Affiliate Faculty

André Bourcier

André Bourcier has been with the Yukon Native Language Centre in Whitehorse, Yukon for 15 years before becoming Acting Director in September 2015. His worked previously many years as a consultant in Linguistics and Language Planning for the Gwich'in and the Inuvialuit of the Northwest Territories.

He received a Ph.D. in Linguistics from Université Laval where his doctoral studies were supported through a Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada scholarship.

Perry Gilmore

Perry Gilmore, Ph.D. (University of Pennsylvania 1982), a sociolinguist and educational anthropologist, is professor emerita at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and professor of Language, Reading and Culture (LRC) and Second Language Acquisition and Teaching (SLAT) faculty at the University of Arizona. She has conducted communication, language, and literacy research in a wide variety of urban and rural settings in the United States, Russia, Africa and Australia. Interest in language and communication has led her to explore a wide range of questions on the origin, nature, and development of interaction and communication, including: field studies of non-human primate communication in the West Indies and East Africa, pidginization and creolization of languages, social aspects of literacy acquisition, and Indigenous language and culture regenesis.

She is the author of numerous ethnographic studies and co-editor of several major ethnography collections, including Children In and Out of School: Ethnography and Education, The Acquisition of Literacy: Ethnographic Perspectives, and Indigenous Epistemologies and Education: Self-Determination, Anthropology and Human Rights. Gilmore is a past president of the Council on Anthropology and Education.

Alice Taff

Alice Taff works to foster Alaskan language continuity by engaging community members to document language, re-establish situations for language use, and create materials in their languages. Examples of materials are:

• Deg Xinag (Deg Hitʼan, Ingalik Athabascan) -- Deg Xiyanʼ Xidhoy Deg Xinag narratives
• Tlingit -- Woosh Een áyá Yoo X̱ʼatudli.átk Tlingit Conversations
• Unangam Tunuu (Aleut language)

Taff earned her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Washington in 1999. She is immediate past president of the Society for the Study of the Indigenous Languages of the Americas. Her current research interest is finding links between ancestral Indigenous language use and health.

Publications

John Ritter

John Ritter is the founding director of the Yukon Native Language Centre in Whitehorse. John documents and describes Yukon aboriginal languages, and he participates in the training of Native language instructors and specialists. He is particularly interested in place names and serves on the Yukon Geographical Place Names Board.