Parker McKenzie

Parker Paul McKenzie (born November 15, 1897 near Rainy Mountain , † March 5, 1999 in Mountain View ) was an American linguist .

He was born in 1897 in a teepee near Rainy Mountain, Indian Territory . He was baptized as a Baptist in the Washita River . His parents were Kiowa - Indians and reported McKenzie in 1904 in the Rainy Mountain Kiowa Boarding School. There it was compulsory to speak English , but those who used the Kiowa language faced corporal punishment. He then attended Phoenix Indian Boarding School, Union High School, Lamson College, and Oklahoma Agricultural and Mechanical .

When the Smithsonian Institution sent the anthropologist John Peabody Harrington to Oklahoma in 1918 to study the Kiowa language, McKenzie was appointed to assist him. This was the beginning of a decades-long scientific discussion of the Kiowa . Up to now it has been a purely oral language. Together they both developed a phonetic alphabet that is still valid today . The results were published in the works Vocabulary of the Kiowa Language (1928) and Popular Account of the Kiowa Indian Language ( 1948 ). The collaboration between Harrington and McKenzie came to an end towards the end of the 1940s, and the system was perfected by the 1950s.

McKenzie never embarked on an academic career, but was merely a shorthand typist in the Indians Monies Section of the Anadarko Agency's Bureau of Indian Affairs between 1920 and 1959 . In the last years of his life he worked closely with Laurel Watkins , who described his work in 1984 in A Grammar of Kiowa . The University of Colorado honored his services to the Kiowa with an honorary doctorate in 1991. On his 100th birthday, he was honored with a ceremony in the Red Buffalo Hall of the Kiowa Tribal Complex in Carnegie . McKenzie died in 1999 at the age of 101. After his death, he was inducted into the Oklahoma Historians Hall of Fame.

Some compared his work to the Sequoyahs who developed the Cherokee alphabet . It has to be recognized not only scientifically, but above all in cultural terms: thanks to it, texts by older speakers and words that are hardly used today have been preserved for posterity. He also translated works from English, including some Baptist hymns in 1986.

He was married to Nettie, whom he had known since high school, and had two daughters, Esther Hayes of Mountain View and Kathryn Collier of Wewoka.