Isabel Meadows


Isabel Meadows was an Indigenous person belonging to the Rumsen Ohlone tribe. She is recorded to be the last fluent speaker of the Rumsen Ohlone language once common, on the now known as, Central Coast of California. Her father James Meadows was born in Norfolk, England, in 1817. He was serving aboard a whaler in 1837 when he deserted the ship in Monterey. He married Maria Loretta Onesimo, one of the last Rumsen Ohlone. Meadows's great-grandmother Lupecina Francesa Unegte had been baptized at the Mission San Carlos Borromeo in 1792 when about 800 Native Americans lived there. She died in 1872 at age 100.
When she was older, Isabel worked closely with Smithsonian ethnologist J. P. Harrington and shared her knowledge of her tribe's culture and languages in the Monterey, Carmel, and Big Sur regions of California. When she was in her eighties, she went with Harrington to Washington D.C. where she lived for five years to continue their work on language. While Harrington was focused on what was then called "salvage ethnology" and paid Isabel for her interviews, she often inserted stories that she believed better illustrated her culture and tribal memory, like that of Vicenta Gutierrez who was raped by Franciscan priest José María Refugio Suárez del Real:
Meadows died in Washington D.C. on May 22, 1939. Her body was returned to Carmel for a memorial service. She was survived by one brother, Thomas Meadows of Monterey, and his children.