Ethnographers Among the Washoe

Some of the most important material housed in the University of Nevada Oral History Program (UNOHP) is a collection of audio and video tapes which document Washoe life in Nevada and California. These were collected by the UNOHP from the mid-1980s on. Other researchers have worked with the Washoe much earlier, studying aspects of their daily lives, their traditions, and their language. In an effort to document the experiences of these anthropologists, linguists, and others, oral history interviews have been conducted with some of these individuals.
    Meredith Rucks, an associate of the UNOHP, interviewed a number of scholars who worked with the Washoe between the 1930s and the 1970s. Researchers who participated in the effort include the late James Downs, Stanley Freed, Donald Handelman, William H. Jacobsen Jr., Philip Leis, Peter Miller, Brooke Mordy, Norman Scotch, the late Edgar Siskin, Anita Spring, and Betty Reveley Wendt.
    The project was sponsored in part by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, a private operating foundation. The organization supports research in all branches of anthropology, including cultural/social anthropology, ethnology, biological/physical anthropology, archaeology, and anthropological linguistics. Wenner-Gren supplied funds for travel and for the finding aid, while the UNOHP contributed staff time for processing and supervision.
    More than eighty-five hours of recordings were generated by the project, and the completed transcripts will be available at the UNOHP reading room as well as in the Special Collections departments at the University of Nevada libraries in Reno and Las Vegas. Copies of the accompanying finding aid will be housed in the same locations, on the UNOHP's Web site, and at the Wenner-Gren offices and Washoe cultural centers. To view abstracts of the tapes in this collection, click here. All abstracts were authored by Kathleen Coles of the UNOHP.

Notes on orthography and word choice:
    The reader will notice that there are two different orthographies for "Washoe" in the following text. At one time, the preferred spelling was "Washo," but that has changed over the years to the currently accepted spelling of "Washoe." There are also terms used in the oral histories (and consequently in the tape abstracts) that may not be in common use today but were so at the time these individuals were doing fieldwork.