My fieldwork is primarily with two Muskogean communities – the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma and Muscogee (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma. I have been studying the languages traditionally spoken by these two communities – Mvskoke, both the Muskogee Creek and Oklahoma Seminole dialects. I have also done a limited amount of fieldwork with the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana and assisted with several workshops that are part of a large documentation project for the Chickasaw language.
Mvskoke
Mvskoke (Creek) is a Muskogean language spoken in the Muscogee (Creek) Nation and the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma as well as by the Florida Seminole. Jack B. Martin (at the College of William and Mary) maintains a blog with an incredible amount of information on Mvskoke as well as texts, interviews, and hymns from his years of work documenting the language: muskogee.blogs.wm.edu.
Chickasaw
Chickasaw is another Muskogean language spoken in the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma. I have been involved in several narrative workshops as part of a documentation project – The Chickasaw Verb. Joshua Hinson, of the Chickasaw Language Department, has been collaborating with Dr. Colleen Fitzgerald (of the University of Texas at Arlington) for many years to produce the single largest collection of audio recordings in Chickasaw.
I spent the last two summers collecting additional audio recordings of narratives and naturalistic conversations. I also work with native speakers of Chickasaw to transcribe the Chickasaw stories and translate them into English. I am now working on organizing the metadata for this vaste collection of audio documentation.
Koasati
Koasati is a Muskogean language spoken by the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana and the Alabama-Coushatta of Texas. Jack B. Martin maintains a blog for the Koasati Documentation Project with interviews and a dictionary: koasati.blogs.wm.edu. The Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana’s Heritage Department website also has more information about the language and the Coushatta community.