The anthropologist Franz Boas (1858-1942) and his students recorded the languages and traditions of many dozens of Native cultures from the Arctic to Central America, writing down stories, vocabularies, histories, and descriptions of cultural traditions. Over several decades of work, they filled up thousands of notebooks and created the first accounts of how many of these languages work. Although they collected this information assuming that these cultures would disappear, the very same Native communities they visited are utilizing these materials today.