As Long as the Earth Endures: Annotated Miami-Illinois Texts ed. by David J. Costa (review)

Reviewed by: As Long as the Earth Endures: Annotated Miami-Illinois Texts ed. by David J. Costa Sean P. Harvey As Long as the Earth Endures: Annotated Miami-Illinois Texts Edited by David J. Costa (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2022. Pp. ix, 641. Glossary, notes, references, index. $85.00.) This impressive collection is the product of linguist David J. Costa's painstaking examination and translation of "almost the entire corpus" of texts recorded in dialects of the Miami-Illinois language, the ancestral tongue of the Miami Tribe, the Peoria Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma, and the Miami descendants who, despite removal, remain in northern Indiana (p. xvi). Indicating the primary importance of the Miami-Illinois consultants who shared their knowledge with collectors between circa 1892 and 1916, Costa has organized the collection's forty-six texts by storyteller. It includes eleven stories each from Gabriel Godfroy (Miami) and Sarah Wadsworth (Wea), ten from Elizabeth Valley (Miami), seven from George Washington Finley (Peoria), and seven additional texts from three other consultants. All but three of the texts were recorded by Albert Gatschet, a linguist at the Bureau of American Ethnology, or the avocational linguist Jacob Dunn. The collection includes stories about the culture hero Wiihsakacaakwa and the "malevolent, anarchic trickster" Wilakhtwa; several animal stories, including stories of Fox tricking Wolf; several Winter Stories that could be properly told only in that season; and the only story of Miami emergence recorded in the language (p. xxi). One story takes place during a time of fighting against the United States, while another text is the Miami chief Little Turtle's speech at the Treaty of Greenville (1795). Still other stories address Miami interaction with Shawnee False Face doctors and warfare against Kickapoos. Several versions of the Lord's Prayer can be found in the collection as well. Costa's useful introduction provides biographical [End Page 90] details about the consultants and collectors, along with information about the original recording process. The introduction also provides an overview of the stories, indicating some notable features of each, and drawing attention to those stories that have parallels in the oral literature of other Algonquian or neighboring peoples as well as those that have no such parallels. Costa is the director of the Language Research Office at the Myaamia Center at Miami University, and the collection's primary value is linguistic. The format of each text consists of a series of four lines: the line's original transcription, Costa's phonemicization of the line (its division into units of significant sounds), a gloss on the meaning and grammatical function of each word and clitic, and his "free translation" (p. xxiv). The collection includes many of the same stories originally recorded by Gatschet and re-elicited by Dunn because of their differing linguistic content. Endnotes for each story discuss "interesting linguistic or philological matters pertaining to the texts," including issues of transcription, translation, and grammar (p. xxiv). Costa has also provided a glossary, coming to more than 150 pages, that contains every Miami-Illinois word in the collection. The book's title comes from "Wiihsakacaakwa's Story," as told by Elizabeth Valley. In it, the titular culture hero predicted, "As long as the earth endures and as long as man lives, / my grandchildren will talk about me, and tell stories about me" (p. 35). With Costa's valuable collection, Wiihsakacaakwa's prediction still stands. Sean P. Harvey Seton Hall University Copyright © 2023 Trustees of Indiana University