The digitized portion (244 folders; ca. 1,500 items; 21,297 images) of the papers (5,000 items) of naturalist, mammalogist, ornithologist, and ethnographer C. Hart Merriam (1855-1942) relates almost entirely to his efforts to collect vocabularies of California Indians and other Native American language families from Indigenous knowledge bearers between circa 1902 and 1936.  The content falls into three major types of materials:

• Indian vocabularies: Alphabetically arranged bilingual fieldwork forms documenting responses from Indigenous language speakers to English-language questionnaires, primarily collected from native-speaking informants in California and the west.
• Maps: Printed maps overlaid with handwritten labeling and watercolor or ink coloring indicating linguistic zones or geographic presence of Indigenous language families or groups in different regions of northern, central, and southern California, representing many different tribal nations and showing tribal nation reservation areas as defined in the time period the maps were printed and prepared, ca. 1902-1936.
• Miscellany: The remaining two digitized items, which were included in the scanning project simply because they are filed at the beginning of container 24, just before the Indian vocabularies begin, consist of notebooks relating to Merriam’s 1875 nature study of Locus Grove, Lewis County, N.Y., and notes he took as a student at Yale University of zoological lectures given by Professor Addison Emery Verrill.

Having trained and worked extensively as a naturalist, Merriam turned to Native American ethnography as a primary focus in the twentieth century.  Though not a linguist, he saw language as a way of demonstrating the extreme variety, diversity, and interconnectedness of Indigenous cultural heritage in the California region. He sought to honor elders with language knowledge and document through native voices views and descriptions of the natural world and longstanding traditional mystical and spiritual stories and beliefs. He split his time in the last decades of his life seasonally in residence in northern California and Washington, D.C.

Merriam traveled extensively in California and nearby border areas to interview native speakers. Some informants and speakers – the Indigenous knowledge experts providing and sharing the information – are identified by name and tribal nation membership in the fieldwork. Others remain anonymous. He recorded handwritten phonetically spelled versions of their responses, utilizing preprinted U.S. Department of Agriculture forms and other field guides that covered many different categories of terms and words. The fieldwork forms include simple phrases, kinship terms, parts of the body, indications of death or illness, and words describing landscape and geographical phenomena, such as mountains, valleys, rivers, seas, and streams; as well as animals, plants, birds, fish, and foodways; and material culture and procedures used in common activities such as hunting, fishing, cooking, weaving, basketmaking, ceramics, or other forms of art and craft.

Some of the fieldwork forms were filled out extensively during interviews, and in some instances more than one type of fieldwork form was used.  Other documents were completed very sparsely or with just a few words.  Merriam revisited some speakers, including elders and those who were known to be very proficient in original language knowledge, and recorded accumulated responses from them over a series of years or sessions.  Others were interviewed just once. Though his focus was on California Indians, some tribal nation language groups from other parts of the United States are represented in his reports, and some source information comes from studies by others.

In 2024, the fieldwork notes for Merriam’s Indian vocabularies, located in containers 24-47 of his papers, were reprocessed, and the collection finding aid revised. Folders were retitled using Merriam's phonetic spellings as written on the vocabulary lists, and his original hierarchical arrangement, grouping individual dialects according to wider language families, was reinstated. Research was also conducted to determine the related modern spelling or equivalent term of a language or Indigenous band, predominantly by using the California Language Archive, maintained by the University of California, Berkeley (see https://cla.berkeley.edu/ External), and California Indian Languages by Victor Golla (University of California Press, 2011), as well as other verified sources. These modern terms, including variant spellings, are included in parentheses next to Merriam's original phonetic spellings. Every effort was made to ensure accuracy in representing both Merriam's original classification and its modern equivalents.

For more detailed information about the C. Hart Merriam Papers, and listings of the content, see the collection finding aid (PDF and HTML), which includes folder-level links to the Indian vocabularies digital files.