ABSTRACT
This chapter traces a 150-year history of Maidu text collections, their repurposing, recontextualization and reuse. Maidu stories and the manner in which they have been collected are part of the United States national story. It was they who bore the brunt of three key events of nineteenth-century nation building. Maidu country was the site of the Central Pacific Railway as it grew into the transcontinental railway. Stephen Powers published accounts of Maidu language and culture in 1877 under the editorship of John Wesley Powell, director of the US Geological Survey and of the Smithsonian Institution's Bureau of Ethnology. The chapter treats Maidu stories that have made their way into ethno-linguistic text collections compiled by Dixon and Shipley, to be later recontextualized in literary publications and still later repurposed for language maintenance projects.
