PhD Student's Project Selected for Funding by Smithsonian

PhD student  Kathryn (Pewenofkit) Bridwell-Briner ’s project “ Nʉmʉ Tekwa!/Speak Comanche!” has been selected for funding by the Smithsonian’s Recovering Voices Community Research Program . Recovering Voices is a collaborative initiative of the National Museum of Natural History, the National Museum of the American Indian, and the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage that supports  interdisciplinary research, documentation and revitalization  in order to bring together research and language study between communities and institutes of learning. Bridwell-Briner will lead a seven-person team (including five Comanche tribal citizens/descendant and Drs. Michael Hamilton and Viktor Kharlamov) to work with  written and recorded Comanche materials in the Smithsonian’s National Anthropological Archives for a week in August 2019. She and her team will gather archival materials in order to fill in lexical gaps in Comanche vocabulary, grammatical content, and to increase phonological understanding. They will look at records dating back to the 1840s in order to trace the way the Comanche language has changed and grown. This work will ultimately feed into Bridwell-Briner’s dissertation project which focuses on creating the first online Comanche dictionary and learning tool.