Isabel Meadows facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Isabel Meadows
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Isabel Meadows in her 40s, circa 1890
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| Born | July 7, 1846 |
| Died | May 22, 1939 (aged 92) |
| Nationality | Rumsen Ohlone |
| Known for | Last fluent speaker of the Rumsen Ohlone language |
Isabel Meadows (July 7, 1846 – 1939) was an Ohlone ethnologist and the last fluent speaker of the Rumsen Ohlone language. She worked closely with the anthropologists from the Smithsonian Institution for more than five years in order to document her culture and language. Her work is considered fundamental in the study of Ohlone languages, especially Rumsen.
Family
Isabel was the daughter of American Yankee James Meadows and Rumsen Native Amrican Maria Loretta Onesimo, one of the last Rumsen Ohlone. Meadows was born in Norfolk, England, in 1817. He was serving aboard a whaler in 1837 when he deserted the ship in Monterey. He later owned a ranch in upper Carmel Valley in the vicinity of a cave in which an Esselen child was found buried in 1952. Isabel's great-grandmother Lupecina Francesa Unegte had been baptized at the Mission San Carlos Borromeo in 1792 when about 800 Native Americans lived there. William Brainard Post worked on Meadows Ranch and met Isabel's aunt Anselma in about 1950. They were married in 1850.
Isabel is known as the last fluent speaker of the Rumsen Ohlone language which had been commonly spoken along the Central Coast of California prior to the arrival of the Spanish. Meadows died at age 100 in Washington D.C. on May 22, 1939. Her body was returned to Carmel for a memorial service. She was survived by one brother, Thomas Meadows of Monterey, and his children.
Smithsonian collaboration
When she was older, Isabel worked closely with Smithsonian ethnologist J. P. Harrington and shared her knowledge of her tribe's culture and languages in the Monterey, Carmel, and Big Sur regions of California. When she was in her eighties, she traveled with Harrington to Washington D.C. where she lived for five years to continue their work on language. While Harrington was focused on what was then called "salvage ethnology" and paid Isabel for her interviews, she often inserted stories that she believed better illustrated her culture and tribal memory, like that of Vicenta Gutierrez who was assaulted by Franciscan priest José María Refugio Suárez del Real:
Vicenta Gutierrez, sister of ‘The Blonde’ Gutierrez, when [she was] a girl went to confession one evening during Lent, and Father Real wanted her, to grab her over there in the church. And next day there was no trace of the padre there, and he was never seen again. He probably fled on horseback in the night. Some said he fled to Spain. He was a Spaniard. He grabbed the girl. The girl went running to her house, saying the padre had grabbed her.
