Chasing Voices
The Story of John Peabody Harrington
Coming to PBS stations starting April 30th 2021. Check local listing for dates and times.
From 1907 to 1961, John Peabody Harrington, a gifted ethnographer amassed over a million pages of notes on over 150 different Native American languages. Fearing others would steal his work and use it for the wrong reasons, he intentionally hid his notes from his employer Bureau of American Ethnology. Today his notes are the “Rosetta Stone” for Native American tribes working to revitalize their language. Chasing Voices is a journey through Harrington’s life and work and how it is impacting tribes today.
“I quickly became aware of just how large the problem of traditional language loss is within our tribal communities. I realized that this man had accomplished all this work on Native American languages yet, virtually no one has heard of him. It was as if he was purposefully left out of history.”
Director: Daniel Golding
