Sally McLendon, a linguist whose work began in the 1960s at the University of California, Berkeley, dedicated her career to documenting Pomoan languages in California. Her research involved years of collaboration with Indigenous communities and resulted in extensive handwritten notes and audio recordings chronicling three of the seven Pomoan languages. These materials include detailed descriptions of pronunciations, grammar, oral literature, and traditions.
As McLendon’s health declined before her death at age 90, she and her daughter Annabella Pitkin discussed what should happen to her collection. The decision was prompted by a letter from the California Language Archive at UC Berkeley. This archive, located in Dwinelle Hall, is one of the largest collections of Indigenous language materials globally. It houses documentation on nearly 400 Indigenous languages and maintains a digital database with about 60,000 files accessible to scholars and tribal members.
Andrew Garrett, professor of linguistics and faculty director of the archive, said: “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. That material is really valuable in Indigenous communities today.”
Zachary O’Hagan manages the California Language Archive. He started working there as a graduate student and later became its full-time manager. O’Hagan noted that much knowledge remains undigitized: “In 2025, it’s easy to think that most human knowledge is somehow already online,” he 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.”
O’Hagan reached out to academics whose work had not yet been archived—including McLendon—and coordinated with Pitkin to identify which materials would be most valuable for preservation. In October 2024, O’Hagan visited McLendon’s apartment to select items for transfer to Berkeley. Audio tapes were transported directly by O’Hagan as carry-on luggage; notebooks followed by mail.
Tyler Lee-Wynant, now a second-year Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley and researcher at the archive, discovered that some tapes featured interviews with his great-great-aunt Edna Campbell Guerrero—a Northern Pomo speaker who worked with McLendon decades earlier. Lee-Wynant described hearing these recordings as deeply meaningful: “When I began to hear my aunt’s voice and the voices of other Northern Pomo speakers, I was just completely just blown away,” he said.
Lee-Wynant spends significant time cataloguing these materials: “This is like a lifetime project for me. I’ve only scratched the surface,” he said.
Jonathan Cirelli, language manager for the Habematolel Pomo of Upper Lake Tribe—a federally recognized Native nation—visited UC Berkeley to review McLendon’s work alongside Lee-Wynant and O’Hagan. Cirelli found previously undocumented words and dialect information critical for ongoing language revitalization efforts within his community.
“It took generations for us to lose our language,” Cirelli said. “It might take a couple generations for us to regain it in the way we want to.” He emphasized that language preservation supports broader cultural renewal: “People really underestimate the power of language,” he said.
Garrett explained another purpose served by archives: “What archives really are is about relationships,” he said. “Relationships between the material that is curated in an archive and the various communities that have a stake in that material.”
Pitkin reflected on her mother’s motivation: “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 sees new possibilities arising from having these materials preserved at UC Berkeley: “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… That’s part of why the California Language Archive is so important. It provides a space from which new things can grow.”
