Pair breathe life into dead language

Takelma are thought to be the earliest residents of Southern Oregon

By: Paris Achen

In 1933, anthropologist John Peabody Harrington chauffeured the last known fluent Takelma speaker, Frances Johnson, from the Siletz Reservation near Newport to the Rogue River Valley to capture some of the phrases and stories of the dying indigenous language.

During the trip, Harrington took about 1,200 pages of field notes on the language, now extinct, said storyteller Thomas Doty.

Johnson died the following year.

Seventy-five years later, Doty and author John Michael Greer hope to revive the Takelma language by writing its first handbook.

"We are basically taking an essentially extinct language and bringing it back to life," Doty said.
"Talking Takelma," the first publication of the Takelma Language Project, will draw on the work of Harrington, 1884-1961, Edward Sapir, 1884-1939, and other anthropologists.

The project began about a year ago as part of Doty's effort to make the stories and culture of Southern Oregon's oldest population available to current residents and descendents of the tribe.
No timeline has been set for its completion, as both writers are working on the project in their spare time.

An English-Takelma dictionary and a collection of traditional myths in Takelma and English are planned to follow the handbook, Greer said.

The Takelma are the earliest known people to have lived in Southern Oregon.

"They are a people we know very little about and could have known more had they not been removed or decimated by disease," said Jeff LaLande, archaeologist with the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest.

Harrington and Sapir both worked with Johnson to learn more about the Takelma and about the lowland dialect of the language.

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