Proactive Acquisition: Four-year Progress Report from the California Language Archive

The California Language Archive (CLA) at the University of California, Berkeley is a physical and digital archive founded in 1953 for linguistic heritage materials from the Americas. As of March 2024, it holds 432 accessioned collections on 519 named language varieties (18,823 items including 51,590 digital files). Since January 2021, the CLA has acquired more than 20 collections by outreach to senior (retired) scholars, primarily linguists, anthropologists, and musicologists with research interests in South America. (See Austin 2017, Dobrin and Schwartz 2021, and O’Meara and Good 2010 for issues inherent in legacy materials.) Examples include relatively large collections, such as Gerald Weiss’s (1932-2021; O’Hagan 2021) papers, tape recordings, and photographs (majority 1961-1980) from ethnographic fieldwork in Ashaninka communities (Peru), and small ones, such as Alfred Pietroforte’s (b.1925) single tape recording of songs in Mono, Northern Paiute, Tachi, and Wukchumni (California), from 1959. These proactive acquisitions complement deposits by active researchers and instructors (and Indigenous efforts to locate at-risk materials; Tamez 2021), and can circumvent models by which an intermediary must facilitate deposits by these scholars. They respond to the precariousness of collections in private hands, but they also risk creating processing backlogs for understaffed repositories. This presentation discusses these acquisitions in order to frame a general progress report on CLA accessions since this date, together with activities including coordination with California tribal groups (e.g., Kawaiisu, Modoc) as part of cataloging, community research visits supported by multiple organizations, collaborations with museums, and preliminary digital materials return events in Kukamiria and Urarina communities (Peru). The result is a variety of collections stemming from classical research projects conducted by faculty members, graduate students, and others, longstanding collaborations with community members, linguistic field methods courses, linguistics lectures, discoveries in departmental spaces, and the work of missionaries. References Austin, Peter. 2017. Language Documentation and Legacy Text Materials. Asian and African Languages and Linguistics 11 Dobrin, Lise M., and Saul Schwartz. 2021. The Social Lives of Linguistic Legacy Materials. Language Documentation and Description 21:1–36. O’Hagan, Zachary. 2021. Obituario, Gerald Weiss (1932-2021). Amazon ́ ıa peruana 34: 279–286. O’Meara, Carolyn, and Jeff Good. 2010. Ethical Issues in Legacy Language Resources. Language and Communication 30:162–170. Tamez, Sonia. 2021. Saving Our Stories: Sustaining California Indigenous Knowledge. California Institute for Community, Art, and Nature.