Linguist's Tapes Transform Indigenous Language Study

Throughout her long career as a linguist, Sally McLendon eagerly anticipated her annual trips to California's Lake County and her conversations with Pomo elders. McLendon first developed a research interest in Pomoan languages during her Ph.D. at UC Berkeley in the 1960s - work she pursued throughout her life as a leading scholar who collaborated with Indigenous communities in California and across the Americas.

On her trips to Lake County, she took page after page of meticulous, handwritten notes and recorded hours of conversations on a tape recorder, which she would replay every night to transcribe and translate. She also took her young daughters to Clear Lake, trips they say they still remember fondly.

Her oldest, Annabella Pitkin, recalls fetching sandwiches from a nearby store while McLendon talked with Eastern Pomo elders about language, culture, oral literature and history. And after they returned home to New York City, Pitkin remembers overhearing the recordings that her mother was analyzing from another room.

"I was so reassured, falling asleep, hearing the sounds of Eastern Pomo," Pitkin said.

Pitkin didn't know it at the time, but her mother had amassed a vast collection of notes and recordings beginning in 1959 that chronicled three of the seven distinct Pomoan languages. McLendon's records described the pronunciations of words and more complex grammatical structures, as well as the tribe's oral literature and traditions. The collection expanded as her collaborations with tribes continued.

Decades later, as McLendon's health began to fail, she and her older daughter began discussing the collection's future. It was a lingering question when she died last year at her home in New York at the age of 90.

The answer came in the form of a letter Pitkin found buried beneath a pile of her mother's unopened mail. It was a query from the West Coast, and it would set in motion a chain of events that would return the materials to the Bay Area, assist a tribe in further revitalizing its language, and help a graduate student unearth his own family history.

The letter was from the California Language Archive at UC Berkeley.

Deep in Dwinelle, an archive of language

Nestled in the depths of Dwinelle Hall, the California Language Archive is home to thousands of notebooks and photographs and hours upon hours of recordings. Started in the 1950s as a research center alongside the Department of Linguistics, it's now among the largest collections of Indigenous language materials in the world. It contains documentation of nearly 400 Indigenous languages, originally from California but now also across the globe.

The archive also contains a massive, publicly accessible database of nearly 60,000 digital files, totaling about 530 days of audio and 40 days of video. Used by scholars and tribes, the archive preserves records essential for language revitalization, cultural reclamation and the reintroduction of tribal practices that may have once been banned, said Andrew Garrett, a professor of linguistics and the archive's faculty director.

"Sometimes we have the only recordings of a particular language or the only documented information about certain cultural practices or certain stories or certain kinds of vocabulary," Garrett said. "That material is really valuable in Indigenous communities today."

Until about five years ago, a graduate student researcher handled the archive's day-to-day operations, which include collecting and cataloging materials and working with scholars and tribal members to access the collection.

Zachary O'Hagan began working with the archive in the fourth year of his Ph.D., studying Peruvian languages. The duties of managing the collection - which continued through his postdoctoral research - fell to him until the archive formally hired him as its full-time manager.

It was an opportunity to jumpstart the effort of opening the archive's holdings to more people and proactively seek out those who may have materials that should be in the archive.

"In 2025, it's easy to think that most human knowledge is somehow already online," O'Hagan said. "There's a vast quantity of human knowledge that is still on paper or still in a box in someone's attic and somewhere where it should make its way into an archive."

In recent years, O'Hagan has turned his attention to alumni and others who did linguistics research throughout the 20th century but whose work had not yet been sent to the archive. Armed with a pen, paper and street address, O'Hagan dashed off letters to academics around the world - people like McLendon.

"She's well known in the documentation of California languages," O'Hagan said. "She was someone who had, in a way, been on our radar for a long time."

The California Language Archive had been on her radar, too.

A suitcase full of 90 priceless tapes

Pitkin got in touch with O'Hagan not long after she found the letter. She and her mother had discussed contributing her work on Pomoan languages to the archive for years; at that moment, it was a question of what materials would be of most interest.

As she sifted through the boxes and folders, Pitkin was filled with a range of emotions. She found receipts from gas stations and restaurants from those trips to Clear Lake. She found photographs, some of her and her sister standing with her mother and old friends from Clear Lake communities, people whom she spent years getting to know.

"It was a wonderful kind of memory lane," Pitkin said.

She remembered her mother and father, the linguist Harvey Pitkin, whom McLendon met in a Dwinelle Hall elevator when they were both graduate students at Berkeley. Over the years, her parents had explained to Pitkin the work they did as scholars of Indigenous languages and the importance of knowing Indigenous history. They taught their children why land ownership was a vital topic and how language was more than just words. By that point, McLendon was teaching linguistics, anthropology and intellectual history at Hunter College and the City University of New York Graduate Center.

Recalling her mother's lifetime of work as a linguist, Pitkin said, "You really can't enter another world until you have at least the most rudimentary sense of language. Language just shapes what you experience and how you reflect on it."

In October 2024, O'Hagan was attending a conference at Yale University. He and Pitkin decided that, in the 90 minutes he had to spare before he needed to be at the airport, he could tour McLendon's mid-century apartment and see what kind of records might be of interest to the archive. He was immediately struck by the volume of notebooks, file slip boxes and tapes. With sticky notes in hand, Pitkin and O'Hagan went room to room, opening boxes and labeling the materials that were of most interest to the California Language Archive.

With the clock ticking before O'Hagan's flight, they decided the boxes of notebooks and file slips could be FedExed to the archive. As for the audio tapes, those should go more immediately.

O'Hagan transferred his clothes and toiletries to an old suitcase they found in the apartment. That freed up space in his carry-on bag, into which they stashed the recordings that would be by his side on his return trip to Berkeley.

"We filled up the suitcase with about 90 tapes," he said, describing the reel-to-reel recordings and cassettes. "That took us really down to the wire."

Then he hailed a cab for the airport, priceless recordings in tow. The arrival of the tapes at the California Language Archive marked the end of one journey, but it was the beginning of another for one student who would find the recordings especially important.

A student's 'lifetime project'

Tyler Lee-Wynant grew up hearing stories about his great-great-aunt, Edna Campbell Guerrero.

In addition to English, she spoke three dialects of Northern Pomo. She shared her cultural and linguistic knowledge with her family and linguists who became dear friends - including researchers like McLendon from UC Berkeley.

Though Guerrero died the year Lee-Wynant was born, his father has shared stories about Guerrero teaching him Pomoan phrases, an effort to keep the language alive. As a linguistics student at UC Davis, Lee-Wynant became involved in documenting Indigenous languages and archiving his own recordings with the California Language Archive. He joined a separate research project after he graduated, annotating and indexing existing materials at the archive.

The work led him to his great-great-aunt.

"When I began to hear my aunt's voice and the voices of other Northern Pomo speakers, I was just completely just blown away," Lee-Wynant said.

Now in the second year of his linguistics Ph.D. at Berkeley, working as a graduate student researcher in the California Language Archive, Lee-Wynant spends hours each week studying and cataloguing new materials. He said having a connection with the archive's holdings has helped him feel a tie to his tribal heritage and family history.

"My connection has only strengthened over the years," he said.

As Lee-Wynant pored through the materials O'Hagan flew back to Berkeley with, he quickly realized several tapes featured McLendon's interviews with his great-great-aunt. Even more of those interactions are detailed in the 23 boxes of McLendon's notebooks that arrived this summer.

Some of the materials focus on language basics, like verb forms or differences in the pronunciation of related words among the seven Pomoan languages. But Lee-Wynant quickly found the interviews veered in all sorts of directions, from family trees to social customs, traditional weddings and childhood stories.

"This is like a lifetime project for me. I've only scratched the surface," Lee-Wynant said, realizing it'll take at least a year to sort through the materials. "There's so, so much. I always get the chills whenever I listen to it because you never know what story is going to come up."

While several students on campus have used the California Language Archive to research their family, Lee-Wynant is the first to have been cataloguing items that feature a relative - a remarkable coincidence in timing that was some 70 years in the making.

"She always valued her heritage. She always wanted to try to document that for posterity," Lee-Wynant said. "I think she always had some hope that, in the future, like now, descendants and people of the community would value it and keep it going.

"And she was right."

After years of learning about his great-great-aunt from his father, Lee-Wynant said it's been deeply meaningful for the role to be reversed - for him to be sharing findings from his research with his father. He's also increasingly optimistic about how her work will persist through efforts to teach Pomoan languages to young people.

"I would love for the descendants to be able to learn about their family from these resources as I have," Lee-Wynant said. "There's just so much, and there's so much that's just waiting to be learned."

Weaving language into community

Jonathan Cirelli is helping to make that a reality.

Cirelli is the language manager for, and an enrolled member of, the Habematolel Pomo of Upper Lake Tribe, a federally recognized Native sovereign nation. His job is both to collect materials that may help with language revitalization and to work with tribal leaders and the community to create systems that keep alive languages and culture the U.S. government tried to destroy. Future plans include creating flashcards, workbooks and curricula for language reintroduction - especially among young people.

"It took generations for us to lose our language," he tells people. "It might take a couple generations for us to regain it in the way we want to."

On a recent Wednesday, Cirelli, Lee-Wynant and O'Hagan gathered in the California Language Archive to review McLendon's work and formulate a plan for how it will integrate with the Pomoan language revitalization work.

Together, they leafed through the folders and followed along with the recordings. McLendon's work was among the most detailed Cirelli had seen. Critically, it filled in gaps with local dialects. Cirelli saw words he'd never seen before and breakdowns of sentences that filled in missing links for how certain words translated between dialects.

It was like finding a piece that fills in a puzzle.

"I was happily overwhelmed with how much material was there," Cirelli said.

The visit exemplified one of the key goals of the archive, said Garrett, the faculty director.

"What archives really are is about relationships," Garrett said. "Relationships between the material that is curated in an archive and the various communities that have a stake in that material."

As the archive works to digitize the materials, Cirelli will be using them to develop a language curriculum - continuing the work of creating teaching materials that McLendon had pursued decades ago. Bit by bit, they plan to introduce phrases in school curricula and casual interactions. It's a long-term project, Cirelli said, but it's one worth doing.

"People really underestimate the power of language," Cirelli said. "There are songs, ceremonies, traditions, food and other things that were ingrained only in - and are kind of protected by - our language. So by us reintroducing it, we're really just trying to get another layer of our heritage back."

Meanwhile, Pitkin has continued to find herself reflecting on her childhood trips to Clear Lake with her mother and sister and their time in Berkeley. Asked what motivated her mother to spend so many years working to preserve Pomoan languages, Pitkin paused.

"I think she felt a real sense of obligation to the communities at Clear Lake, an obligation to try not to let them down," she said.

Having these materials at the California Language Archive brings them full circle. It opens the door for future possibilities for how the materials might be used by communities and researchers - possibilities McLendon had already begun to imagine.

"The story is not over," Pitkin said. "These are living materials that belong to the world of living people and that are part of ongoing community and scholarly conversations and reimaginings. They're kind of like the seeds of future things that can grow from them.

"That's part of why the California Language Archive is so important. It provides a space from which new things can grow."