Collections at UC Berkeley's California Language Archive help keep Indigenous languages alive. This is the story of one of them.
November 6, 2025
This story is part of a two-part UC Berkeley News series about the California Language Archive. An episode of the Berkeley Voices podcast features one student’s story of working with the archive and learning about his own culture.
Throughout her long career as a linguist, Sally McLendon eagerly anticipated her annual trips to California’s Lake County and her conversations with Pomo elders. McLendon first developed a research interest in Pomoan languages during her Ph.D. at UC Berkeley in the 1960s — work she pursued throughout her life as a leading scholar who collaborated with Indigenous communities in California and across the Americas.
On her trips to Lake County, she took page after page of meticulous, handwritten notes and recorded hours of conversations on a tape recorder, which she would replay every night to transcribe and translate. She also took her young daughters to Clear Lake, trips they say they still remember fondly.
Her oldest, Annabella Pitkin, recalls fetching sandwiches from a nearby store while McLendon talked with Eastern Pomo elders about language, culture, oral literature and history. And after they returned home to New York City, Pitkin remembers overhearing the recordings that her mother was analyzing from another room.
“I was so reassured, falling asleep, hearing the sounds of Eastern Pomo,” Pitkin said.
Pitkin didn’t know it at the time, but her mother had amassed a vast collection of notes and recordings beginning in 1959 that chronicled three of the seven distinct Pomoan languages. McLendon’s records described the pronunciations of words and more complex grammatical structures, as well as the tribe’s oral literature and traditions. The collection expanded as her collaborations with tribes continued.
Decades later, as McLendon’s health began to fail, she and her older daughter began discussing the collection’s future. It was a lingering question when she died last year at her home in New York at the age of 90.
The answer came in the form of a letter Pitkin found buried beneath a pile of her mother’s unopened mail. It was a query from the West Coast, and it would set in motion a chain of events that would return the materials to the Bay Area, assist a tribe in further revitalizing its language, and help a graduate student unearth his own family history.
The letter was from the California Language Archive at UC Berkeley.
Deep in Dwinelle, an archive of language
Nestled in the depths of Dwinelle Hall, the California Language Archive is home to thousands of notebooks and photographs and hours upon hours of recordings. Started in the 1950s as a research center alongside the Department of Linguistics, it’s now among the largest collections of Indigenous language materials in the world. It contains documentation of nearly 400 Indigenous languages, originally from California but now also across the globe.
The archive also contains a massive, publicly accessible database of nearly 60,000 digital files, totaling about 530 days of audio and 40 days of video. Used by scholars and tribes, the archive preserves records essential for language revitalization, cultural reclamation and the reintroduction of tribal practices that may have once been banned, said Andrew Garrett, a professor of linguistics and the archive’s faculty director.
“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,” Garrett said. “That material is really valuable in Indigenous communities today.”
Until about five years ago, a graduate student researcher handled the archive’s day-to-day operations, which include collecting and cataloging materials and working with scholars and tribal members to access the collection.
Zachary O’Hagan began working with the archive in the fourth year of his Ph.D., studying Peruvian languages. The duties of managing the collection — which continued through his postdoctoral research — fell to him until the archive formally hired him as its full-time manager.
It was an opportunity to jumpstart the effort of opening the archive’s holdings to more people and proactively seek out those who may have materials that should be in the archive.
“In 2025, it’s easy to think that most human knowledge is somehow already online,” O’Hagan 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.”
In recent years, O’Hagan has turned his attention to alumni and others who did linguistics research throughout the 20th century but whose work had not yet been sent to the archive. Armed with a pen, paper and street address, O’Hagan dashed off letters to academics around the world — people like McLendon.
“She’s well known in the documentation of California languages,” O’Hagan said. “She was someone who had, in a way, been on our radar for a long time.”
The California Language Archive had been on her radar, too.
A suitcase full of 90 priceless tapes
Pitkin got in touch with O’Hagan not long after she found the letter. She and her mother had discussed contributing her work on Pomoan languages to the archive for years; at that moment, it was a question of what materials would be of most interest.
As she sifted through the boxes and folders, Pitkin was filled with a range of emotions. She found receipts from gas stations and restaurants from those trips to Clear Lake. She found photographs, some of her and her sister standing with her mother and old friends from Clear Lake communities, people whom she spent years getting to know.
“It was a wonderful kind of memory lane,” Pitkin said.
There’s a vast quantity of human knowledge that is still on paper or still in a box in someone’s attic.
Zachary O’Hagan
She remembered her mother and father, the linguist Harvey Pitkin, whom McLendon met in a Dwinelle Hall elevator when they were both graduate students at Berkeley. Over the years, her parents had explained to Pitkin the work they did as scholars of Indigenous languages and the importance of knowing Indigenous history. They taught their children why land ownership was a vital topic and how language was more than just words. By that point, McLendon was teaching linguistics, anthropology and intellectual history at Hunter College and the City University of New York Graduate Center.
Recalling her mother’s lifetime of work as a linguist, Pitkin said, “You really can’t enter another world until you have at least the most rudimentary sense of language. Language just shapes what you experience and how you reflect on it.”
In October 2024, O’Hagan was attending a conference at Yale University. He and Pitkin decided that, in the 90 minutes he had to spare before he needed to be at the airport, he could tour McLendon’s mid-century apartment and see what kind of records might be of interest to the archive. He was immediately struck by the volume of notebooks, file slip boxes and tapes. With sticky notes in hand, Pitkin and O’Hagan went room to room, opening boxes and labeling the materials that were of most interest to the California Language Archive.
With the clock ticking before O’Hagan’s flight, they decided the boxes of notebooks and file slips could be FedExed to the archive. As for the audio tapes, those should go more immediately.
O’Hagan transferred his clothes and toiletries to an old suitcase they found in the apartment. That freed up space in his carry-on bag, into which they stashed the recordings that would be by his side on his return trip to Berkeley.
“We filled up the suitcase with about 90 tapes,” he said, describing the reel-to-reel recordings and cassettes. “That took us really down to the wire.”
Then he hailed a cab for the airport, priceless recordings in tow. The arrival of the tapes at the California Language Archive marked the end of one journey, but it was the beginning of another for one student who would find the recordings especially important.