M. Eleanor Nevins - World-Making Stories

This book is a work of fiction.
Names, characters, places, and incidents either are productsof the authors imagination or are used in a fictional setting. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental .

2017 by the Maidu Summit Consortium

All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America

This book is published as part of the Recovering Languages and Literacies of the Americas initiative. Recovering Languages and Literacies is generously supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017942531

Set in Huronia by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

This book is dedicated in loving memory to Farrell Cunninghamjatam (19762013), who planted and grew our work with us at Weje-ebis Maidu.

The vision of my brothers existence was, and is still, brilliant! Let his light so shine in memory of his lifes work. There is no one who is comparable to his gifts of knowledge, to his strength as a leader. Forever in my heart.

The Weje-ebis Maidu project team requests that readers of this book respect the expectation among the Maidu community concerning the names of the deceased. If speaking Farrell Cunninghams name aloud, follow with jatam (pronounced yah-tam).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The Weje-ebis project team gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Administration for Native Americans, from the Mellon Foundations Recovering Languages and Literacies of the Americas, from Middlebury Colleges Undergraduate Research Office, and from research funds from Middlebury College Dean of Faculty. We also gratefully acknowledge institutional support from Susanville Indian Rancheria in administering the ANA grant, Middlebury College for supporting research and writing, Maidu Intertribal Language Summit (and Donna Clark, who financially supported that effort) for providing a forum for dialogue, and the Maidu Summit Consortium for acting as copyright holder of the work. In addition, we wish to thank Pat Kervick of the archives of the Peabody Ethnological Museum for providing us with copies of Roland Dixons notebooks, and Jacque Sustrand, the director of the University of Nevada Reno Special Collections, for help accessing and imaging the Shipley and Stolpe volumes. We thank Ilze Akerberg of Indiana University Archives of Traditional Music for providing sound recordings of songs sung for Roland Dixon in 1902 by Tom Young and Bill Reeves, as well as Andrew Garret at the UC Berkeley Survey of California and Other Indian Languages for access to William Shipleys field recordings.

Thanks to the estate of William Shipley for providing us with Bills unpublished lessons in Maidu and for permission to publish them for the first time here. We also thank the estate of William Shipley for permission to republish his transcriptions, transliterations, and literary translation and for permission to adapt, alter, and re-present these as needed in service of Maidu language learning. We thank Daniel Stolpe for permission to similarly adapt and republish his original artwork for presentation in an affordable paperback. We are grateful to Wilhelmina Ives, elder and Maidu language keeper, for guidance on key issues of translation and place. Thanks to Jim Bauman for advice on language pedagogy and for establishing an online Maidu lexicon from Shipleys text collection and for continuing support via the Maidu site in OurLanguage.org.

We also recognize four undergraduate research assistants at Middlebury College. Thanks to Sophie Bufton and Anna Mullen for recording, interviewing, and photographing accounts of Maidu places with Maidu community members. We also thank Maddie Gilbert, who checked parts 1 and 2 of Shipleys literary transcription and translation against Dixons text collectionand helped restore sentence-by-sentence correspondence and omitted lines. Thanks to Maddie Cochrane, who, with the guidance of project participants, rendered the map at the front of this book that locates key Maidu places with respect to widely recognized landmarks and towns on the shared indigenous-settler landscape. Thanks to Mari Price, Sociology and Anthropology coordinator for typing up Shipleys lessons on reading and pronouncing Maidu for inclusion in this volume. A warm thank you to Matt Bokovoy and Heather Stauffer of the University of Nebraska Press for seeing this project through from beginning to end.

CONTRIBUTORS

18991905

Tom Young / Hncibyjim (Genesee CA )
Roland Dixon (Cambridge MA )
Hiriam Kelley (Round Valley CA )
Dorius Leon Spencer (Genesee CA )
Billi Preacher (Chico CA )
George Barber (Chico CA )
Mike Jefferson (Chico CA )
Pouissey (Chico CA )
Mary Azbill (Chico CA )
Henry Azbill (Chico CA )
Bill Reeves (Mooretown CA )

19552003

Maym Hannah Gallagher (Paynes Creek CA )
Lena Thomas Benner (Susanville CA )
Roxie Peconom (Susanville CA )
Dan Williams (Quincy CA )
Leone Morales (Susanville CA )
George Peconom (Susanville CA )
Marie Potts (Sacramento CA )
William Shipley (Santa Cruz CA )
Daniel Stolpe (Santa Cruz CA )

20122014

Farrell Cunningham (Susanville CA )
Donna Clark (Susanville CA )
Melany Johnson (Westwood CA )
Kenneth Holbrook (Sacramento CA )
Paul Cason (Sacramento CA )
Dan Manning (Greenville CA )
Shiwaya Peck (Greenville CA )
Wilhelmina Ives (Greenville CA )
Marybeth Nevins (Middlebury VT )
Jim Bauman (Washington DC )
Ruth Rouvier (Sacramento CA )

World-Making Stories

Maidu Places and Stories on a Shared California Landscape. Map created by Weje-ebis (Keep Speaking) Maidu team with support from the Middlebury College Undergraduate Research Office and Digital Liberal Arts Initiative.

Introduction