Dr. Oleg Bychkov, director of the Native American and Indigenous Studies program at St. Bonaventure, presented a paper titled “Two examples of recovering traditional Onödowa’ga:’ stories in the original language from Arthur C. Parker archives: Initial observations” at the 13th Storytellers Conference organized by the Department of Indigenous Studies at the University at Buffalo, on April 15, 2023. 

The paper presents two examples of Onödowa’ga:’ (Seneca) stories in the original language that Bychkov recovered from two different archives of Arthur C. Parker, a renowned scholar of the Onödowa’ga:’ tradition.

The paper presents the stories, one partially and one fully transcribed in the original Onödowa’ga:’ language, and discusses the challenges of recovering texts in the original Onödowa’ga:’ language that were transcribed before the standardization of its phonetic transcription, in the absence of complete dictionaries of the Onödowa’ga:’ language, and given that some forms or even roots may have disappeared from the memory of the remaining native speakers.