From the 1920s through the 1940s, the University of Pennsylvania anthropologist Frank Gouldsmith Speck worked on Cherokee language and culture with his primary consultant, Will West Long. Raised in Big Cove, North Carolina, Long was a respected elder and spent much of his adult life attempting to record and preserve traditional Cherokee culture. The Speck Cherokee Collection consists of diaries, accounts, and medicinal texts in Cherokee collected by Will West Long and Morgan Calhoun, accompanied by notes by Speck and John Witthoft. Among these are several diaries kept by Long (mostly 1904-1917), records of the Gadugi (a Cherokee mutual aid group), accounts, records of births and deaths at Big Cove, Cherokee-English vocabularies, and material collected on Cherokee botany collected by James Mooney in 1887. Several of the items contain information on Cherokee medicine, including formulae and curing charms.

Four Cherokee stories recorded by Charles Huff at Cherokee, North Carolina in June 1980. Three stories--"The Possum's Tail," "The Possum and the Wolves," and "Rabbit and the Bear"--given by Ollie Jumper. One unidentified story given by Goliath George.

Oral history interviews with 15 Cherokee speakers on their background and use of Cherokee, espcially their use of the Cherokee syllabary.

Field recordings made in North Carolina in 1958 of Cherokee sacred formulae. The material in this collection has been designated as culturally sensitive. Remote access and reproduction are restricted. Please consult a librarian for details.

Cherokee folkloric stories told by Lloyd Running Wolf Sequoyah and Lawyer Calhoun, 15 in English, 4 in English and Cherokee. Recorded by Raymond Fogelson in North Carolina in July and August of 1958.

Includes paradigms; suffix forms; prepronominal prefixes; texts.

The linguist Harvey Pitkin has worked on several of the indigenous languages of Northern California, with a particular interest in Wintu, Patwin, and Yuki. A student of A. L. Kroeber, Pitkin was a member of the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, and later at Columbia University before his retirement in the late 1980s. The Pitkin Papers contain materials recorded or accumuluted by Harvey Pitkin during the course of his study of American Indian languages, including not only his own fieldnotes and research on Wintu and Yuki, but originals and copies of notes, notebooks, and slipfiles by A. L. Kroeber, A. M. Halpern, John P. Harrington, John Alden Mason, Paul Radin, Hans Uldall, Donald Ultan, T. T. Waterman, and others. These include important information on Atsugewi, Kwakiutl, Luiseno, Pomo, Wappo, Yahi, and Yana, and include some data on the consultants Ralph Moore (Yuki) and Ishi (Yahi).

Includes folkloric stories, conversation (concerning religion, sons in the military, letters from friends), and a variety of elicitations to test freedom of word order between two generations of speakers, classificatory verbs, word pairs with contrast of vowel length and stress, verb affixes and suffixes, and immediate and regular imperative verbs. Recorded at the Cherokee Indian Reservation, North Carolina from 1951-1952.

This collection pertains principally to the Cherokees of North Carolina and Oklahoma and to their language, ethnography, folklore, archeology, history, music, etc. Includes Indian studies and correspondence by Gillespie, notes on Indian dances and linguistics, bibliographies, publications of the Archaeological Society of Brigham Young University, and newspaper clippings. Also comprised of materials on: Apache, Calusa, Chippewa, Choctaw, Delaware, Eskimo, Fox, Iroquois, Karankawa, Kuchin, Louchens, Mattaponi, Muskogee, Navajo, Onondaga, Pueblo, Sauk, Seminole, Seneca, Shawnee, Sioux, Slave, Timucua, Tuscarora, Tutelo, and Wyandot. Contains: Gillespie, "A grammar of western dialect of Cherokee language of the Iroquoian family," 1949-1954 (131 pages); "Miscellaneous material on the Cherokee Indians and language"; "Miscellaneous items pertaining to the American Indian."

These papers include materials on the Onondaga, Tuscarora, Seneca, Cayuga, and Oneida Indians, collected during the years 1928-1930 under the auspices of the American Council of Learned Societies' Committee on Native American Languages. Included are field notes, grammars, dictionaries, studies of Handsome Lake religion, medical prescriptions, comparative linguistics, and correspondence with Franz Boas. Contains data on consultants, texts, translations, paradigms, grammatical studies, and lexical files.

This item contains Jefferson's comparative vocabulary, based on his collection of vocabularies taken on printed forms; a second comparative vocabulary; and John Sibley's vocabulary of the Caddo language. This document was damaged in transit from the White House to Monticello in 1809 (see letters of Jefferson to Peter S. Du Ponceau, November 7, 1817, and April 26, 1816.)

Beginning in the 1790s, the American Philosophical Society began to accumulate vocabularies and texts written in Native American languages, guided by Thomas Jefferson's idea of using comparative linguistics to reconstruct the histories of Indian peoples and discern their origins. The American Indian Vocabularies Collection was initially assembled by the Historical and Literary Committee of the APS for publication in 1816. They include information on seventeen North American languages and one each from the Caribbean and Central America, collected between 1784 and 1828. A number of individuals were invovled in recording the vocabularies, including Benjamin Hawkins, William Thornton, David Campbell, Daniel Smith, Constantine Volney, Constantine Rafinesque, William Vans Murray, John Heckewelder, Martin Duralde, Campanius Holm, and Jefferson himself. Most followed the standardized word set established by Jefferson.

This collections consists of texts in several Iroquoian languages (Cayuga, Cherokee, Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Seneca, Tuscarora) recorded and played back to other speakers to test the mutual intelligibility of the languages for various speakers. The recordings comprise numerous texts in these languages, administered mutual intelligibility tests, stories, and conversations, all predominantly untranslated. Originally recorded on wire in the fall of 1950 at various locations in the United States and Canada. Later copied to sound tape reels. The native consultants involved in these recordings are as follows. The Cayuga language consultant was Jane Owl, recorded at Cattaraugus Indian Reservation (N.Y.) The Cherokee consultant was David Owl, recorded at Cattaraugus Indian Reservation (N.Y.) The Mohawk consultants were Ernest Benedict and Sadie Curlyhead, recorded at Saint Regis Mohawk Indian Reservation (N.Y.), and Ernest Benedict and Mr. & Mrs. Charles Benedict, recorded at Cornwall, Ontario. The Oneida consultants were Harry Antone, Betsy Antone, Rosa Antone, Billy Antone, and Mr. & Mrs. Chapman Schanandoah, recorded at the Onondaga Indian Reservation (N.Y.), and Albert Christian, recorded at Nedrow (N.Y.) The Onondaga consultants were Louis Lyons, recorded at the Cattaraugus Indian Reservation (N.Y.), and George Thomas, Jr., Percy Smoke, Thomas Lewis, Pat Homer, and Floyd Henhawk, recorded at the Onondaga Indian Reservation (N.Y.) The Seneca consultants were as follows: Annie Lyons, recorded at the Cattaraugus Indian Reservation (N.Y.); a Mr. & Mrs. Smith, recorded at the Oneida Nation of the Thames in southwestern Ontario; Richard Johnny John, Colline Johnny John, Amos Johnny John, Lena Snow, Kenneth Snow, Albert Jones, Hubert Cusick, Lynn Dowdy, Henry Redeye, Elver Jacobs, and Mr. & Mrs. Laurence Jimerson, recorded at the Allegany Indian Reservation (N.Y.); Jesse Cornplanter and Solon Skye, recorded at the Tonawanda Indian Reservation (N.Y.) The Tuscarora consultants were Nellie Gansworth and William Mt. Pleasant, recorded at the Tuscarora Indian Reservation (N.Y.)