GRIN Language and History Resources
A collection of 300+ Language and History Articles from Gila River News
You can view the whole base by clicking the button below….
The idea for this project originally came from Robert Johnson over the the Huhugam Heritage Center. I was in a meeting with him a few months ago discussing language and history learning- he brought up that GRIC already has a pretty sizeable set of curriculum in the public - the HHC staff has been posting regular articles for about 15 years!
On the history front, you have the great work by Billy Allen, and then going further back you have articles from Emmett White as well. Robert said we should just go through and pull all these articles together – so I started working on that.
What is It
This is a database that has the various articles regarding history, language, or culture that I’ve found in the various Gila River Newspapers.
I searched through the issues I have available in the Gila River News Database - specifically in
Pima Gazette (1935-1946)
Gila River News (1964-1970)
Pima Maricopa Echo (1971-1982)
Gila River Indian News (1998-2024)
You can see from the database that there are still a number of issues missing from my collection, so there could be additional material out there. I’m sure that Emmett was doing articles before 2008 - but my collection only goes back to there. Maybe someday I will convince CPAO to digitize the rest…
How?
This was a lot of manual effort - luckily I had already tagged many of these articles in my “Interesting Stories” listing.
When I first went through the papers I tried to note articles related to history, culture, or language. So I had some foundation already. Going through this time I found more than I original tagged - but I’m sure I missed some side stories that were written here and there. But it was pretty time consuming … so it’s good enough.
I was thinking about pulling the actual article out of the paper through some extraction software - but with over 200+ articles I just don’t feel like putting the effort in to do that. Maybe someday I’ll do some extraction to make the text easier to search, but for now this is a good start.
How to use it?
Read!
No seriously - I think of two major uses
History - A lot of the history work I do is built on Billy Allen’s articles over the years and I highly recommend reading through all of them. He does a great job with easy to read articles that have a great mix of personal and data-driven information. Similarly, Emmett White also did amazing and very personal articles about all kinds of local history.
Language - Like Robert Johnson recommended, you have all the elements here to start your own little curriculum. There are word-searches, crosswords, and line connecting puzzles to have activities. There are in-depth sentence structure and other linguistic lessons as well that HHC has put together over the years. A great place to start your language journey or practice your skills!
Oh - and there is also a great partial series of language lessons from the 1960’s that is fun to read too! Orthography is a bit different, but you’ll get used to it.
Ways to make it better
As usual - there are probably lots of ways it could be better, but here are a few I’m thinking about
More Content!!!!!
I wish I had more of the newspapers digitized - I’d love to be able to complete this collection. Especially with the GRIC issues from the 80’s and 90’s - I hope to someday go through them to see if there is any other content in there…
Other Language Lessons
Something I considered but didn’t pursue was a broader set of language lessons from newspapers on all the Four Southern Tribes - Gila River, Ak-Chin, Salt River, and Tohono O’odham.
I was thinking about an intertribal super-collection of these resources so folks can have a one-stop… But, I don’t know their newspapers well enough and what I have so far was already pretty time-consuming.
Still…. it would be cool if anyone from any of these tribes wants to copy this base and start their own collection. Happy to help you get started and maybe we can link them together.
HMU if interested in a collaboration =)
Conclusion
And, well… that is about it. Not a crazy new project, not a lot of cool technical bells and whistles to get it developed. But I hope that it will be useful for folks who want to get quick access to publicly available language and history resources.
Obviously, there is also the O’odham Learning Library you can access and find academic and scholarly sources - but to me these local sources are more important and powerful than those. These are the words from our local experts, they are lessons from the people who have been doing this work in our Community for decades.
And they are aimed at COMMUNITY - not some ivory tower publisher.
Anyway - hope this resource helps you on your learning journey =)