Chasing Voices

Chasing Voices tells the extraordinary life story of controversial ethnographer John Peabody Harrington. Beginning in 1907, Harrington crisscrossed the United States frantically searching and documenting dying Native American languages. For the next 50 years, this became his obsession. Harrington amassed over a million pages of notes on over 150 different tribal languages. Some of these languages were considered dead until his notes were discovered. Today tribes are accessing the notes, reviving their once dormant languages, and bringing together a new generation of language learners in the hope of saving Native languages.