Documentation Across Generations: 100 Years of Northern Paiute Field Study in Burns, Oregon

In the early 1900s, before the earliest known work on the Northern Paiute language was published, a skilled amateur linguist and physician named Dr. W. L. Marsden began documenting the language of Captain (Patotzi) Louie in the town of Burns in eastern Oregon. As a doctoral student of Mary Haas at the Survey of California and Other Indian Languages (SCOIL), Michael J. P. Nichols spent three summers conducting field research near Burns, Oregon, with Marian Jim Louie, the daughter-in-law of Captain Louie. Nearly thirty years after Nichols’ time in Burns, the co-authors began working together to document the stories of elders of the Burns Paiute Tribe, including those recollected by two of Marian Louie’s children, among others.

This presentation explores the changes that can be traced both in the Northern Paiute language itself across three generations of speakers of the same communolect and in the approaches to and products of documentation by evaluating both in terms of language maintenance efforts and linguistic science. Greater understanding of variation can contribute to revitalization efforts through the incorporation of legacy materials into the process.