[Intro music]
Martha Tsutsui Billins (host): Hello and welcome to Field Notes, a podcast about linguistic fieldwork. I’m Martha Tsutsui Billins, and today’s episode is with Dr. Kate Lindsey. Kate Lindsey is a professor of linguistics and co-director of the Structures of Under-Researched Languages lab at Boston University. Her research has both theoretical and documentary applications. Her theoretical work focuses on the analysis of underspecification and variation in phonological systems supported primarily by field data. Her dissertation utilized original data from eleven months of fieldwork with Ende speakers of Limol village, Papua New Guinea to explore the interaction of so-called ghost elements pervasive in Ende phonology. Current research projects include extended fieldwork in the South Fly area of Papua New Guinea to support the first reference grammar of Ende, and theoretical analyses of vowel harmony and phonological reduplication.
Kate is a longtime friend of the pod, as she was an early supporter and listener of Field Notes. I’m thrilled to have Kate on the pod as the inaugural Papuanist interviewee. Papua New Guinea is very well known in language documentation as the most linguistically diverse place on Earth, and it was really interesting to hear about Kate’s work, her field site, the people she works with, and the languages they speak. One of the topics we discuss in detail in this interview is a documentary created and directed by the technology class of 2018, which Kate led in Limol village, Western Province, Papua New Guinea. Here is a short clip from the documentary, which is available on YouTube and has closed captions in English. The English translation of the following clip is as follows. “Welcome to South Fly, Papua New Guinea, a land of many different languages, many different cultures, and many important stories. It’s a beautiful place. We are about to watch an important movie about the Ende tribe, about how something amazing and surprising came to them and changed their lives forever.”
[man speaking Ende]
MTB: Hi, Kate, how are you?
Kate Lindsey: I’m really good, Marti. Thanks for having me.
MTB: Thank you so much. The first thing I’d like to ask you about is, where did your interest in linguistics first come from?
Kate Lindsey: I guess you could say my interest in languages arose pretty early on. I was in high school. I was really interested in math, and one of my favorite math teachers was my pre-calculus teacher. And he had this really interesting backstory. He was one of the last speakers of a language called Hupa in Northern California. So, I’m from Northern California. I interacted with a lot of Native American community who were at my school. They were also my teachers. And so I had this kind of closer relationship with this math teacher, and he told me a lot about kind of his relationship with his language and his family up in Northern California. And that kind of got me hooked when I was young that, “Oh, there are languages that are not French or English or Spanish like you get taught in school.” So I went to college. I studied quite a few lots of different languages, and in 2011, I went to an LSA Summer Institute in Boulder, Colorado as kind of a whim. I was really interested in languages, but kind of wanted to do a little bit more on the science-y side and study languages from that perspective. And I ended up taking a field methods class that was taught by Nicholas Evans, and it was on a Papuan language called Idi. And after I took that class, I mean, that just really opened my eyes up to linguistics and linguistic anthropology and language documentation, and that’s kind of what got my career going.
MTB: That’s so cool. That’s awesome. And Idi is closely related to the language, the language you’ve worked on, Ende, right? Is that correct?
Kate Lindsey: Yes. When I first started grad school… So I had studied Russian in college, and I got really connected to the Chuvash community, which is… They speak this Chuvash language. It’s a Turkic language spoken in Western Russia. I lived there for quite a while and ended up doing a Fulbright research year studying Chuvash, Chuvash language revitalization, you know, a bit of a survey on, you know, what parts of the population were speaking the language and how much of the time and that sort of thing. So when I started grad school, I was thinking I would continue working in Russia, and I ran into some logistical problems with getting back into Russia, as I’m sure a lot of people can sympathize with these days. And I ended up needing a new language, a new region, a new everything for my dissertation. I ended up emailing Nick Evans from that initial field methods class, asking if he could help me, and he set me up with the language of the class, Idi, that language’s sister, Ende. There were a couple people in the community, in the Ende community that had come to Nick. So Nick Evans, he’s a professor at ANU, Australian National University. He works primarily on a language called Nen, which is spoken also in the South Fly, Papua New Guinea, where Idi and Ende are. So a couple of Ende speakers had made their way to his field site and asked him to send a linguist.
MTB: Oh, perfect.
Kate Lindsey: So when he heard that I was looking for a language, they were looking for a linguist, match made in heaven. I got sent to work with the Ende community. So that’s how that all happened.
MTB: That’s amazing. I love stories like that where it’s just like, serendipity, fate, like the stars just align and everything works out.
Kate Lindsey: Oh, yeah. I would say that it was a real blessing that I felt invited personally by this community to come, and that when I arrived, there wasn’t any cell service or any real way for me to contact them besides sending a satphone message that I would be coming this year and that I was a linguist. And so when I arrived, there was a large group of people that were really excited about having me there and had a lot of ideas about what kind of language project activities they wanted to do. So when I got there, we were really able to hit the ground running. I didn’t have to explain who I was and how my work might benefit them or how their work might benefit me. It was great that they already had this example of a working linguist-community relationship nearby that they could kind of transfer for their own needs.
MTB: Yeah. Yeah, that’s awesome. So were you the first or one of the first linguists to work with Ende speakers, or had people been there before?
Kate Lindsey: So I arrived for the first time in 2015. The last person, non-local person or non-Papuan person to visit, had been in the 1960s, were some missionaries, so for many people, I was the first outsider they had ever seen or the first white person they had ever seen or the first linguist they’d ever seen. So there was definitely a lot of adjustments right at first. Of course, that was the first Papuan village I had ever seen. So we were all getting to know each other pretty well. But yeah, there hadn’t been any kind of like foreign visitors in that area in a very long time. It’s quite a trek to get to. It takes me about two weeks to get from the United States there.
MTB: Wow, door to door, two weeks.
Kate Lindsey: Door to door, two weeks.
MTB: Okay, so what steps are involved? Well, first I have to fly to Australia. So usually I would go San Francisco to Sydney. Sydney, I’d fly up to the northern part of Australia, usually the Cairns or Horn Island. From Cairns, I’d fly into the capital of Papua New Guinea, which is Port Moresby. Once I’m in Papua New Guinea, I can be on a domestic flight. So the planes just keep getting smaller. From Port Moresby, I can fly to the regional center of… So where we’re going is the South Fly region of New Guinea. It’s the southern part of Western Province. It’s right north of the Torres Strait, which is separates Papua New Guinea and Australia. So the regional center, like the regional urban center there, is a town called Daru, which is an island also in the Torres Strait area. So I can fly a domestic plane from Port Moresby to Daru. These only fly a couple times a week, so sometimes you have to wait a couple days in Port Moresby for the plane to be there. Once I’m in Daru, there is an even smaller plane that can fly into some of the regional local airstrips. So there’ll be some grass land where the grass has been chopped down and the anthills have been removed, where MAF flights… MAF is kind of a missionary aviation company in Papua New Guinea, and they fly these little, you know, like eight-seaters into some of the more regional areas. The village where I’m going, Limol, doesn’t have an airstrip, so we land to the closest airstrip, and after that, it’s a canoe ride, so we all get all of our stuff into canoes. We take that for a day, sometimes two, depending on the levels of the water. It’s best to go in the summer when there’s no rain, for linguists, because rain is terrible for recording and for recording equipment. But in the summer, the water levels are lower, which means the mud is higher. The heavier your canoe, the less likely you’re going to be able to get going down the river, and I always brought a lot of stuff, so I had some pretty heavy canoes. So we would get to the canoe spot, and then it was a half-day hike to get to the village. It takes quite a long time to get there, and a lot of logistics go into getting there when you do. For that reason, you know, it doesn’t make sense to go. Most of my trips have been longer to kind of make the journey worth it. But also because of that, you know, some of these communities, because they’re so hard to access, there isn’t a lot of foreign influence or a lot of foreigners walking around, so it’s quite a novelty that someone makes it out that far.
MTB: Yeah. Wow. The first time you went, did you, did like someone meet you at some point to help you get there? Like what, what was that like?
Kate Lindsey: The first time I landed in Daru, I had messaged in advance and there were some Ende people that were looking out for me. And as soon as I landed, everyone knew I had arrived. It’s a small town, and I stuck out like a sore thumb. So I had an assistant with me, my really good friend, Grace Maher. I almost always take people with me on, on these trips. So Grace and I were just walking around town. And then Nick Evans was actually flying, also flying through Daru at that time, and he helped us by introducing us to an Ende speaker and some Ende people. One of them was a translator, and she stayed with us for the whole trip once she met us and realized we needed help. So she came with us. That first trip, we didn’t take any plane. We just took the, we took a boat the entire way from Daru to Limo, so she came with us on the boat and she helped me write a welcome speech on the way there so that when we arrived, I could say something intelligible to the people. She stuck with us the whole time. She did a lot of translating of stories, you know, kind of live translations while people were telling them, and really helped us. We had these big community halls to kind of explain who we were and why we were there and what we were interested in doing. So she did a lot of that work translating while we, while I was still learning the language.
MTB: Was it just a lucky coincidence that you met her, or had you intended to work with a translator while you were in the field?
Kate Lindsey: It was somewhat lucky. Daru, as the regional center, they have, the big hospital is there. Secondary schools are there. It’s where the big market is. So people from all over the kind of like the region come to Daru in order to do a lot of their trading. Their kids go to school if somebody’s sick. So Daru itself is kind of this meeting point. So I can imagine that I could fly into, you know, anyone could fly into Daru almost any time and say a language and somebody will come out of the woodwork and be like, “Oh, yeah, I know… I know that language,” or, “I know this guy that… My neighbor speaks that language,” or so on. This region of New Guinea, this kind of like southern part of the New Guinea Island, it’s about as large as maybe the Netherlands. It’s not huge, but there are at least eight different language families and just tons and tons of languages. I recently started this project, which is a collaboration between some linguists and the secondary school, which is in Daru. So Daru secondary school is grades 9 through 12. Students who are in the school vary a lot in their ages. Many are, you know, what we in the U.S. we would say are like typically high school age, you know, it’s kind of late teenagers, but there’s a lot of older students as well, depending on when they were able to get the resources to get to secondary school. There’s about 1,000 students at the school, and it’s a boarding school, so they come from all over the area. And one thing that was really, you know, something that’s, that’s always been a kind of like a bit of a nightmare for these field trips has been just like in how difficult it is to access this part of the community. So I kind of already explained how it takes, you know, two weeks, but that two weeks is just, it’s really difficult. You know, I say that, you know, it’s like a simple canoe ride, but it’s actually, you know, you’re sitting in a metal boat with, you know, mosquitoes and spiders and sun and, and it’s not… So it’s not fun for the people in the boat. And then there’s also these people who have to push me and my canoe miles down a river, and it’s not fun for them either. I can tell you that. So it’s a huge effort from both the community and from the linguists in order to kind of like make these things happen. And one thing I’ve noticed on all of my trips is that, you know, like whenever I come into the area, I’m always, you know, introduced to someone who speaks a language that I haven’t heard of before, I haven’t written down. If I look it up in Ethnologue or Glottolog, like, I don’t see it there. So there’s just this huge resource of untapped linguistic diversity that we just know nothing about.
And so this project I have is forming this relationship with Daru Secondary School because what I have learned is that a lot of students at the secondary school are really interested in learning some of the technologies and some of the tools that linguists use to document languages and to kind of celebrate or learn more about the linguistic diversity of the area. Some of them are interested in languages. Some of them are interested in learning more about computers and cameras and recorders, you know, you know, for other reasons. But there’s a lot of interest at the school or in this age group to know more about linguistics and technology. And so last summer I talked to a bit of the administration at our secondary school about the possibility of, you know, teaching a class at the school about linguistics and about tech to give some students some exposure to technology and to linguistics as a science. And the first thing I did was I took a survey of all the students to just see how many languages were spoken at the school. The school is English-medium. You’re not allowed to speak any languages but English while on the campus. And when I took the survey, we got 58% of the students. So there’s about 1,000 students there. So 580 students took the survey, and they documented 129 different languages as languages that they speak, and only 64 of them were in Ethnologue or Glottolog. So it’s just this amazing amount of diversity. And I imagine that, you know, like once we start digging we’ll find out that some of those unidentified languages, maybe they’re different names for languages we know about, maybe they’re dialects, maybe they’re, who knows, maybe they’re just a funny spelling of a more common language. But easily, you know, more than, you know, 70, 80 languages are being spoken by these students. So the current project is to do this kind of knowledge exchange where I get linguists and linguistics students to come out and teach, you know, language documentation technology and those sorts of things. And during those classes, students are able to do their own types of language documentation data collection and be able to archive it in this kind of open access resource center for the school as well as for any linguists that are, you know, kind of interested. And I don’t think it’s going to be like enough data to do a full-on documentation or grammar, but it’s at least, you know, could be word lists or stories or songs about languages that we don’t even know exist to be documented or to be, you know, compared or to really understand, you know, the landscape of this region.
MTB: Yeah, that’s amazing. That’s so cool.
Kate Lindsey: Yeah, so that’s the… That’s a stop in Daru. Daru is, it’s still, you know, pretty like way out there, but it’s got a store, it’s got electricity, it’s got cell phone service. And so as like a kind of a landing space, definitely a lot more accessible than other areas. And I’m hoping that that can help help linguists learn more about the linguistic diversity there and also help this community also learn more about their own linguistic heritage and, you know, help them… giving them the tools to do whatever it is that they want to do with it.
MTB: Yeah, that’s amazing. That’s really cool. Do you want to say a bit more about your approach to community-based fieldwork? Do you want to speak about your documentary? I feel like this is kind of a good continuation of what we were just discussing.
Kate Lindsey: Yeah. So as far as my approach to community-based fieldwork, something that I feel I’ve always been really lucky is that all of the communities I’ve worked with, I’ve had a personal invitation to kind of come in and be working on projects with them. That type of, you know, relationship where it’s been the collaboration or, you know, the idea that we’re doing this together as a team from the beginning has been really helpful in really framing the types of conversations that we have, how we compromise on our interests and our goals and how we can work together in order that, you know, both parties are happy and feel like their needs are getting met.
In the Ende community, some of the big major goals for the… on the community side was to have some kind of written-down documentation or reflection of Ende language and Ende culture. Some of that was directly for a purpose. So one of the first things we did was establish a writing system, some quick, you know, like stories illustrating how the writing system works. This kind of these kind of documents are really, are essential for elementary schools who want to be able to teach in the language of the village. So in Papua New Guinea, for the most part, the medium of instruction for schools is English, but any community that has a language that has a writing system is permitted by the government to have elementary education or like those first two years to be in the language of the community instead of in English in order to help those students kind of… Usually this is like a stepping stone like, “You know, we’re using Ende language to help teach English concepts or, you know, to help them get prepared for later years.” But the only way that you can get permitted to teach in your language of the community is to have some kind of writing system and an illustration of that. So a lot of communities in the area will actually ask linguists to come and help them with those, like setting up that writing system and illustrations in order so that they can talk with the Department of Education in order to get that elementary school in the language of the community. So some of their goals were like directly tied to certain kind of milestones that they were interested in. The Ende language community was also, you know, a bit formed as part of a Bible translation group. So there was a Bible translation center not far away from Limol that was going on in the, I want to say early 2000s. And a group of Ende speakers had gone up there to translate the Bible into Ende. They did really good work and they translated the Book of Mark, which is the book that I guess that they start people off with. So one of the another one of the goals of the community was to finish doing that Bible translation. When I came, you know, I had a couple goals of my own. The overarching looming one from my advisors, of course, was to write a dissertation.
MTB: Yeah. [laughs]
Kate Lindsey: So I needed to, you know, be able to not just understand the language and not just, you know, like, you know, do anything I wanted to like really see how cool and interesting and unique and… this language was, but I also had to find some question that could be answered that would interest my advisors. That was a goal that I had that didn’t exactly line up with community goals. One of my fascinations with this language is in the verbal morphology and the verbal morphophonology. So one of my main interests was in verb conjugations. And so when we came together… And like, that’s something I learned over over time. So when we came together to do, you know, work on the language project, you know, we had to fit in, “OK, we need resources for the elementary school. We need texts, word lists, things that are going to help with the Bible translation,” which I didn’t actively work on personally, but just like in assisting other people who were working on that. We needed to do grammatical elicitations for my dissertation, and then we had to conjugate a lot of verbs for my own interest in the Ende verbs. And so we tried to make, you know, a lot of the days, you know, fit. Like, how can we reach all these goals? One thing we did was we we created a hymnal for the church, which was, entailed recording about 80 or 90 locally written hymns and church songs that were written in Ende by Ende people. So they weren’t just like direct translations of church songs they had heard other places. But there was about 80 or… There was a huge collection of religious songs that we recorded, and we used those. We recorded them, wrote them down, made it into a book, printed out that book and put it in the church. And that book served for… It served all of our purposes. For one, it was a huge tool for literacy within the community, because everybody knows the songs. Reading a hymnal is really easy. As long as you know, like someone starts singing the first couple words, all of a sudden, like you are saying the words out loud because you know them in your head, and you can match them up with the words that are on the piece of paper.
MTB: You can follow along.
Kate Lindsey: This is a lot easier than like even storybooks or even stories that people know, because those can always be told a little bit differently. So it was a huge literacy boon. So that was good for the elementary side. They were all religious and about Jesus and God and had lots of, you know, words like “baptism” and “saving” and all kinds of, you know, religious words that were needed for the texts, and also, you know, kind of helped the church part of the community like feel like their work was going to — you know, benefiting this particular community, which is the church. So that was good. For my work, it ended up being amazing that there was all these different kinds of grammatical structures that I hadn’t found in stories that were visible in the songs. One thing that’s really cool about Ende verbs is that they have different forms based on direction. So like if you say, “I’m going fishing,” and you’re still like on the route towards the fishing hole, you use one form of the verb. But if you return and you say, “I’m coming back from fishing,” or like, “I’ve fished and I’m returning home,” there’s another form of the verb for that direction when you’re coming back towards the village, and it’s called either associated motion or ventive kind of verbal morphology. It’s very cool. When you listen to stories, usually with a story, you have some kind of adventure or journey that you’re going on, and like you reach a point and then you turn around and come home. And so you can see all of the verbs change after that point when you’re on the return. But the great thing about these songs was that it was all about, you know, God coming to us or Jesus coming to us and, you know, like sins coming out or blood coming out — I mean, there was all of this in-and-out directional verbal morphology in all of these songs, and so they ended up being really great examples for my grammatical descriptions. And there’s tons of verbs in songs. So it ended up like this whole project, you know, was able to kind of reach, you know, kind of fit all of these goals. And so, and to answer your question about, you know, community-led field work, we engaged in this type of fieldwork by having a lot of conversations about our goals and really trying to pick projects that helped reach different goals, you know, kind of all at the same time.
MTB: Can you tell us more about your documentary project with Ende?
Kate Lindsey: Yeah, definitely. The documentary project is a… It’s a documentary called Ende Tän e Indrang, or “Light into Ende Tribe.” It is a 25-minute documentary all in Ende. It’s on YouTube, and this documentary was the capstone of a technology class that I taught in Limol in 2018. While every time I visited Limol, I always brought with me a fair amount of equipment and technology in order to do data collection, and that included computers, recorders, cameras, solar panels, satphones, all types of other things that are needed in order to do this type of work when you’re off the grid, when there’s no electricity and no cell service or nothing like that — I noticed on my first trip that the equipment, of course, garnered a lot of interest from other people in the community. So on future trips, I started bringing extra equipment, so two or three recorders or three laptops or a bunch of solar panels. And in 2018, which was my fourth trip there, I had gathered enough equipment that I was, I had enough in order to start teaching classes and allowing people to, you know, kind of play around and practice using the equipment. For the couple months when I was there in 2018, every day at 4 p.m., we would ring the bell and people would come from all over the community. So Limol is about, got about 300 people in it. The men, women, children were all invited. And we even had people come from nearby villages when they heard about the technology classes. I set up stations so people could be working on a laptop. I brought some like typing software, so people could learn how to type. I had a camera station with like a scavenger hunt list where people could take the cameras. They had to go out, take pictures of, you know, 20 different things, come back. We had audio recorders for people to take and just record their family saying silly things or whatever it is that they wanted to record certain people saying. Through that exercise, I ended up getting a collection of jokes for the language data collection which I had not gotten anywhere else. No one had ever offered to tell me a joke, and then when I listened to them, I didn’t get them, so maybe they were right not to waste their jokes on me. But just a really hilarious collection because they’re recording it…. You know, so it was a group of youngish men who took the recorders out and they just got, you know, just really, really hilarious jokes, and you hear everyone laughing on the recording. It’s not great quality, you know, maybe for doing some kind of intonation or phonological analysis of it. But it’s just, it’s a really lovely thing to have, I think, for people who are interested in seeing, you know, kind of what Ende life, Ende culture is like in these recordings.
MTB: That’s awesome.
Kate Lindsey: And then we have these video cameras. I had a group of students who were really interested in the video cameras, and they took these cameras everywhere to record little snippets of daily life. And after class one day, one of my students asked if they could make a little documentary about Ende life, and in particular, this story about how Christianity came to the Ende community. And they wanted to make this documentary to show the children in the community what life was like before Christianity came. Who were the… You know, the… There were two brothers and their wives who left the village to go find a missionary and to learn about Christianity, and then they came back with those messages and those words. So the village itself wasn’t ever visited by a missionary, but they kind of had these people that went out to bring back this message for them. And then what happened afterwards — schools came, roads came, medicine came, writing came. You know, all these types of things were new after this happened. And so we got, you know, a whole bunch of people together who were going to reenact these different ways of life and to reenact the journey of these four Ende people who very bravely went out in search of, you know, something positive that they thought was really positive for the community. And through that, we ended up getting interviews with those four elders who were still alive at the time in 2018.
MTB: Oh, wow.
Kate Lindsey: We heard about their journey. We heard about, you know, the challenges and how life changed. We got lots of really interesting pre-Christianity like cultural activities. So we got some like tutorials on how magic was practiced, how, you know, some kinds of old songs, old kind of beliefs that people don’t talk about anymore. And we also just got these just really, really nice discussions about, you know, what people really love about Ende life and culture, what hasn’t changed. And all of this was done for the children in order, you know, to kind of show them like, “This is your history. This is what happened.” It was such a blast to record this documentary and to have the Ende community both, you know, helping doing the recording, doing the acting. I had some free video editing software on my computer that I dumped all of the data into and did my best to make into some sort of story that made sense. I’m not a film editor, but, you know, I worked really hard on it, and we had one of the students volunteer to be the narrator, and he wrote, you know, like the whole narration for the film. And we were able to show it. I brought a projector to the village. Most evenings, if we had enough solar power from the day, I would play a movie for the village at nights with the projector, and a lot of them were actually documentaries from Australia, which I think is where people got this idea that they could have a documentary of their own life and culture. And so, the last week I was there, that trip, we were able to play the documentary with those four elders in attendance and like really honor them for their, you know, what they did for the community. It was really cool. And now that that documentary is on YouTube, people really wanted me to upload it and have it out there and to talk about it. They want, you know, people to know who they are and where they are in the map. They’re very interested in being known right now. And so, that’s how that documentary came about.
MTB: That’s so cool. And I’ll share a clip from the documentary so people can hear it and I’ll link it in the show notes if people want to watch the full 25 minutes. We’re running out of time. Like, oh my gosh, I felt like I could just talk to you for so many hours. But I really want to hear about your kind of day-to-day routine when you’re in Limol. Like what, do you have a routine? What’s a typical day like for you? Or is every day different? What does that look like?
Kate Lindsey: The days changed a lot depending on whether or not it was raining, whether or not people in the village were, if it was a hunting day or a garden day or a “stay at home with the linguist” day. People usually wake up at about 6 a.m. with the birds. There’s light from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. So, it’s usually early mornings. I always brought, had a lot of housemates with me, so I either brought along with me some other linguistics students who have different skillsets or different perspectives than I do to help me with data collection or data analysis. I also often brought researchers from other kind of like domains. I brought a horticultural scientist once, and I brought a Doctors Without Borders nurse once. So, just like a lot of different people with different things going on related to what the communities expressed their needs were. So, there’s a lot of people on the Ende language community that love talking about plants and really wanted to do a good job documenting those plant terms and words, and so, I brought along my good friend Elizabeth Conlan, who’s a horticultural scientist with Driscoll’s. She went and like, you know, did all of the documentation of all the different yam species and got all of these agricultural practices written down. It was really interesting. Anyway, so, I always had a couple different housemates with me, and in the morning we would do chores. That usually involved going to fetch water, which is a mile, two-mile walk. We have to carry the water back. We usually carried enough water for our house and for the house of whatever family was cooking for us that day. Then we would do any other chores, setting up solar panels, sweeping the language house. The language house was a long building with a thatched roof and tables and benches underneath that people went to in order to work on any language projects. So, we would sweep the language house and all have breakfast together. Then for a couple hours in the morning, depending on who showed up, sometimes it’d be like a gaggle of kids. More often it would be a couple of men from the Ende language committee who weren’t hunting or gardening or building that day, and based on their particular skillsets and what they were interested in, we would either collect data, collect stories. If one of them had been on a hunting expedition the night before, we definitely recorded him telling about what happened then. There’s a special tense for what happened the previous night that’s different from what happened yesterday. So, we love to get people who were active in the night to tell their stories about people would go like kangaroo hunting or they would be out in the village and they would see a mysterious light or something like this would happen. They had all these great stories about what happened in the night. Sometimes if we had some people who really enjoyed writing, we would do transcription of stories. Oftentimes if people like to read, I would record people rereading transcriptions of other stories. And sometimes we did a dictionary word collection, things like that. And then we would break for lunch about 12. Noon to one is the hottest part of the day. So, we would eat some lunch. I’d spend some time in the hammock waiting for the solar panels to charge up all of our batteries. We’d usually have another work session in the afternoon with whoever was available and, you know, could come and sit under the house. If we had kids, we would often have them listen to stories and then illustrate them. So, we gave them paper and crayons and just had them draw pictures from whatever was happening in the story, often for the school books. And then at 4 p.m. every day, we would have the technology class where we’d have everyone come and practice using different cameras, recorders, solar panels. And after that, we would do our evening chores, firewood, gather more water, fetch water for showers. And by 6 o’clock, the sun would set and it would be dark. So, whatever light we were or whatever energy we were able to collect with our solar panels, we would use that for the lights and for our computers. And I would usually, you know, kind of sit and input metadata and transcribe or gloss or write down my thoughts for as long as I could until the computer would shut off. And yeah, then we would go to sleep. That’s probably a pretty typical day just for language stuff.
We also had the only first aid kit in the village, so, evenings, sometimes evenings were kind of spent, you know, kind of tending to injuries or helping take care of people. That’s why I brought a doctor on a couple of my trips because I felt like often the injuries were outside of my abilities.
MTB: Yeah, I want to ask you about that, if you had had medical training before or if they… if you like learned medical training in the field, like, or you just had like the only box of Band-Aids, so…
Kate Lindsey: [laughs] Yeah, I took a number of classes before I went. My first trip, I was, you know, pretty concerned about my own safety knowing that I was, you know, two days, three days away from any hospital, so if I broke a leg or got cut or got an infection or, you know, God forbid, got a… rabies or a virus or a snake bite or malaria, so many different things. My parents and I were concerned, you know, like if something might happen. And so, the first time I went, I brought a kit for myself and for my assistant and we’re like, “Okay, you know, if anything happens, we’ve got…” We took CPR, we did like the basic, you know, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, first aid classes that are taught. We got a whole lot of extra medicines for, you know, any kind of contingency. And then we went thinking that that first aid kit was just going to be for the two of us. First trip in the village, we saw and realized that there was a lot of medical need in the community that we weren’t really prepared to address. So, yeah, we gave out all our Band-Aids, we gave out our, you know, our burn gel, we gave out, you know, our snake bandages, you know. We didn’t take any of it home with us, but every trip after that, you know, like the first aid kit expanded in order to try to help, you know, as many people that needed medical help as we could. Sometimes it was basic first aid or basic… Like, I took a couple of wilderness first aid classes, which is all about, you know, kind of triaging until you can get somewhere with a doctor. We also brought the Where There Is No Doctor books, which is a Hesperian series that just kind of talks about how do you do medical triage, how do you figure out if something is serious or not serious. It has a lot of, you know, discussion about various medicines and their efficacies and also just backwoods techniques for fixing things, like how do you relocate, you know, a dislocated shoulder if you only have a bag of rice and a table, you know, or these sorts of things. So, we definitely learned a lot when things got serious. We actually had a lot of medical emergencies while we were there, and some of them I assisted with. I assisted with a number of births. I assisted with a number of snake bites. I assisted with a lot of fire, like big fire accidents and burns and wounds. Three times people died, and there wasn’t, you know, anything I could do.
MTB: Yeah.
Kate Lindsey: And that was really hard, kind of being out of your skillset in that way.
MTB: Well, that’s like not something you were expecting to see or something you see in your, like, daily life in Northern California.
Kate Lindsey: No, no.
MTB: So, I can imagine, like, just the shock.
Kate Lindsey: Yeah, and it’s, you know, it’s devastating. It’s hard being the most medically trained person in a community and not being able to help and, you know, having to set boundaries that are just like, “I know I’m the only person that, you know, I guess has attended a birth or knows about snake bites,” but I’m also like, “I am not medically qualified to be able to do anything in this situation.” It’s like a, it’s a really hard boundary to set, you know, because obviously you want to help as many people as you can, but at some points when, during fieldwork there, you know, we got… You know, it was like all day helping with medical emergencies and no, none of the day doing any linguistic stuff. And so that was, you know, it was always a balance. Actually, the reason that we first brought the projector in some of the videos was to play for kids, you know, like while we were like wrapping their bandages or, you know, like if they had cut themselves, you know, so they could watch, you know, like fish on a screen and hopefully get distracted by it.
MTB: Your field site is so different from mine.
Kate Lindsey: Is it?
MTB: Yeah, I’m just like, I’m so like impressed by how badass you are. If I had to deliver a baby in the field, like, oh my gosh. [laughs]
Kate Lindsey: You know, in some ways it was, there’s something very Indiana Jones or whatever about doing fieldwork, you know, really far away from the beaten path. Right? And there were some things that were, you know, like I just felt really lucky to be there, really lucky to have been invited there. And also, you know, it’s really humbling to, you know, participate in a community and to live somewhere where, you know, the quality of life and the types of resources people have access to do too is so, so much less than what we’re used to as a bare minimum. It’s really sad and it makes fieldwork difficult. It’s just, it’s a, it’s a tricky place to work and live, but even, even more difficult, I think for the people who live there full time, not the, not me who I get to, you know, kind of leave and get back to a place where I can wash my clothes and dry them and go to a pharmacy and things like that.
MTB: Yeah, it definitely puts things in perspective. What common misconceptions have you encountered about your work that you’d like to shed light on?
Kate Lindsey: I think most of the time being a researcher in Papua New Guinea, people tend to have a lot of misconceptions about Papua New Guinea, the culture, the people, what life is like there. There’s a lot of, you know, like really extreme examples of Papua New Guinea culture that people know about that… I think there’s this idea that life there is so different that it just must be impossible to understand, which I think is, which is just not true. People there are living their lives much in… In much similar ways that we are based on the types of resources that they have and their environment and what they have access to. You know, there’s people in the village now that have cell phones that are posting selfies to Facebook and just being like having a good day with, you know, throwing a peace sign up there and you’re like, “These are the same people, just in a different place.”
I think one of the biggest misconceptions that I had about my work when I first started was that if I got good enough data that it would be, you know, really good data and really understood the language, that it would be a rather straightforward task of translating that data into some kind of grammatical description. And that was something that I had to really unlearn because what I realized during my fieldwork and the more I grew to understand the language and the more I grew to… The larger my data collection grew and the more, the more I had, the more I realized that a straightforward description of this data was just, was becoming harder and harder to do. I think when I first got there and I barely understood what was going on, you know, I had a whole lot… You know, I had a list of generalizations that I was ready to make. But the more I learned, the more I realized this is really messy, really internally varied, really such complex data that writing a grammar or like, you know, kind of translating it was not as straightforward as I thought it would be. At first I thought it was because my data weren’t good enough, but later I realized that actually in order to write grammatical descriptions, you know, linguists have to take a lot of liberties in, you know, standardizing what is happening in a very complex and non-standard situation. So, that’s something I’m always having to like reteach myself. I think it comes from our intro, you know, classes in linguistics where we’re given a really beautiful curated data set and asked to make generalizations about it and it’s so straightforward even when the data is complex. In a way, that’s what I was hoping for or expecting in fieldwork. But instead, it’s a much messier, more beautiful, insanely interesting project that is taking, you know, years to… That, yeah, that is just taking years to figure out and it’s an amazing journey that is nothing like what I expected.
MTB: Yeah, for sure. That’s awesome. Thank you so much, Kate, for coming on to Field Notes. Where can people find you if they want to learn more about your work?
Kate Lindsey: Sure. I have a website through Boston University where I teach. So, if you search, you know, my name, Kate Lindsey, Boston University, you’ll find me. Our lab, the Structures of Under-Researched Languages, also has a bit of a website. And my email is klindsey@bu.edu. I’m always happy to chat with people, collaborate if you’re interested in learning more about fieldwork in Papua New Guinea. I’m happy to connect you with anyone I know or even connect you with some language data that you might find interesting.
MTB: Awesome. Thank you so much.
Kate Lindsey: Thanks, Marti.
You’ve been listening to Field Notes, a podcast about linguistic fieldwork. This podcast is hosted and produced by Martha Tsutsui Billins with production help from Laura Tsutsui. Claire Gawne is our editor, and Luca Dinu is our transcriptionist. Our music is by Lobo Loco, and our logo is by E.Vill Designs. If you have fieldwork experience to share, email us at fieldnotespod@gmail.com. You can also follow us on Twitter and Instagram @lingfieldnotes. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to follow and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform. Also, consider becoming our patron on Patreon to help keep our content ad-free. Thanks for listening!
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