The Blackfoot Lab began in Summer 2020. Scroll down to learn more about our projects and lab members.
Projects
Blackfoot Words
Our main project has been the creation of Blackfoot Words, a database of Blackfoot lexical forms from legacy documentation materials. Project tasks included: (1) digitizing the lexical forms and related metadata from grammars, dictionaries, and wordlists; (2) a morphemic analysis of those words into stems and morphemes; and (3) importing the data into a MySQL relational database.
Summer 2021 outcomes
- digitized lexical forms from 26 resources (in aggregate)
- published Blackfoot Words v.1, which included lexical forms, maximal stems, and lemmas from nine of those resources
- drafted and submitted a paper describing the database structure
Summer 2020 outcomes
- digitized lexical forms from eight Blackfoot dictionaries and grammars
Annotating audio recordings
Some students are helping me to organize audio recordings I have made with Blackfoot speakers. This involves segmenting and annotating Blackfoot and English speech in ELAN.
Summer 2020 outcomes
- annotated English phrases from eight elicitation sessions
Summer 2021 outcomes
- annotated English phrases from 27 elicitation sessions (in aggregate)
- added Blackfoot annotations to several elicitation sessions
Language teaching games
During Summer 2020, we focused on creating language teaching games in conjunction with the Cuts Wood School in Browning, MT, the Piegan Institute, and Native Teaching Aids. By the end of Summer 2020 we had developed four pedagogical games.
Lab members

Current (AY 2021-2022)
- Hailey Dykstra YC ’23 (2020-present)
- Evan Hochstein YC ’23 (2021-present)
- Nico Kidd YC ’22 (2020-present)
- Diana Kulmizev YC ’23 (2021-present)
- Matty Norris YC ’22 (2021-present)

Previous


- Isobel Anthony YC ’20, (2020)
- Charelle Brown YC ’20 (2020)
- Tyler Brown YC ’23 (2020-2021)
- Josh Celli YC ’21 (2020-2021)
- Rodrigo Hernandez-Merlin YC ’22 (2020-2021)
- Pearl Hwang YC ’23 (2021)
- Paige Johnson YC ’20 (2020)
- Shayley Martin YC ’22 (2020)
- Hannah Morrison YC ’23 (2020-2021)
- Hema Patel YC ’23, (2020)
- Evan Roberts YC ’23 (2020-2021)
- Alex Smith, ULeth (2021)
- Lena Venkatraman YC ’22 (2021)
(Last updated: 9 March 2022)