American Indian Culture and Research Journal

While working on a dictionary of the Nuu-chah-nulth (Nootka or Aht) language in 1992, I spent some time in Port Albemi, B.C., consulting with an old man named Charlie Watts. He told me that he was born in 1917 and added, ”My father, Sayaachapas,worked with Dr. Sapir. I was here in the 1940s when Morris Swadesh came out with his two little girls and his wife Frances. They lived in that cabin right over there. Besides working with the Old People, he used to have sessions at the community hall in the evening when he would teach us how to write our language. Lots of people came. Swadesh was a good teacher.” Then he said, ”Oh, I have something you’d be interested in!” Rummaging under his bed, he pulled out a faded envelope that contained two typed pages, foxed with age. It was a letter protesting the nonrenewal of Morris Swadesh’s contract by the City College of New York in 1949, an outcome apparently related to Swadesh’s indictment by the McCarthy Commission earlier that year. This letter was signed by Captain Jack, a now long-dead chieftain of the Mowachat band, with a shaky X.