Born in the Blood: On Native American Translation

Contributors

contributors John Bierhorst is the author, editor, or translator of more than thirty-five books on the Native literatures of North, South, and Central America. A specialist in the language and literature of the Aztecs, he is the author of Cantares Mexicanos: Songs of the Aztecs, A Nahuatl-English Dictionary, History and Mythology of the Aztecs: The Codex Chimalpopoca, and Ballads of the Lords of New Spain. Julie Brittain teaches linguistics at Memorial University, Newfoundland. Her research interests include theoretical models of syntax and morphology, with a focus on Algonquian languages. Other research interests include first-language acquisition (Cree), the oral literatures of native North America, and strategies to maintain and revitalize indigenous languages. She is Director of the Chisasibi Child Language Acquisition Study (cclas), a research project begun in 2004 that is investigating the linguistic stages through which Cree children (ages two to six) pass as they acquire the grammar of their first language. Lynn Burley is an Associate Professor in the Department of Writing at the University of Central Arkansas. She teaches primarily linguistics courses, including semantics, world languages, and linguistics for educators. She has published previously on Siouan languages in the Encyclopedia of Linguistics as well as in composition in chapters in A Delicate Balance: Teaching, Scholarship, and Service in the 21st Century College English Department and Miss Grundy Doesn’t Teach Here Anymore: How Popular Culture Has Changed the Composition Studies Classroom. She is now working on a book on the role of linguistics in k–12 education. William M. Clements teaches anthropology, literature, and American Indian studies at Arkansas State University. He has published several books, articles, chapters, and reviews on American Indian literature, including Native American Verbal Art: Texts and Contexts. He has also published on American religious folklife, Italian Americana, and other topics in literature, folklore, history, and popular culture. Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh is Curator of Anthropology at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. He received a PhD from Indiana University and a ba from the University of Arizona, and has held fellowships with the Center for Desert Archaeology and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has published more than two dozen articles and book chapters and has authored and edited seven books, including History Is in the Land: Multivocal Tribal Traditions 455 in Arizona’s San Pedro Valley (with T. J. Ferguson), which received Honorable Mention in the 2007 Victor Turner Prize juried book competition. He also sits on the editorial board of the American Anthropologist. Nora Marks Dauenhauer was born (1927) in Juneau, Alaska, and was raised in Juneau and Hoonah, as well as on the family fishing boat and in seasonal subsistence sites around Icy Straits, Glacier Bay, and Cape Spencer. Her first language is Tlingit; she began to learn English when entering school at the age of eight. She has a ba in anthropology from Alaska Methodist University and is internationally recognized for her fieldwork, transcription, translation, and explication of Tlingit oral literature. Her creative writing has been widely published and anthologized . Her Raven plays have been performed in several venues internationally , including the Kennedy Center in Washington dc. In 1980 she was named Humanist of the Year by the Alaska Humanities Forum. In 1989 she received an Alaska Governor’s Award for the Arts, and in 1991 she was a winner of the Before Columbus Foundation’s American Book Award. From 1983 to 1997 she was Principal Researcher in Language and Cultural Studies at Sealaska Heritage Foundation in Juneau. Her books include The Droning Shaman, Life Woven with Song, and, coedited with Richard Dauenhauer and Lydia Black, Russians in Tlingit America: The Battles of Sitka 1802 and 1804. Richard L. Dauenhauer, born and raised in Syracuse, New York, has lived in Alaska since 1969. From 1981 to 1988 he served as the seventh Poet Laureate of Alaska. In 1989 he received an Alaska State Governor’s Award for the Arts. In 1991 he was a winner of an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. He is widely recognized as a translator, and several hundred of his translations of poetry from German, Russian, Classical Greek, Swedish, Finnish, and other languages have appeared in a range of journals and little magazines since 1963. He holds degrees in Slavic languages, German, and comparative literature . Since moving to Alaska, much of his professional work has focused on applied folklore and linguistics in the study, materials development, and teacher training of and for Alaska Native languages and oral...