Mohegan — Flying Bird’s diaries have landed.

They’ve come home, alighting on the Mohegan reservation where Fidelia “Flying Bird” Fielding wrote them more than a century ago. Accounts of daily life, they’re the key to and inspiration for the preservation of the Mohegan-Pequot language.

Fielding, who died in 1908, was the last one to speak it fluently.

James Quinn, the Mohegan Tribe’s historic preservation officer, retrieved the diaries last week, traveling to Ithaca, N.Y., where the Cornell University Library had held the rare manuscripts — three small notebooks as well as a copy of the Lord’s Prayer written in Mohegan — since 2004.

Cornell came into possession of the diaries through its acquisition of one the largest Native American collections in the world. Valued at $8.3 million at the time, the collection, previously held by the Huntington Free Library in the Bronx, N.Y., includes more than 40,000 volumes.

The acquisition secured Cornell’s place as a top research library for American Indian studies.

“We believe that these papers coming home is really Fidelia coming home to us,” Lynn Malerba, the Mohegans’ ceremonial chief, told the Cornell Chronicle, a university publication that reported the transfer Monday, posting a YouTube video.

In an interview Tuesday, Malerba said Mohegan tribal leaders had approached Cornell’s president, Martha Pollack, last year, the start of a fast-moving process that culminated in Quinn’s trip to Ithaca last Wednesday. James Gessner, the Mohegan tribal chairman; Larry Roberge, then chairman of the tribe’s elders’ council; Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel, medicine woman and tribal historian; and Malerba signed the letter Pollack passed along to Gerald Beasley, the Cornell librarian.

“He was delighted to say yes to us,” Malerba said. “We’re so grateful to Cornell for preserving and caring for this work and for being so willing to transfer it back to us.”

Malerba said she and Zobel were overcome with emotion upon learning the transfer would take place.

Zobel, whose great aunt, Gladys Tantaquidgeon, was a Fielding mentee, said the Native American diaries of Fielding’s day were informal notebooks fashioned from scraps of catalogue pages and advertisements, whatever provided space for writing. They tended to dwell on the weather.

“Fidelia’s world was extremely animated,” Zobel said. “Thunder, snow, rain, but also spirits in the woods, animals.”

An anthropology student who worked with Fielding and with whom she entrusted the diaries loaned some of them to a professor whose house burned, destroying them, Zobel said. Fortunately, Fielding’s adopted son found more diaries — the ones that have come back to the tribe — while quarantining in Fielding’s house during the influenza pandemic of 1918.

“One couldn’t overstate the trauma Gladys felt over the first diaries being lost,” Zobel said.

The student, Frank Speck, who became a noted anthropologist, left the surviving diaries with the Museum of the American Indian in New York, where they became part of the Huntington collection that Cornell acquired.

Zobel said Fielding, “an uncompromising Mohegan,” insisted on speaking her native language and took to writing it down in order to preserve it, even at her own peril. “Flying Bird’s Diary,” an acclaimed screen and stage play Zobel has written, contains a scene in which a young Fielding is beaten for speaking Mohegan in school.

In 1994, Fielding was posthumously inducted into the Connecticut Women’s Hall of Fame. Gladys Tantaquidgeon, who died in 2005, also received the honor that year.

The Mohegan Language Project has sought to recover the tribe’s lost language, an endeavor the transfer of Fielding’s diaries surely will invigorate, Zobel said.

“They mean we’re on a real path toward the restoration of our language,” she said of the diaries. “We’re not just talking about it, we can see it, touch it and feel it. It’s a different way of viewing the world. In the Mohegan language, ‘you’ comes before ‘me.’ We don’t name things after people, but what they do. A fox is ‘one who circles’; Misquamicut is ‘the place where the red fish run.’"

“What better time than now to start focusing on the natural world?”

b.hallenbeck@theday.com