> I recently came across Bureau of Ethnology Bulletins 1-8, one of which
> includes a "Siouan Bibliography." Many articles pertaining to the
> Winnebago language were listed, and many of those were tagged as being
> housed (or having once been housed) in the library of a J. Powell of
> Washington, D.C. Is anyone aware of the existence of this library today? '
> Is the Bureau of Ethnology Library still in existence?
J.W. Powell (a one-armed Civil War veteran who was among the first to
explore the Grand Canyon, among other things) founded the Bureau of
Ethnology, which is now the National Anthropological Archives, in the
Smithsonian Institution's Museum of Natural History. The BAE files are
subsumed within the NAA's files, and may be consulted by visiting the
offices of the NAA in the MNH. It's wise to write ahead to make
arrangements and present credentials. There is a huge published catalog of
the holdings of the NAA which should be in the nearest university reference
collection.
> We are also now seeking language information for Iowa and Catawba; these
> tribes have contacted us for help with language revival. According to the
> Iowa branch we talked to, they have one semi-speaker left and about 5 more
> in another branch.
Currently working with Ioway-Otoe-Missouria:
Louanna Furbee and students at the University of Missouri, Columbia, MO.
Jimm Good Tracks has published a draft dictionary through the University of
Colorado's Center for the Study of the Native Languages of the Plains and
Southwest (CeSNaLPS, U of Colo, Campus Box 295, Boulder, CO 80309-0295).
The dictionary costs $30. It is about 300 pp., IO to E and E to IO, as far
as I can recall without having a copy in front of me at the moment. There
are extensive ms. materials on IO (lexical slips, some texts, and
grammatical notes) available in the NAA and at the Library of the American
Philosphical Society. The latter can be ordered as microfilm for about $50,
I think, if you consult their published catalogs for the catalog numbers.
Check under Gordon Marsh, who worked with IO in the 30's.
> The Catawba man who called us says he know of no speakers of that
> language. We would be especially interested in contacting linguists who
> may have worked with these or related languages, and who might know of
> existing sound recordings.
Dr. Frank T. Siebert, MD, has worked with Catawba directly before the last
speakers died. Kathy Shea at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, compiled an
extensive vocabulary from other sources (in various orthographies) as an MS
project. There are a fair number of texts, not very well transcribed, in
print, e.g., by Speck. Paul Voorhis, at the University of Manitoba, has
worked with Catawba grammar and lexicon using materials in print, and has a
manuscript sketch morphology (article length). Richard Carter has done some
comparative work with Catawba and Woccon (a relative known only from a word
list published c. 1700).
John Koontz (koontz@bldr.nist.gov)