The University of Chicago

International Year of Indigenous Languages @ UChicago

Who’s Who

  • Rhodel “Rhodee” Castillo is a proud Garifuna, raised in the coastal Garifuna communities of Hopkins Village and Dangriga Town, in Belize. Holding degrees from the Belize College of Arts and Sciences, Chicago State University, and Roosevelt University, he is the co-founder of the Progressive Garifuna Alliance (PGA), an organization dedicated to the preservation and the advancement of Garifuna culture worldwide. The PGA has contributed to several multimedia exhibits as well as to the Annual Chicagoland Celebrations of Garifuna culture, with proceeds benefiting the communities in Belize. Rhodel has released two CDs and, together with his family, has opened the Garifuna Flava Restaurant in Chicago.
  • Carla Collins is a master speaker of the Potawatomi language who studied under fluent speakers in Northern Wisconsin. Margaret Mersereau Long and Dejonay Biles Morseau are both students of Carla’s. All three are members of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians.
  • Hilaria Cruz is a Lyman T. Johnson Postdoctoral Fellow and a native speaker of San Juan Quiahije Chatino Eastern Chatino, an endangered Zapotecan language, spoken in the mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico. Through her documentation and revitalization work on the Chatino languages, she has collected and archived more than one hundred hours of audio recordings of naturalistic speech in formal and informal settings. She is currently researching the Chatino concepts of the dead in four Eastern Chatino communities: Santa Maria Amialtepec, San Juan Quiahije, Santiago Yaitepec, and San Marcos Zacatepec. Her research interests include linguistic ecology and morphology.
  • Alexandra Halkin founded the Chiapas Media Project, an award winning bi-national organization that has trained over 200 indigenous men and women in video production in the Mexican states of Chiapas and Guerrero. A Guggenheim Fellowship and Fulbright recipient, Alexandra has produced five documentary shorts in Mexico, and her work has been broadcast and screened at film and video festivals worldwide. In 2010, she founded the Americas Media Initiative (AMI), a non-profit organization that works with Cuban filmmakers living in Cuba.
  • Kalvin Hartwig, the producer of the short film “This Is Who I Am,” is Bear Clan Anishinaabe from the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians. He holds an MA in International Relations from Yale University, where he focused his studies on Indigenous rights and Indigeneity.  Kalvin also holds a Graduate Diploma in Communication Studies from Concordia University of Montreal.  Recently he managed a $500,000 budget for his Tribe, which he used to promote strong Anishinaabe identities amongst youth.  Kalvin is currently finalizing a script for a full-feature film, which he hopes will be inspiring and shed more light on issues affecting identities of Native youth today.
  • María “Luz” Márquez promotes P’urhépecha culture and language by teaching traditional music and dance in the Chicagoland region. Márquez was born into a family of musicians in Cherán Atzicuirín (Chernástico), a village in the Mexican state of Michoacán. After moving to the USA, Márquez noticed the social pressures causing the P’urhépecha language to disappear from use, in favor of Spanish and English. For this reason, Márquez engaged the local community with her talent for music and dance. Márquez’s family continues to speak speak P’urhépecha at home and through texting.
  • Miguel Marzana has written poetry for over 20 years from several countries of the American continent, where he has emphasized the gardens, the dereliction, the climate, and the drift of his generation. His work has been published in Contratiempo and Volantines turbios, among others. He has been anthologized in Rapsodia de los sentidos (2013) and Cantología (2013). Decomposiciones, his collection of poetry, was released in 2011.
  • Adam Singerman is a linguist who conducts research into indigenous Amazonian languages. He defended his dissertation, entitled “The Morphosyntax of Tuparí, a Tupían Language of the Brazilian Amazon,” at UChicago in 2018. He currently serves as a Humanities Teaching Fellow at UChicago. During the 2020-2021 academic year he will write a reference grammar of Tuparí with the financial support of the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
  • Sofía Syntaxx is an indigenous linguist, teacher, and researcher.  After completing her Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship in Romania, she moved to Brazil, where she currently resides in São Paulo.  A multi-media artist and direct descendent of the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe, Syntaxx honors her ancestors and heritage in her work, and often uses her indigenous language, Ojibwe, to title her pieces. The digital drawing on the poster is called “Ishkwaatamagad eni Maajitaamagak” which translates to “End of the Beginning.”