Circular Letter from John Collier at the United States Department of the Interior Office of Indian Affairs, Washington D.C.

OUTLINING NAVAJO ORTHOGRAPHY FOR THE FIRST TIME

Three typescript leaves stapled at upper left corner, light toning but otherwise near fine. [5]pp. United States Department of the Interior, Office of Indian Affairs, Washington D.C.,

Addressed to the Superintendent of the Navajo Agency, the letter begins: "In recent years the Office of Indian Affairs has become increasingly concerned with the preservation and use of the native languages." It then outlines the Department's motivation to establish a fixed orthography for the Navajo language, which until the 1930s had no standardised written form. The rest of the document describes the necessary adaptations of the roman alphabet, as well as giving specific pronunciations, diacritical marks, and the means of representing the clicks characteristic of Navajo speech.

 

John Collier (1884-1968) was the Commissioner for the Bureau of Indian Affairs under President Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration, from 1933 to 1945 and was chiefly responsible for the "Indian New Deal". In particular, he oversaw the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, through which he attempted to reverse a long-standing policy of cultural assimilation of Native Americans, and instead to implement systems for the preservation and perpetuation of their distinct history and culture. This circular letter refers to writer and anthropologist Oliver La Farge (1901-1963) and linguist and ethnologist John Harrington (1884-1961), as well as Catholic missionaries Dr. Edward Sapir and Fr. Berard Haile, all of whom contributed to the development of the Navajo orthography.

 

This late development of a written form of the Navajo language was to serve the United States unexpectedly just a few years later during World War Two. The US Army employed Navajo speakers as "code talkers" to transmit secret radio messages, safe in the knowledge that there were at that stage no published dictionaries with which the enemy might decipher any intercepted speech. 

 

No copies located through OCLC. 

Stock Code: 251769