The LSA is extremely pleased to announce the following recipients of funding awards to participate in CoLang 2022, the Institute on Collaborative Language Research, at the University of Montana later this summer. 

Emmon Bach Fellow: Christina Thomas (University of California at Davis)

LSA-CoLang Scholarships:

• Lisa Casarez (University of Arizona)
• Ivette S. González (University of New Mexico)
• Erin Hashimoto (University of Victoria)
• Charlotte Logan (Cornell University)
• Martin Renard (University of Toronto)

The LSA is a proud sponsor of CoLang, and has been awarding scholarships for students to attend the Institute since 2014. This is the first year that the LSA awarded the Emmon Bach Fellowship, which was generously endowed by hundreds of LSA members and donors via a special fundraising campaign conducted in honor of the late LSA President. The other CoLang scholarships are made from the LSA's general operating budget, which is supported by membership dues, publication subscriptions, meeting fees, and other charitable contributions. Eligibility to apply for LSA-funded fellowships and scholarships is a benefit of LSA student membership.

Read on for biographical details on each of this year's fellowship and scholarship recipients.

Christina Dawa Kutsmana Thomas is a 3rd year PhD student attending the University of California, Davis, in the Native American Studies Department. She is earning a Designated Emphasis in Performance and Practice Studies. She is an Indigenous scholar, vocalist, dancer, cultural activist, and language warrior. Christina’s practice is rooted in the Great Basin, more specifically Northern Nevada. Her primary fields of study are historical musicology and language regeneration of the Northern Paiute language. Her research amplifies Native ways of doing music history -- privileging Paiute knowledges, languages, and performance -- as a means to Indigenize music studies curriculum. Her research interests include Great Basin Indigenous Arts and Language Regeneration, Indigenous Performance Studies, Public history and community-based research, Indigenous Pedagogies and Curricula, and Indigenous creative production as sovereign acts (pictured at right).

Lisa Casarez is a student in the Native American Linguistics Program (NAMA) at the University of Arizona. Her heritage is both Hidatsa and Mexican American. A second language learner of Hidatsa since childhood, Lisa has been a K12 language instructor in her home community of Mandaree, North Dakota and also taught at the Nueta Hidatsa Sahinsh College on the Fort Berthold Reservation. Lisa helped establish a nonprofit dedicated to the preservation and maintenance of the Hidatsa language, called Hiráaca Maa Aru Cáawi. The mission is to make language more accessible for community members and incorporate linguistics as a tool in community language revitalization (pictured at left).

Ivette S. González is a PhD student in Linguistics at the University of New Mexico. Her language work focuses on the maintenance of the Paipai language (Yuman) in the Mexican state of Baja California. She has worked with the community since 2018 in the documentation of the language and the elaboration of teaching materials. She is currently collaborating to create a local repository (pictured at right).

Erin Hashimoto is a student in the MA Linguistics program at the University of Victoria. Her work and research center around the digitization and transformation of legacy documentation for contemporary community-based language work. She is currently involved with work with the Makah Language Program at Di·ya (Neah Bay), Washington and the Wendat Language Committee at Wendake, Québec (pictured at left).

Charlotte Logan: Charlotte Logan is Kanien’kehá:ka of Akwesasne (Mohawk of Akwesasne) and a Ph.D student in the Department of Linguistics at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY.  Her work focuses on two aspects, the first being the Hodinoñsyoñnih Language Documentation and Conservation Initiative, which aims at sitting with Hodinoñsyoñnih Elders to ensure the passage of story and language to the next generation of Confederacy speakers.  The second is to describe and characterize the linguistic functions and meanings of discourse particle usage within Hodinoñsyoñnih languages.  Charlotte started her Language Revitalization work as a learner and teacher of Onoñdaʔgegaʔ with the Onondaga Nation School and Adult Immersion Program and continued onto Cornell University where she supports the Gayogohonǫ7 (Cayuga) Language course within the Linguistics and American Indian and Indigenous Studies Departments.  The primary goal of her work is to produce data and resources that directly support Language Revitalization efforts within Hodinoñsyoñnih communities to support the continued sovereignty and great peace of the Hodinoñsyoñnih Six Nations Confederacy (pictured at right).

Martin Renard holds a Bachelor and Master’s degree in linguistics from the University of Cambridge (UK), and is currently a first-year PhD student in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Toronto. He is very interested in Indigenous language revitalization and collaborative linguistic research, and has mostly worked on the endangered Northern Iroquoian language Kanien’kéha, also known as Mohawk (pictured at left).