This manuscript, transcribed around the year 1890 from the original version dating to 1843, is written in a clear cursive hand, although the ink has now considerably faded. The vocabulary contains parallel columns of common English and Potawatomi words, as well as verb conjugations and some phrases. The pages for the first section of the vocabulary (A-Gr) are missing, and the manuscript picks up with English words beginning in “Gu-.” The volume has an old, likely contemporary (but re-backed) mottled paperboard binding with marbled edges.
The Potawatomi people have traditionally inhabited the Upper Mississippi River region (Michigan, Wisconsin, southern Ontario), as well as Indiana and Kansas, and are making efforts to promote the use of their native language, a sub-group of the Algonquian language family.
The compiler of this vocabulary, Joseph Napoleon [or Napolean] Bourassa (1810-1878) was of mixed Potawatomi and French heritage. He was educated at the Carey Mission near Niles, Michigan, on the banks of the Saint Joseph River, and later studied law in Kentucky before settling for the remainder of his life in Wabaunsee county, Kansas.
The original manuscript of Bourassa’s Vocabulary was owned by John Brown Dunbar (born April 3, 1841), a philologist who used it as a source while compiling his own grammar and dictionary of the Potawatomi language. The Smithsonian Libraries’ copy is thought to have been transcribed and annotated by Wilberforce Eames (1855-1937), a bibliographer and librarian who headed the American History Division at the New York Public Library. The manuscript was formerly in the collection of the Mercantile Library Company of Philadelphia.
