I have held a range of roles in language restoration, working for and with endangered language communities in the North and Central America and around the world.
I am currently the Native American Scholars Initiative Engagement Coordinator for the Center for Native American and Indigenous Research at the American Philosophical Society (2022-present), where I design and implement funding, educational, and public programs related to the Indigenous materials in the collections at the American Philosophical Society. These include our virtual Indigenous Learning Forum speaker series, and our Mellon Native American Scholars Initiative Digital Knowledge Sharing Fellowship and Summer Undergraduate Internship.
As Senior Research Associate with the Office of Head Start's National Center on Cultural and Linguistic Responsiveness (2014-2015), I visited Early Childhood language revitalization programs in 17 tribal communities around the US to learn about their successes and challenges, and how they could be better supported by the Office of Head Start and other federal agencies. These visits formed the basis for a report on language revitalization in Tribal Head Start, which in turn informed a new Federal Policy Statement on supporting Dual Language Learners in Early Childhood programs.
I began my support of language revitalization on a federal level in my role as Program Manager for the Smithsonian Institution’s Recovering Voices program (2012-2014), where I collaborated with non-profit, academic and government organizations to support language maintenance and revitalization. This included enhancing endangered language communities’ access to collections, archives and other resources through activities such as the National Breath of Life Archival Institute for Endangered Languages, and raising public awareness of language endangerment and revitalization at events like the “One World, Many Voices” program at the 2013 Smithsonian Folklife Festival.
As Language Program Coordinator for the Karuk Tribe (2008-2011), I ran a Master-Apprentice Language Documentation Project. In that position I worked with elders, youth, tribal staff, community members and academic partners to build the critical relationships, leadership and expertise needed to ensure long-term language restoration, and to create culturally contextualized language documentation to support language learners.