Museum Documenting Jesuit Contact with American Indians
A project headed up by the Arizona State Museum's Office of Ethnohistorical Research and the UA Department of German Studies
is their first joint attempt to transcribe and translate German text into English.
reprinted with permission from UA News
(Click to enlarge)
Can you read this? UA students are going through an arduous translation and interpretation process in helping the Arizona State Museum to decipher letters written by Philipp Segesser, a Swiss Jesuit priest who worked under Father Kino. To date, more than 200 UA students have helped translate and interpret writings for the museum office. Eventually, the office would like to have the Segesser letters translated into Spanish.
A small file box in the Arizona State Museum's Office of Ethnohistorical Research contains copies of personal letters written by Philipp Segesser, a German-speaking Swiss Jesuit priest said to be one of the missionaries who have spent the longest term in the region.
From the 1720s to the 1760s, Segesser – who served at San Ignacio and San Xavier del Bac, among other locations – wrote numerous letters in Spanish and German to his family in Switzerland and his supervisors before and while doing missionary work in southern Arizona and northern Mexico.
Those letters remained in his family home in Lucerne until Raymond Thompson, a former Arizona State Museum director, was able to acquire microfilm copies of them in the 1980s.
"These are very interesting letters," Thompson said. "Mixed in are lots of stories about the natural history of the area and also information about the people and the problems they had."
The University of Arizona office is now collaborating with the German Studies department to translate the letters into English – making it the first formal translation and interpretation project the ethnohistorical office has led that is not in Spanish.
"These letters add depth to the ethnohistorical record of northern New Spain during the 18th century, providing details about the ways in which native communities interacted with the missionaries," said Diana Hadley, who directs the Office of Ethnohistorical Research.
"These letters also provide details about the personal experience of a lonely missionary on a very distant frontier – even his personal religious experience," she said.
"He recognized the skill and intelligence of the people," said Hadley, who is also the museum's associate curator of ethnohistory. "He was impressed by their knowledge and was sympathetic toward the native people."
New Grant-Funded Research
Hadley recently received a grant totaling nearly $20,000 from the Southwest Foundation for Education and Historical Preservation to translate the Segesser letters and for other research projects.
Diana Hadley looks through the bin containing a collection of letters written by Philipp Segesser, a Swiss Jesuit priest, while working in southern Arizona and Mexico during the 18th century.
To translate the Segesser letters, Hadley enlisted support from UA German Studies professor Albrecht Classen, a University Distinguished Professor, and his students.
Classen said that while Segesser's letters are certainly not the only source available that details contact between American Indians and Jesuit priests, "this is just one more and a very important addition, but it is a very personal body of text, that will be important to people in religion, anthropology, geology, history, art and also to climatologists and economic historians."
The transcription and translation process is arduous and time consuming.
Segesser often wrote in fragmented and convoluted sentences and tended to intermix indigenous, Spanish and German words,. He also wrote from one border of the paper to the next – front and back – in ink that has often bled through the paper, making his writing difficult to read.
"It's been a real challenge," said Ivan Grubisic, a biochemistry student working on the project. Grubisic, who is also majoring in engineering mathematics and German studies, said it takes him more than one hour to translate about 40 lines of text.
For this project, students must first do a rough translation of all the letters, which often requires consulting older dictionaries, specialists and museum resources.
Then come numerous rounds of revisions, double-checking, background investigations and other types of research to ensure accuracy.
"We're doing primary research, and the students are instrumental in carrying out this research," Classen said.
For that, Christopher Floess is grateful.
Floess, a German studies major, said he values working on the project and realizes it will be of help to a range of people, including historians and community members who are interested in what happened to American Indians in the region.
"Working with Professor Classen has been a great experience," Floess said. "He has given us all an opportunity to do real academic work that will be of use to historians, religious studies majors, perhaps geographers, people interested in Native American studies and more."
'Unique Project' Yields Interesting Results
Grubisic, like the other students working on the project, got involved after taking a course with Classen. Today, the group meets weekly to work on the project.
"It's a very unique project, and it's not one very many people get to work on," Grubisic said. "So for that, we're all relatively excited."
The letters detail the everyday life of Segesser, who wrote often about the situation at the missions and about missing his homeland. He never returned to Switzerland.
"Along the way, Segesser is interacting with this new culture and trying to figure out ways to solve problems," Grubisic said.
Unlike the formal letters Segesser drafted to secular and papal officials, the letters home "contain information concerning the native peoples at each of the missions that does not appear in the writings of other missionaries or government officials from this period," the grant proposal noted.
In some instances, Segesser asked that his family and friends send him certain books, "scented water," scythes for field work, a butter churn, plum seeds, chocolate and even his mother's marzipan recipe.
Segesser wrote about the popular foods of the time, the ways in which people traveled, marriage rituals practiced by different indigenous groups and also ways he and others handled illnesses, Grubisic said.
He also wrote about the ways that the Europeans attempted to control and indoctrinate the American Indian tribes. He mentioned the Pima Revolt that occurred in 1751 and also detailed instances of attacks by Apache members against the missions.
"At one point in a letter that I was translating, Segesser was in hiding with some other people because of these uprisings," Floess said.
"The Indians were burning everything and Segesser was quite distraught about all the decades of work – I believe he said 80 years – of the missionaries being destroyed," he said.
Such details, and many others, are important to understanding the region and the time, Classen said.
"The question is fundamentally, ‘Why did they want to come here and live for decades in total isolation with people they didn't really understand?' We found out already there is a mystical missionary experience they had," Classen said. "They had visions and felt a calling."
This icon indicates link opens in a new window.
