Pliny Earle Goddard (November 24, 1869 – July 12, 1928) was an American linguist and ethnologist noted for his extensive documentation of the languages and cultures of the Athabaskan peoples of western North America. His early research, carried out under the auspices of the University of California, Berkeley, focused on the Hupa and adjacent Athabaskan groups in northwestern California. After moving to New York in 1909 at the invitation of Franz Boas his scope expanded to include the Athabaskans of the Southwest, Canada, and Alaska. During the 1910s and 1920s. as Boas's junior colleague at the American Museum of Natural History and Columbia University, Goddard played a major role in creating the academic infrastructure for American Indian linguistics and anthropology in North America.
Life and works
The California years
Goddard was born in Lewiston, Maine, on November 24, 1869, into a Quaker family of modest means. He attended Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana (A.B. 1892, M.A. 1896), where he studied Classics. Between 1892 and 1896 he taught Latin in secondary schools in Indiana and Kansas, but the hard economic times of the mid-1890s led him to accept a position as an interdenominational missionary to the Hupa of northwestern California. Finding it necessary to learn enough of the Hupa language to communicate with his flock, Goddard soon became engrossed in analyzing a linguistic system radically different from any he had previously studied. In 1900 he resigned from his missionary post and began graduate study at Berkeley. The following year he was given an Assistantship in the university's newly formed Anthropology department, joining Alfred L. Kroeber, who had been hired to administer the fledgeling program.
Goddard was awarded a Ph.D. in 1904 for a detailed grammatical study of Hupa, the first doctorate in anthropological linguistics granted by any American university. He was promoted to Assistant Professor in 1906 and had responsibility for much of the undergraduate instruction in anthropology and linguistics offered by the university. After finishing his documentation of Hupa, Goddard devoted most of his summers to amassing data on the other surviving varieties of California Athabaskan, traveling hundreds of miles on muleback in search of speakers of such languages as Kato, Wailaki, and Sinkyone. Goddard's preferred technique of working from narrative texts rather than wordlists was in advance of its time, and his notes continue to be of interest.
The most significant source of unpublished Goddard material is his set of notebooks, compiled between 1902 and 1908, that are archived at the American Philosophical Society (APS) in Philadelphia. The notebooks were originally housed at the University of California, Berkeley, but were sent to the APS in the 1940s to become part of that institution's Franz Boas Collection. The notebooks contain interviews with elderly Indians from several tribal groups, including those groups most commonly referred to as the Sinkyone, Mattole, Nongatl, Tolowa, Chilula, Whilkut, Tsnungwe, and Hupa. Much of the material consists of vocabularies and stories, but there are substantial sections containing precise geographical information. Transcriptions of the geographical information have been created by the Cultural Resources Facility, Humboldt State University, Arcata, California. In addition to the APS notebooks relating to California Athabascan Indians, Professor Melville Jacobs of the University of Washington Department of Anthropology received four Goddard notebooks relating to the Lassik tribe.
The New York years
In 1909 the substantial subvention from Regent Phoebe Apperson Hearst that had supported much of UC's anthropological research during the early years of the century was greatly reduced, and a fierce contest ensued between Kroeber and Goddard for control of the diminished program. When Kroeber emerged victorious, Goddard resigned to take a curatorship in ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History, in New York, engineered for him by Franz Boas. From this position Goddard came to exert wide influence, primarily as a writer on general ethnological topics and as the editor of the American Anthropologist (1915–20). Goddard became a forceful proponent of Boas's views in anthropology and linguistics, in particular of Boas's conservative view of the validity of deep linguistic relationships. In 1917 Boas and Goddard co-founded and edited the International Journal of American Linguistics, which soon became the principal organ of American Indian linguistic scholarship.