The Grace Hudson Museum & Sun House is a cultural heritage museum in Ukiah, California, centrally located with respect to the various surrounding Pomo communities. The museum hosts a vast collection of Pomo artifacts that help paint a picture of how the various Pomo peoples lived. In addition, the museum hosts paintings and personal possessions from John Hudson and his family, the former an anthropologist who lived with the Pomo people and documented their lifestyle.
Outside of the museum is the Sun House, where the Hudson family lived, as well as an outdoors educational classroom. The park is subdivided into areas with various flora used by the Pomo people, with an outdoor classroom and a gathering space for people to receive a hands-on education in basket making, music making, and other central aspects of traditional Pomo culture.
One of the goals of Northern Pomo Language Tools is to spark interest in Northern Pomo and inspire language learning. Language learning is facilitated by interacting with objects in situ. Hence, the Grace Hudson Museum’s close connections to the Pomo communities make it an ideal location for embedding Northern Pomo language materials in a physical environment. Community members are already engaging with their culture in the context of this heritage museum, making it a natural catalyst for reintroducing Pomo community members to their ancestral language.
QR Codes are barcodes that take someone to a website when scanned with a smart phone. QR Codes have been posted around the museum, and when someone scans one of these QR Codes, they are taken to a page that contains the Northern Pomo word for the object the QR Code was near, as well as its English translation, and related words and phrases.
If you would like a guided walk-through that shows you how to use one of these pages, click here!
If you would like to set up a similar QR Code system for another endangered language, the code involved in making these pages will be made available here shortly. Feel free to contact us with any logistical questions or suggestions!
Note on Images: In these pages, we have borrowed some images from Wikimedia Commons. Northern Pomo Language Tools does not endorse the work or views of any of the individuals who uploaded these images to Wikimedia Commons, and these individuals have not expressly endorsed our work. Links to the licenses under which these images can be distributed and used are provided on individual pages.
