With National Science Foundation support, the Grace Hudson Museum, which is located in the city of Ukiah, California, will curate the Pomoan materials collected during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Pomo Indians inhabited this region of California to the North of San Francisco and Grace Hudson, her father and later her husband collected Pomoan materials in a careful and systematic fashion. The documentation which accompanies the collections is, in most cases, detailed and the scientific value of the materials is increased by photographs, systematic ethnographic investigation, field notebooks and related correspondence. Unfortunately the collection suffers from disorganization and a lack of cataloguing and cross-referencing that renders much of these important holdings inaccessible to all but the most knowledgeable and persistent researchers. NSF has already awarded a grant to re-transcribe linguistic manuscripts, catalogue and annotate photographs and catalog ethnographic artifacts. This current award will allow MS Smith-Ferri to continue this process. Written materials and photographs will be correlated, annotated, indexed and cross-referenced. The information and papers themselves will be made available to interested users, institutions with related collections and Indian communities through the use of both microfilm and CD-ROM technology. The last native speaker of Pomo is extremely old and much of what is known of early historic Pomoan lifeways is contained in the collections of the Hudson Museum and a few other institutions. Not only are these materials of great historical significance, but they are also invaluable scientific resources. In the current condition however they are very difficult to use and this grant will significantly increase their access to the scientific community.
