A partnership between a UW-Madison undergraduate student and the Wisconsin Historical Society has resulted in a new online guide for Indian languages in Wisconsin.
This guide is the fruit of a yearlong partnership between undergraduate student Marissa Lipinksi nee Mastrangeli (BA'2010, Linguistics and Spanish) and the Society's Library and Archives.
Last year Lipinski, winner of a UW-Madison Hilldale Fellowship to support undergraduate research, spent her summer sifting folder-by-folder and page-by-page through nearly 100 collections of manuscripts at the Society.
Most of these collections were acquired and processed long before any language preservation efforts had been imagined and so had never been indexed in any catalog or database.
Under the guidance of Professor Monica Macaulay (Linguistics), Lipinski searched for manuscripts in or about Native American languages and described them in detail.
Her final bibliography -- "Bibliography of Historical Manuscripts in American Indian Languages at the Wisconsin Historical Society" -- cites more than 250 documents or groups of documents created between 1689 and 1976.
Many of these documents were written by missionaries, traders, Indian agents, linguists, and anthropologists, ranging in date from 1689 to 1976.
Some were as short as single-page letters and others were volumes of several hundred pages.
They preserve evidence about more than 20 different languages, mostly spoken in the Great Lakes region.
Paper copies of her bibliography will be sent to tribal language programs and scholars later this fall.
Lipinski's guide is not a primary source, but gives researchers more than 250 historical documents written in or about American Indian languages housed at the Society.
For more information, see the announcement:
http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/highlights/archives/2010/10/indianlanguages.asp