Fort McDermitt Reservation (McDermitt, Nevada)

The McDermitt reservation straddles the Oregon-Nevada border and is the home of the majority of all remaining first language Northern Paiute speakers. Like the Duck Valley Reservation, it is quite isolated, lying approximately 90 miles northeast of the town of Winnemucca, Nevada (population > 7,000). The following stories are two of the many texts collected in the early 1960s by Sven Liljeblad from Pete Snapp, a fluent speaker from McDermitt. Mr. Snapp was in his early nineties at the time of this recording, which was made on reel-to-reel tape and archived as part of the Sven Liljeblad Collection in the Special Collections Department at the University of Nevada at Reno. His interlocutor was more than likely his son, Allen Snapp, who worked with the missionaries John and Joy Anderson to produce the first fairly complete grammar sketch of Northern Paiute (Snapp et al. 1982).