Himonnhma

Samantha Cornelius, PhD, has worked with Indigenous languages and projects by and for Indigenous peoples since 2013. She completed her dissertation, "Prosodic Phonology in Oklahoma Cherokee", in 2018, which examined tone and intonation interactions at word boundaries in the Cherokee language. Following her dissertation, she worked on a collaborative project on Cherokee pronominal prefixes from a cultural perspective with a Cherokee speaker and teacher (2019-2020), and she served as annotation manager for the Turtle Mountain Talking Dictionary Project (2021), which made an online dictionary for Michif. Since 2022, she has worked for the Chickasaw Nation Language Preservation Division on Chikashshanompaꞌ language documentation, archiving, and research. Her research interests include stress, rhythm, and intonation in Chikashshanompaꞌ, and traditional Chickasaw kinship.

Kimberly Johnson, PhD, has worked with the Chickasaw Nation in different capacities since 2015, when she began participating in the NSF-funded Chickasaw Verb Project as a graduate student. Johnson joined the Chickasaw Nation Language Preservation Division full-time in 2023 as a lead transcriptionist. Her work includes recording and transcribing narratives, maintaining metadata for audio and annotation files included in the Chickasaw Verb Project collection, and coordinating with fluent speakers to translate recordings. In addition to her collaboration with the Chickasaw Nation, Johnson has been involved in language documentation and community-based language research with the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana, the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, and the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma. Her 2022 dissertation presented a semantic analysis of the verbal and nominal uses of past tenses in the Mvskoke language.

Lokosh (Joshua D. Hinson) is a Chickasaw citizen, also of Choctaw, Muscogee (Creek), Cherokee, and Euro-American descent. A conversational speaker of the Chickasaw language, he is the director of the Chickasaw Language Revitalization Program and an award-winning artist. He holds a bachelor’s degree in painting from Abilene Christian University, a master’s degree in Native American art history from the University of New Mexico, and a doctorate in Native language revitalization from the University of Oklahoma. He creates art within the Chickasaw Nation, located in Ada, Oklahoma.

Juliet Morgan, PhD, is the senior linguist manager of the Chickasaw Nation Language Preservation Division. She has been working with Indigenous communities and language projects since 2009 and began collaborating with the Chickasaw Nation in 2012. She has been a part of the development team for Rosetta Stone Chickasaw since 2015. Her 2017 doctoral dissertation focused on the acquisition of Chickasaw morphosyntax by adult language learners. Her current work includes assisting with curriculum development, especially for the Chikasha Academy Adult Immersion Program, and further documenting and describing the grammar of both Native speakers and second-language speakers of Chikashshanompaꞌ.