David J. Costa – författare

The Miami-Illinois Language reconstructs the language spoken by the Miami and the Illinois Native Americans. During the latter half of the seventeenth century both Native communities lived in the region to the south of Lake Michigan in present-day Illinois and Indiana. The French and Indian War, followed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by massive influxes of white settlers into the Ohio River Valley, proved disastrous for both Native groups. Reduced in number by warfare and disease, the Illinois (now called the Peorias) along with half of the Miamis relocated first to Kansas and then to northeast Oklahoma, while the other half of the Miamis remained in northern Indiana. The Miami and the Illinois Native Americans speak closely related dialects of a language of the Algonquian language family. Linguist David J. Costa reconstructs key elements of their language from available historical sources, close textual analysis of surviving stories, and comparison with related Algonquian languages. The result is the first overview of the Miami-Illinois language.

New Voices for Old Words is a collection of previously unpublished Algonquian oral traditions featuring historical narratives, traditional stories, and legends that were gathered during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The collection presents them here in their original languages with new English-language translations. Accompanying essays explain the importance of the original texts and their relationships to the early researchers who gathered and, in some cases, actively influenced these texts. Covering the northeast United States, eastern Canada, the Great Lakes region, and the Great Plains, the Algonquian languages represented in New Voices for Old Words include Gros Ventre, Peoria, Arapaho, Meskwaki, Munsee-Delaware, Potawatomi, and Sauk. All of these languages are either endangered or have lost their last speakers; for several of them no Native text has ever been published. This volume presents case studies in examining and applying such principles as ethnopoetics to the analysis of traditional texts in several languages of the Algic language family. These studies show how much valuable linguistic and folkloric information can be recovered from older texts, much of it information that is no longer obtainable from living sources. The result is a groundbreaking exploration of Algonquian oral traditions that are given a new voice for a new generation.

As Long as the Earth Endures is an annotated collection of almost all of the known Native texts in Miami-Illinois, an Algonquian language of Indiana, Illinois, and Oklahoma. These texts, gathered from native speakers of Myaamia, Peoria, and Wea in the 1890s and the early twentieth century, span several genres, such as culture hero stories, trickster tales, animal stories, personal and historical narratives, how-to stories, and translations of Christian materials. These texts were collected from seven speakers: Frank Beaver, George Finley, Gabriel Godfroy, William Peconga, Thomas Richardville, Elizabeth Valley, and Sarah Wadsworth.Representing thirty years of study, almost all of the stories are published here for the first time. The texts are presented with their original transcriptions along with full, corrected modern transcriptions, translations, and grammatical analyses. Included with the texts are extensive annotation on all aspects of their meaning, pronunciation, and interpretation; a lengthy glossary explaining and analyzing in detail every word; and an introduction placing the texts in their philological, historical, linguistic, and folkloric context, with a discussion of how the stories compare to similar texts from neighboring Great Lakes Algonquian tribes.