The SSILA Executive Committee is seeking volunteers for an ad hoc Ethics Committee. The committee might consider how SSILA could discuss issues of ethics and rights, how we might develop consensus, and how we might develop an ethics statement and/or statement of rights and principles. If you are interested in serving on such a committee, please contact Mary Linn at secretary@ssila.org or Jack Martin at jbmart@wm.edu.
2023-2024 Travel Award - Matching Fund Drive
Friends of SSILA,
It’s hard to imagine, but our last in-person meeting was in New Orleans in 2020! Last January at our online Business Meeting we discussed future meeting formats. There was broad support for gathering in person and celebrating the LSA’s centennial celebration in New York in January, 2024.
That meeting will be financially challenging for many. SSILA has offered Travel Awards in the past based in part on financial need, but we generally receive requests totaling $13,000 to $17,000 and have had a total budget of just $3,000 to give out. This year I am very happy to report that Stephen R. Anderson and Janine Anderson-Bays have pledged up to $5,000 in matching funds to SSILA. To take advantage of their offer, we are currently seeking donations of any amount for travel assistance or for our general fund: the matching funds will be used specifically to assist with travel to the LSA.
SSILA is a non-profit 501(c)3 charitable organization. Donations may be deductible for U.S. federal income tax purposes. For donations of more than $295.00, or amounts not listed on the donation form, please contact our Secretary-Treasurer Mary Linn at secretary@ssila.org.
The call has already gone out for session proposals. In a few weeks we’ll send a call out for abstracts. Please also make a note of the different awards SSILA gives. In addition to travel awards, we give the Best Student Presentation Award, the Mary R. Haas Book Award, the Victor Golla Prize, the Ken Hale Prize, and the Archiving Award.
Thank you for your continued support of SSILA!
Jack B. Martin
SSILA President
Adrienne Tsikewa Named to Program Committee
We welcome Adrienne Tsikewa, who is joining the SSILA Program Committee for a three-year term.
The composition of the SSILA Executive and Program Committees for this year is summarized by the following diagram.
Delores Taken Alive Awarded SSILA Ken Hale Prize
The Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas (SSILA) is honored to report that the SSILA Ken Hale Prize in 2022 has been awarded posthumously to Hiŋháŋ Sná Wíŋ (Rattling Owl Woman), or Delores Taken Alive.
Delores was a treasured keeper of traditional Lakota knowledge, who spoke her language fluently. She was renowned not only across Standing Rock but throughout the Dakota and Lakota reservations as one of the most eloquent Lakota speakers of her time. Even other fluent speakers, when they had questions about the intricacies of their language, would say, “Delores will know.”
She dedicated her life to teaching the youth about who they are and where they come from. Her service began at Standing Rock Head Start in Little Eagle, South Dakota, just a few miles from Kȟaŋǧí Ská Oyáŋke (White Crow Settlement) where she had grown up. Her childhood was a traditional one, without electricity or running water, and the stories she heard from her father Wallace, as they went to sleep each night in their one-room log cabin, made her into the wonderful storyteller that the community knew her as.
After more than thirty years at Head Start, she went into retirement for a few short years until being asked to teach her language at McLaughlin School. The bond she had with her students was one between an uŋčí (grandmother) and tȟakóža (grandchildren). Her philosophy and style of teaching instilled into the young ones the essential understanding that we are all related, and those relationships thrive on respect.
Delores used to joke that she wasn’t allowed to retire. Behind her good humor was a deep sense of responsibility. Oyáte wačhíŋyaŋpi – the nation depended on her. Even after another fourteen years at McLaughlin, she was called upon regularly to speak at public gatherings, to lecture at Sitting Bull College, or to make recordings for the tribal language program. Besides her work on local projects, she was one of the primary Native speaker-consultants for various publications by the Lakota Language Consortium, including the New Lakota Dictionary, and the Lakota Grammar Handbook, which are well known in the field of Native American linguistics as gold standards for works of their type.
Just three years ago, at the age of 84, Delores became a weekly host on KLND Radio 89.5 FM. Her show, It’s Good to Speak Lakota, was the only 100%-Lakota language show on the station, and possibly on any airwaves. She produced 48 episodes. In doing so, she breathed the sound of Lakota back into homes across Standing Rock and beyond. Every week, she encouraged other fluent speakers to phone into the show, rebuilding their confidence about using their language in public, and tackling the loneliness felt by Elders who live remotely or have no one left to visit with.
Delores recording her weekly show on KLND Radio 89.5, “It’s Good To Speak Lakota.” Photo by John Brave Bull.
Delores always kept her focus on seven generations ahead. Through her decision to record both her radio shows, and the weekly classes she gave at Sitting Bull College between 2017 and 2018, she documented hundreds of hours of fluent Lakota speech, much of which is transcribed. These collections of recordings are the biggest of their kind in Standing Rock’s corpus of Lakota language resources and will continue to be an abundant gift for future generations.
In one of these recording, Delores spoke of her belief in the power of education:
Leháŋn oúŋ uŋkítȟawapi kiŋháŋ: wípȟe núŋpalala uŋyúhapi. Íŋyaŋ Woslál Hé thimáhe úŋpi kaškáp iyéčhel uŋk’úŋp. Čha wíipȟe núŋm úŋhapi kiŋ hé lé wóuŋspe waŋkátuya luhápi kiŋ lé waŋží; na ičínuŋpa kiŋ hé íŋš wóčhekiye kiŋ. Wakȟáŋ Tȟáŋka yéksuyapi aŋpétu iyóhi … háŋtaŋ líla waš’ágya yaúŋpi kte. Thiwáhe nitȟáwapi kiŋháŋ líla taŋyáŋ úŋpi kte.
In our modern way of life, we have two weapons. Living at Standing Rock is like we’re living as prisoners of war. So the two weapons we have are these: the first is education, and the second is prayer. Every day you remember the Great Spirit. If you do that, you’ll be really strong, and your families will live healthy lives.
We presented the Ken Hale Award to members of the Standing Rock Language and Culture Institute during the business meeting of our virtual 2023 Annual Meeting on January 21, 2023. It is our honor to recognize the legacy of elder Delores Taken Alive. Her work truly exemplifies the spirit of Ken Hale.
— Nacole Walker, former director of Standing Rock LCI, provided the body of this text in her nomination letter. No further use of the photo is allowed without permission of the Taken Alive thiyoshpaye.
2023 Best Student Presentation Award Announced
Congratulations to J. Drew Hancock-Mac Tamhais, whose paper “Revising the Particle Class in Northern Iroquoian” won the SSILA 2023 Best Student Presentation Award at the 2023 SSILA Annual Conference. The judges remarked that the research was fascinating, and the presentation was very nicely done. Hancock-Mac Tamhais’s research has been conducted as part of his PhD work at the University of Bern.
2023 SSILA Annual Meetings - Virtual January 20 - 22
Dear SSILA members,
I hope you are all well and safe as we continue to navigate through difficult and uncertain times. We, the SSILA Executive Committee, have deliberated about the format of the 2023 Annual Meeting and, after much discussion, we have decided that we will be holding our meeting virtually once again, from Friday, January 20th to Sunday, January 22nd. We are working on finalizing the call for papers, which we will send out soon.
With this decision we are hoping to ensure equal access to the meeting to members both within the US and overseas who may be unable to travel given safety concerns, rising travel costs due to the conflict in Europe, budget limitations and other vulnerabilities. We believe there is still a great deal of uncertainty and that, given these circumstances, it is best for us to plan as safely as possible and within the limits of our budget (a fully accessible hybrid option is out of our capabilities at the moment). Crucially, we believe that holding the meeting virtually leads to greater inclusion of members from across the Americas and all over the world, and this was a key parameter in our decision-making process.
Having said that, we would also like to express that this decision is not intended to be for the long term and that we hope to resume in person meetings as soon as circumstances allow us. We acknowledge many of our members are also LSA members and that there are benefits that this partnership brings, and we would like to continue preserving those benefits for our members, and we have communicated this to the leadership of the LSA. At the same time, we are also looking forward to exploring options to keep including a virtual component in our activities moving forward, for the reasons expressed above.
Please reach out if you have any questions, suggestions or comments.
Best,
Gabriela Caballero
SSILA President, on behalf of the SSILA Executive Committee.
SSILA Program Committee - Call for New Member
The SSILA Program Committee (PC) is the body responsible for organizing the SSILA annual meetings. It is made up of all the voting members of the elected SSILA Executive Committee, as well as three dedicated PC members who serve for three-year terms. The chair of the PC is the member who is in their third year. As the senior PC member this year, Bernat Bardagil will chair the PC as we prepare for the 2023 Annual Meeting. Martin Kohlberger will continue to serve in his role as Program Committee Administrator, facilitating PC members in their tasks throughout the year.
We are now requesting nominations for a SSILA member to serve as the newest member of the Program Committee. The appointment will begin in March 2022 and conclude at the end of the 2025 Annual Meeting.
Volunteers for this position can expect the following yearly tasks:
Preparing calls for papers in mid-February and early May
Assigning abstracts to external reviewers in mid-July
Reading abstracts and making acceptance decisions in early May and late August
Preparing the program for the annual meeting in September
Making logistical decisions in October and November for how the conference will be run
Participating in the annual meeting in early January
Please nominate yourself or someone else by February 28, 2022. Please give a brief explanation of why you or the person that you nominate would be a good fit for this position. If you nominate someone else, please confirm with them that they would be willing to serve on the committee for a three-year term.
Nominations should be sent to SSILA president Gaby Caballero (gcaballero@ucsd.edu) and SSILA secretary Mary Linn (secretary@ssila.org).
We hope to receive your nomination soon.
Thank you for your support!
2022 Mary Haas Book Award
The Mary R. Haas Book Award is presented to a junior scholar for an unpublished manuscript that makes a significant substantive contribution about Indigenous languages of the Americas. The award carries no financial stipend, but the winning manuscripts will be considered for publication under the Society’s auspices in the University of Nebraska Press series “Studies in the Native Languages of the Americas.”
SSILA received a large number of excellent nominations for the Mary R. Haas Book Award this year. As a result, the committee chose to award one winner and three honourable mentions. Please join us in congratulating the following young scholars and their work!
Dr. Ryan Henke has been awarded the Mary Haas Book Award for his University of Hawai‘i at Manoa dissertation The First Language Acquisition of Nominal Inflection in Northern East Cree: Possessives and Nouns. The well-written dissertation describes and analyzes the L1 acquisition of Northern East Cree nominal inflections which are linguistically expressed in polysynthetic and morphological form in Northern East Cree speech. Henke draws from data found in a rich corpus containing said language samples of child directed NEC speech. Henke’s study is undeniably original and significant given the paucity of linguistic research in this area, and the current realities of language endangerment involving Indigenous communities. This sensitivity represents the current new paradigm in linguistics where acknowledgment is given the one’s positionality and them problem of adopting of positivistic science approaches that may otherwise come into conflict with interpretive Indigenous communities. In this regard, Henke’s dissertation shows a unique commitment and understanding to linguistics theory and its place in the world of living interpretive speech communities.
Dr. Esteban Diaz Montenegro was awarded an Honourable Mention for his Université Lumière Lyon 2 dissertation entitled El habla nasa (páez) de Munchique: nuevos acercamientos a su sociolingüística, fonología y morfosintaxis [The Nasa (Paez) language of Munchique : new approaches to its sociolinguistics, phonology and morphosyntax]. This social and grammatical description is very clear with multiple examples, gathered from exemplary work in an in-flux community. It is an important contribution especially given the paucity of knowledge of this language. Dr. Diaz chose to write his dissertation in Spanish so that it could be more accessible to the community.
Dr. John Elliott received an Honourable Mention for his University of Hawai‘i at Manoa dissertation A Grammar or Enxet Sur. This is a very comprehensive grammar of an under-described language. The writing, formatting, and organization are all commendable, and thus, it is a stellar example of both documentation and description of a language.
Dr. James Sarmento received an Honourable Mention for his University of California, Davis dissertation The Shasta Language: A One-Hundred Year Conversation. Sarmento’s approach is theoretically and methodologically grounded in the realities of a living Indigenous community absent of its heritage language. This reality therefore shapes that way in which Sarmento designs his methodology. His claim is that the Indigenous language revitalization and reclamation of Shasta requires an emergent ‘conversation’ (as community-engaged practice) between living Shashta and the historical and idealogical dimensions of Shashta language work. In this way, Sarmento’s dissertation is original and compelling given the current realities of Shashta language and culture.
Call for SSILA Program Committee Member
The SSILA Program Committee (PC) is in need of a new member to serve for three years.
The PC is the body responsible for organizing the SSILA annual meetings. It is made up of all the voting members of the elected SSILA Executive Committee, as well as three dedicated PC members who serve for three-year terms. The chair of the PC is the member who is in their third year. As the senior PC member this year, Verónica Nercesian will chair the PC as we prepare for the 2022 Annual Meeting. Martin Kohlberger will continue to serve in his role as Program Committee Administrator, facilitating PC members in their tasks throughout the year.
We are seeking nominations for a SSILA member to serve as the newest member of the Program Committee. The appointment will begin in February 2021 and conclude at the end of the 2024 Annual Meeting.
Volunteers for this position can expect the following yearly tasks:
Preparing calls for papers in mid-February and early May
Assigning abstracts to external reviewers in mid-July
Reading abstracts and making acceptance decisions in early May and late August
Preparing the program for the annual meeting in September
Making logistical decisions in October and November for how the conference will be run
Participating in the annual meeting in early January
Please nominate yourself or someone else by February 10, 2021. Please give a brief explanation of why you or the person that you nominate would be a good fit for this position. If you nominate someone else, please confirm with them that they would be willing to serve on the committee for a three-year term.
Nominations should be sent to SSILA president Gaby Caballero (gcaballero@ucsd.edu), or to the SSILA secretary Mary Linn (secretary@ssila.org).
We hope to receive your nomination soon. Thank you for your support!
Mary R. Haas Book Award - Winners Announced
The Mary R. Haas Book Award is presented to a junior scholar for an unpublished manuscript that makes a significant substantive contribution about Indigenous languages of the Americas. The award carries no financial stipend, but the winning manuscripts will be considered for publication under the Society’s auspices in the University of Nebraska Press series “Studies in the Native Languages of the Americas.”
SSILA received a large number of excellent nominations for the Mary R. Haas Book Award this year. As a result, the committee chose to award one winner and three honourable mentions. Please join us in congratulating the following young scholars and their work!
Dr. Amalia Skilton (University of California, Berkeley) has been awarded SSILA Mary R. Haas Book Award for her thesis Spatial and Non-Spatial Deixis in Cushillococha Ticuna. This dissertation is an exquisite piece of work in both methodology and the theoretical contributions. The replicability of the several experiments –both with other Ticuna speakers and cross-linguistically– is a highly desirable feature in the context of the study of Indigenous languages. It also makes important theoretical contributions to the area of semantics and pragmatics of demonstratives, providing evidence that demonstratives encode visibility contrasts. This finding challenges the current dominant view that demonstratives carry information regarding distance but do not encode perceptual deictic content. The study also provides evidence that demonstratives do not contrast necessarily in terms of ‘distance’ between speaker/addressee and referents, but in terms of ‘peripersonal space,’ the space within reach of the speaker.
Dr. Geny Gonzales Castaño (Université Lumière Lyon 2) has received an honourable mention for Una gramática de la lengua namtrik de Totoró - Lengua barbacoa hablada en los Andes colombianos. Her dissertation provides an extremely detailed, comprehensive guide to the Namtrik language as it is spoken in Totoró, a Colombian town within the Cauca district.
Dr. Kelsey Neely (University of California, Berkeley) has also been selected for honourable mention for The Linguistic Expression of Affective Stance in Yaminawa (Pano, Peru). The committee praised this thesis for its comprehensive nature, consisting of both a grammar of Yaminawa with context-rich examples and a detailed study of affective stance, and for its potential broader impacts of the work, particularly with respect to language education.
And finally, Dr. Andrey Nikulin (Universidade de Brasília) and his thesis Proto-Macro-Jê: Um Estudio Reconstrutivo have been selected for honourable mention for the SSILA Mary R. Haas Book Award. His dissertation, drawing on a vast amount of published and unpublished sources, is a remarkable piece of scholarship, and it will serve as a reference for years to come to anyone interested in comparative studies and classification of South American languages.
The winners will be formally awarded at the SSILA Annual Business Meeting on January 9, 2021. SSILA wishes to thank all of the nominators.
Nominations for the Mary R. Haas Book Award are due June 15 every year.
Lev Michael Awarded the Victor Golla Prize
SSILA is happy to announce that Lev Michael, University of California, Berkeley, has been awarded the Victor Golla Prize.
The Victor Golla Prize is presented in recognition of a significant history of both linguistic scholarship and service to the scholarly community, with service that expands the quality and/or dissemination of such scholarship. The Prize, which bestows a life membership in SSILA on the recipient, seeks especially to honor those who strive to carry out interdisciplinary scholarship in the spirit of Victor Golla, combining excellent linguistic scholarship in one or more other allied fields, such as anthropology, education, history, or literature.
Lev exemplifies Victor’s virtues of scholarship grounded in an empirical practice that encompasses ongoing language documentation and text philology, pursuing answers to big-picture questions about areality and language change, and effectively integrated with service to a broad community. He excels in the area of South Americanist language documentation, linguistic analysis, and community language support.
His publications show depth and breadth in South American languages and families, as well as in extending to philology and history. They appear in IJAL, Journal of Language Contact, Language, Linguistic Typology, and Pragmatics and Society among other journals, and in volumes published by Benjamins, Cambridge, Oxford, and Routledge. His book A linguistic analysis of Old Omagua ecclesiastical texts (2016, co-authored with Zach O’Hagan) not only strengthens our understanding of the language, but shows clearly that Omagua crystallized before European contact. He is currently co-editing a Handbook of Amazonian languages for de Gruyter Mouton.
Lev has directed eight PhD dissertations and many undergraduate theses, and he has supervised half a dozen postdocs. His work with and impact on students and other younger scholars.
In impact to the field, Lev started the biennial Symposium on Amazonian Languages, which meets in Berkeley. In March of last year, SAL 3 had 21 talks by scholars from Brazil, Canada, and the US. Of course there are bigger events for Latin Americanists generally, but nothing comparable in North America for Amazonianists. He created SAPhon, the South American Phonological Inventory Database. This online resource contains information about phonological inventories for 363 South American languages, allowing users to view information about individual languages and sounds, with a map browsing function.
Lev and his research partner Chris Beier are absolutely committed to capacity building in the Amazonian communities where they work. This is a critical part of Lev’s pedagogy and mentoring of North American students, and shines through in his work. He does training and involves community members in the work he and Chris do, and makes sure there are results that benefit them. This includes (at least) dictionaries of Iquito, Máíhĩkì, and Muniche and pedagogical descriptions of Andoa, Iquito, and Muniche.
The committee found that Lev exemplify the spirit of this award through the breadth, quality, and availability of his research, his success in engagement with communities, and by the inspiration he brings to new generations of linguists.
Amalia Skilton wins the SSILA Archiving Award
The SSILA Archiving Award Committee is delighted to announce that Amalia Skilton, University of California, Berkeley, has been awarded the SSILA Archiving Award in Honor of Michael Krauss.
The committee recognizes the Ticuna Archive, assembled and archived by Amalia and housed at the Survey of California and other Indian Languages. The archive stands out not only for the breadth of materials which it contains, but also for its meticulous organization and curation, which are documented in the guide to the materials, and published in Language Documentation and Conservation. In addition, the committee particularly notes the level of community-engagement exemplified by Amalia’s discussion of ethics and permissions associated with the collections and the level of accessibility of the collection. Amalia lives up to the spirit of Michael Krauss in creating high standards for documentation and archiving and at the same time as contributing to linguistic theory through her research on such topics as deixis, language acquisition, and Ticuna grammar.
New Committee Members Elected
Congratulations to our new Executive Committee and Nominating Committee members!
Jack Martin is the Vice President/President Elect for 2021-2022, and he will become the President at the 2023 Annual Meeting. Jack is Chancellor Professor of English and Linguistics at William & Mary. He began fieldwork on Muskogee (Creek) in Oklahoma during the 1980s. Since then he has worked collaboratively with the Seminole Tribe of Florida, the Coushatta Tribe, the Choctaw Nation, the Seminole Nation, and the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians. For SSILA, he has served on the Nominating Committee, the Mary R. Haas Award Committee, and the Ken Hale Award Committee. For the LSA, he has served on the Ethics Committee and chaired CELP. At William & Mary he has directed Linguistics, chaired the English department, and served as President of the Faculty Assembly. He is the author, compiler, or co-editor of four books: A Dictionary of Creek/Muskogee (Nebraska, 2000); Totkv Mocvse/New Fire (Oklahoma, 2004); A Grammar of Creek (Muskogee) (Nebraska, 2011); and Creek (Muskogee) Texts (Berkeley, 2015).
Susan Gehr, Karuk, is the in-coming Member -at-Large on the Executive Committee. She has a master's in linguistics from the University of Oregon and a master's in library and information science from San José State University. She’s been a member of SSILA since 2008, and has been on the Archiving Award Committee since May 2019. Gehr served as a linguist mentor at the Breath of Life Workshop held by the Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival at UC Berkeley in 2004 and 2012. Gehr conducted an oral history for her MLIS thesis entitled “Breath of Life: Revitalizing California’s Native Languages Through Archives.” Gehr worked with other Karuk community language scholars who are involved in documenting and revitalizing their language to care for their materials with support from the National Science Foundation’s Documenting Endangered Languages Program. Gehr has co-taught several courses at CoLang and served as a co-convener of the CoLang Advisory Circle with Ewa Czaykowska-Higgins.
Racquel-María Sapién will join the Nominating Committee. Racquel is an Associate Professor at the University of Oklahoma, Racquel works with speakers, teachers, and learners to document, analyze, and reclaim Kari'nja (Cariban) and Lokono (Arawakan) as spoken in Suriname. In addition to the morphosyntax of Cariban and Arawakan languages, her research interests include a focus on methods and methodologies for community-inclusive field research. She serves as a Co-Chair of the LSA Committee on Endangered Languages and their Preservation (CELP) and has taught courses at both the Northwest Indian Language Institute (NILI) and the Institute on Collaborative Language Research (CoLang).
CALL for SSILA EDITOR
The Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas (SSILA) is seeking an Editor. SSILA works to keep their membership informed and connected through the SSILA website, and minimally through Facebook. The Editor is responsible for content on these platforms and works in close collaboration with the SSILA Secretary-Treasurer to keep the website updated. The editorship has a term of three years. It requires minimally requires 5-8 hours of work per month but may take more depending on the vision and commitment of the editor to develop content. The Editor receives a $500.00 stipend at the end of each calendar year, but compensation may be adjusted to reflect added vision and time.
Responsibilities
Check Editor email (editor@ssila.org) regularly and respond.
Post relevant content to the website and Facebook that is sent to the editor by members.
Post any official SSILA content requested by the EC and the in Memoriam Editor, and email it to membership.
Ensure consistency of style, formatting, and accessibility throughout the website.
Put some amount of effort into monitoring news for items of interest (using a weekly news search result or some such), as well as posting items they happen to come across in their own social networks.
Update and maintain Facebook page, in accordance with guidelines and with other members delegated to post on Facebook.
Create a yearly report of website activities and attend the Executive Committee meetings (in person or by video) each year at the SSILA Winter meeting in early January, attend quarterly video meetings as needed, and report to and advise the Executive Committee on website and technical matters as needed.
Preferred Skills
Familiarity with the following services:
SquareSpace (the website platform)
MailChimp
If interested please contact the current SSILA Secretary/Treasurer at secretary@ssila.org. Please provide a letter of interest that includes links to a website or websites contributed to, or highlighting other editing or content development roles and the name, and the name and contact information for one reference.
Meet the team behind your new SSILA website!
We would like to introduce you to the team who created the new SSILA website:
Diego Frankel
Diego is an undergraduate computational linguistics major at the University of Southern California. He is a summer 2020 intern with Mary Linn, the SSILA Secretary/Treasurer, at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage (CFCH).
He is responsible for the bulk of the work you see (and don’t see) on these pages, and in getting the membership transferred from the old site.
Diego also translated all of the content into Spanish.
Hali Dardar
Hali is the Language Reclamation and Media Project Coordinator at CFCH. Some of you may have met her at the LSA/CELP closing event for the 2019 Year of Indigenous Languages at the winter meetings in New Orleans, where she was with the Houma Language Project presenting some of their language and culture learning activities.
Hali oversaw Diego in the technical aspects and financial linkings on the new platform.
She kept all of us on track.
Cecelia Halle
Cecelia is the Strategic Communications Specialist of Cultural Sustainability at CFCH. She worked as an intern on the Smithsonian Mother Tongue Film Festival before joining the staff.
She refreshed our logo, and decided on colors, styles, and images for the new look.
As the granddaughter of Morris Halle, Cecelia is honored that her design skills could be used for SSILA.
Danny Hieber
And a special thank you to Danny Hieber, former SSILA Webmaster and PhD Candidate at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who designed and took care of the old site single-handedly for many years, and who was there for us to answer questions during this transition.
Mary Linn
SSILA Secretary/Treasurer