Morris Swadesh - Early Career

Early Career

In the 1930s, Swadesh conducted extensive fieldwork on more than 20 indigenous languages of the Americas, with travels in Canada, Mexico and the US. He worked most prominently on the Chitimacha language, a now-extinct language isolate found among indigenous people of Louisiana. His fieldnotes and subsequent publications constitute the main source of information on this extinct language. He also conducted smaller amounts of fieldwork on the Menominee and Mahican languages, of the Algonquian language family.

Swadesh taught linguistics and anthropology at the University of Wisconsin in Madison from 1937 to 1939, during which time he devised and organized the highly original "Oneida Language and Folklore Project." This program hired more than a dozen Wisconsin Oneida Indians on a WPA project to record and translate texts in the Oneida language. Swadesh was let go by the university just as the project was to begin, and the task was left to Floyd Lounsbury to finish. Lounsbury, later Sterling Professor of Anthropology and Linguistics at Yale University, was an undergraduate at that time.

In the late 1930s, Swadesh went to Mexico to help with changes in indigenous education. Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas was promoting the education of indigenous peoples there. Together with rural school teachers, Swadesh worked in indigenous villages, teaching people to read first in their own languages, before teaching them Spanish. He worked with the Tarahumara, Purepecha (Tarascan), and Otomí.

Returning to the U.S., during the Second World War Swadesh worked on military projects to compile reference materials on Burmese, Chinese, Russian, and Spanish. He also wrote easy-to-learn textbooks for troops to learn Russian and Chinese.