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).