Magic of the Papago Indians of Southern Arizona. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press. Underhill, Ruth M., Donald M. Bahr, Baptisto Lopez, José Pancho, and David Lopez. 1979. Rainhouse and Ocean: Speeches for the Papago Year. Flagstaff: The Museum of Northern Arizona Press. Zepeda, Ofelia. 1984. Topics in Papago Morphology. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Arizona. Zepeda, Ofelia. 1988. A Papago Grammar. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

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