12 Facts About Isabel Meadows

Isabel Meadows was an Ohlone ethnologist and the last fluent speaker of the Rumsen Ohlone language.

Isabel Meadows worked closely with the anthropologists from the Smithsonian Institution for more than five years in order to document her culture and language.

Isabel Meadows's work is considered fundamental in the study of Ohlone languages.

Isabel Meadows was born on July 7,1846, in Carmel Valley, California.

Isabel Meadows later owned a James Meadows Tract in upper Carmel Valley in the vicinity of a cave in which an Esselen child was found buried in 1952.

Isabel Meadows spoke of her childhood community as a disordered and traumatized one, featuring abuse, abandonment and addiction, the latter resulting from pain and ending in death, she said.

Isabel Meadows is known as the last fluent speaker of the Rumsen Ohlone language which had been commonly spoken along the Central Coast of California prior to the arrival of the Spanish.

Isabel Meadows's body was returned to Carmel for a memorial service.

Isabel Meadows was survived by one brother, Thomas Meadows of Monterey, and his children.

Isabel Meadows insisted upon her input and their affairs were amicable as she provided personal tales, per her desire, and the fundamentals Harrington sought.

Isabel Meadows credited the fatal effect alcoholism had on her community with the lack of preservation for the Rumsen Ohlone language.

Harrington's practice functioned as salvage ethnography; Isabel Meadows was "one of the last survivors who could retrace the sweeping and succeeding colonial forms of violence by the Spanish, Mexican and US American imperial and settler colonial systems in California".