Watt Sam (October 6, 1876 – July 1, 1944)[1] was a
Natchez storyteller and cultural historian of
Braggs, Oklahoma and one of the two last native speakers of the
Natchez language.[2]
Around 1907 he worked with anthropologist
John R. Swanton who collected information about Natchez religion.[3] Swanton commented that Sam, having lived among the
Cherokee and
Creek his whole life and being fluent in both languages, had absorbed so much of their oral tradition that it was difficult to know the extent to which his stories reflected original Natchez tradition. For some of passages in the narratives that had sexual content, Swanton only provided a translation into Latin.[4] In the 1930s he worked with linguist
Mary Haas who collected grammatical information and texts. In 1931, anthropologist Victor Riste made several
wax cylinder recordings of Watt Sam speaking the Natchez language, which were rediscovered at the
University of Chicago in the 1970s by Archie Sam and linguist Charles Van Tuyl.[5][6] One of the cylinders is now at the
Voice Library at the
University of Michigan.[6]
He was the biological cousin of the other last speaker of Natchez,
Nancy Raven, who in Natchez kinship terminology was his classificatory aunt, and through his father Creek Sam (b. 1825) he was the great-uncle of Natchez scholar
Archie Sam.[7][8]
In some of his stories he used a register of Natchez that he referred to as "Cannibal language" in which he substituted some words with others.[9] As among the Natchez the language was generally passed down matrilineally, Watt Sam did not teach the language to any of his children.[2]
^
abKimball, Geoffry (2005).
"Natchez". In Janine Scancarelli; Heather Kay Hardy (eds.). Native Languages of the Southeastern United States. University of Nebraska Press. pp. 385–453.
ISBN0803242352.
^Swanton, John R. (1929). "Myths & Tales of the Southeastern Indians", Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin, No. 88, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office.
^Swann, Brian (2011). Born in the Blood: On Native American Translation. University of Nebraska Press. p. 173.
ISBN978-0803267596.
^
abBarnett, James F. Jr. (2007). The Natchez Indians: A History to 1735. Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi. p. 134.
ISBN9781578069880.
OCLC86038006.
^Galloway, Patricia Kay; Jason Baird Jackson (2004), "
Natchez and Neighboring Groups", in Raymond D. Fogelson (ed.), Handbook of North American Indians, Vol. 14: Southeast, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, pp. 598–615 [unified volume Bibliography, pp. 772–999]
^Martin, Jack B. (2004), "Languages", in Raymond D. Fogelson (ed.), Handbook of North American Indians, Vol. 14: Southeast, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, pp. 68–86 [unified volume Bibliography, pp. 772–999]
^Kimball, Geoffrey (2012). Natchez Cannibal Speech. International Journal of American Linguistics, Vol. 78, No. 2 (April 2012), pp. 273–280