Nisga'a materials, ACLS collection
Culture:
Nisga'a includes: Nass, Nisgha, Nishga, Nishka, Niska, Nisqa'a
Date: circa 1894; After 1911; 1920
Contributor: Boas, Franz, 1858-1942 | Matheson, G. | Sapir, Edward, 1884-1939 | Schulenburg, A. C. | Stirling, Matthew Williams, 1896-1975
Subject: Biography | Linguistics
Type: Text
Genre: Dictionaries | Field notes | Shorthand | Transcripts | Stories | Vocabularies
Extent: Circa 3,300 slips, 241 pages, 4 notebooks
Description: The Nisga'a materials in the ACLS collection consist primarily of materials in the "Nass (Nisga'a)" section of the finding aid. The earliest item (Pn5b.3) is a roughly 500-word Nisga'a-English list compiled by Boas from his own work and that of Schulenberg's "Die Sprache der Zimshian-Indianer." There are subsequent texts and vocabularies recorded by Boas, Sapir, and Stirling within this section. Also included is the first half of a Nisga'a-German dictionary compiled by Boas (item Pn5b.4), and an extensive lexicon by Stirling numbering over 3000 word slips (item Pn5b.1). In the "Tsimshian" section of the finding aid, see also Boas' "Texts and word lists in Tsimshian, Ts'ets'aut, and Nisga'a" (item Pn5a.5), which includes original field notes, texts (most published), song texts, musical scores, and some shorthand notes. Overall, material described in the collection as "Nass" or "Nass River" is Nisga'a, though some may be intermixed among Tsimshian materials.
Collection: ACLS Collection (American Council of Learned Societies Committee on Native American Languages, American Philosophical Society) Mss.497.3.B63c