Wishram notebooks from summer, 1905.

These materials were compiled by various anthropologists: Edward Sapir, Franz Boas, Alex Thomas, and Frank Williams. Sapir (ca. 1920) collected and annotated a series of Nootka ethnographic and legendary texts (600 pages of materials), initially intended as a third volume of Sapir and Swadesh, Nootka Texts (1939). Boas (ca. 1900-1913) contributed Nootka vocabularies and grammatical notes (100 slips and 100 pages). Thomas obtained Nootka texts for the collection (ca. 1910-1920).

As s student of Edward Sapir at the University of Chicago, Fanggui (Fang-Kuei) Li spent two months during the summer of 1928 in northern Alberta studying Chipewyan and went on to a career that included pioneering work in other Dene ("Athapascan") languages (including Mattole, Hupa, and Wailaki), Thai, and Chinese. A longtime member of the Academia Sinica, Li was for many years a professor of Linguistics at the University of Washington and, at the end of his career, at the University of Hawaii. The Li Collection is comprised of ten volumes containing stories in Denesuline ("Chipewyan") collected in northern Alberta in 1928 by the Chinese-American linguist, Fanggui Li, along with an extensive Denesuline slip file. The texts contain phonetic transcriptions of stories elicited from François Mandeville and Baptiste Ferrier with interlinear English translations. These were edited and published Fanggui as Li and Ronald Scollon, Chipewyan Texts (Taipei: Academia Sinica, 1976). The collection also includes two cassettes containing an oral history interview with Li conducted in November 1982 by M. Terry Thompson and Laurence Thompson.

This small but important collection of correspondence relates to the formation of the Committee on Research in the Native American Languages, its grants, and its publications. Presented by Waldo G. Leland, 1956.

During the half century leading up to the Second World War, Franz Boas helped to define academic anthropology in the United States. Trained as a geographer at the University of Heidelberg, Boas worked initially on the Inuit of Baffin Island and subsequently on the cultures of the Indians of the Northwest Pacific Coast, becoming a leading figure in American anthropology by the first decade of the twentieth century. As Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University, Boas made significant theoretical contributions to ethnology, linguistics, and physical anthropology, helping to ingrain the four fields approach in his discipline and introducing the concept of cultural relativism into wide currency. He was, as well, a committed Socialist and an ardent opponent of both racism and fascism. This collection includes correspondence that Boas carried on with his colleagues in anthropology, as well as with those in the other social sciences and sciences. This correspondence is rich as a source for twentieth-century historians interested in "radical" social causes, since Boas was a socialist and an outspoken voice for progressive social causes.

The Franz Boas Personal and Professional Papers contain a diverse assemblage of professional correspondence, family letters, and diaries, with a valuable series of essays and lectures by Boas on both professional and political topics (democracy, race, etc.). (NOTE: This collection is not to be confused with the much larger Franz Boas Papers collection (Mss.B.B61), which contains the vast majority of Boas's professional correspondence and was referred to as the "Professional Papers" in earlier decades.) During the half century leading up to the Second World War, Franz Boas helped to define academic anthropology in the United States. Trained as a geographer at the University of Heidelberg, Boas worked initially on the Inuit of Baffin Island and subsequently on the cultures of the Indians of the Northwest Pacific Coast, becoming a leading figure in American anthropology by the first decade of the twentieth century. As Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University, Boas made significant theoretical contributions to ethnology, linguistics, and physical anthropology, helping to ingrain the four fields approach in his discipline and introducing the concept of cultural relativism into wide currency. He was, as well, a committed Socialist and an ardent opponent of both racism and fascism.