Between approximately 1990-2003, Dr. Virginia Beavert, a Yakama elder and native speaker of Sahaptin, and one of her students, the late Edward James, taught Sahaptin language classes at what is now Heritage University in Toppenish, WA. For those classes Dr. Beavert developed numerous pedagogical materials. Edward James, a student of Dr. Beavert’s (Click here to read the original letter he sent to Virginia when he began studying the language), eventually became an instructor of the language at Heritage. He and Mary James collected and stored the materials developed for the classes taught at Heritage. In 2012-2013, Mary James gave them to University of Washington Prof. Sharon Hargus for preservation and archiving. The materials received consisted of roughly 21 banker boxes containing paper materials and over 300 audio cassette tapes.
The boxes after arriving to the UW.
The initial sorting process.
A particularly large conference table was very useful for follow up sorts of larger categories into subcategories.
Russell Hugo, then a graduate student in the Linguistics department, worked under the supervision of Prof. Hargus sorted (with duplicate removal) and prepared the paper materials for archiving. This process began in the Fall of 2013 and by July 2014, all of the papers had been sorted. By the end of 2014 all of the materials had been scanned. By 2015 all of the audio had been digitized and most of the materials had been added to the online version of the archive. This online archive was initially a temporary means of providing Sahaptin Language community members ease of access to the materials while the archive was being completed. Once the archiving process was completed, all materials were transferred to the University of Washington Libraries Pacific Northwest Collection, with the help of Special Collections librarian Anne Jenner. In late 2017, all of the materials had been added to the online archive. However, the archive is continuous evolving with new transcripts, notes and annotations being added. Periodically, the updated data set is shared with UW Special Collections for the permanent archive.
Needs Analysis
Community input and oversight was sought throughout the process and a needs analysis was conducted in communities with ties to related Sahaptin dialects, focusing primarily on Yakima stakeholders.
Online Course Content (Moodle)
Introductory online course content was developed for Moodle using materials from this archive.
More information on the planning and progress of the related online course module can be found here: Online Course Content
Dissertation
This project is described in more detail in the following dissertation:
Endangered languages, technology and learning: A Yakama/Yakima Sahaptin case study. 2016
This archive is intended to serve as a template for other communities looking to create an accessible, and low-no cost archive for their language resources. (Please see the Lushootseed (dxʷləšucid) Teaching Resources Archive as another example.
The project and dissertation was supervised by the following UW Faculty: Prof. Sharon Hargus, Prof. Betsy Evans, Prof. Emily Bender, Prof. Amy Ohta.
Their help and guidance was invaluable.
The UW Language Learning Center currently helps maintain this archive.
Additional Thanks
Some others who supported the creation and improvement of this archive with substantial time and effort:
Substantial work on adding materials to the online archive as well as creating XML data, annotations and transcriptions were done by UW Linguistics graduate students Sara Ng and Jiahui Huang.
Theodore Gerontakos of the UW Libraries has provided support on the XML metadata structure.
