Chasing Voices: John Peabody Harrington and the Language Revitalization Movement
When linguist and anthropologist John Peabody Harrington died in 1961 at the age of 77, few understood the significance of his work. He was an eccentric, paranoid and obsessively driven anthropologist, whose life became dedicated to preserving Native Americans’ dying languages. Today Harrington’s legacy is regarded as the “Rosetta Stone” that unlocks dozens of all-but-forgotten California Indian languages.
