College of William and Mary
04/14/2026 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 04/14/2026 07:59
W&M faculty research leads to landmark Indigenous Language Symposium
W&M faculty research leads to landmark Indigenous Language Symposium
Tribal members from across Virginia and the Eastern Seaboard gathered at the Muscarelle Museum of Art for William & Mary's first Indigenous Language Symposium.
Published April 14, 2026
Buck Woodard described the roundtable format as central to the day's applied anthropology approach - research conducted alongside communities, not about them. "I want to open up that path for the Eastern Band of Cherokee, for the Pamunkey, for the different communities to feel as though we have a road between Williamsburg and their community that's going back and forth," Woodard said. (Photo by Grace Helmick)
On Feb. 21 - International Mother Language Day - 65 tribal members from across Virginia and the Eastern Seaboard gathered at the Muscarelle Museum of Art for William & Mary's first Indigenous Language Symposium, hosted by the American Indian Research Center and the Powhatan Algonquian Intertribal Roundtable (PAIR).
The daylong convening was built around a simple question: What role can the university play in supporting Indigenous communities in reclaiming their language?
The answer, two years in the making, brought together tribal leaders, linguists and W&M students and scholars for workshops, teaching demonstrations and difficult conversations - all of it shaped by the tribal communities themselves. The research underlines W&M's commitment to civic leadership - among the university's defining institutional priorities - put into practice through faculty research and tribal partnership.
The symposium grew from a conversation between Chief Anne Richardson of the Rappahannock Tribe and university leadership.
"Chief Anne came to campus and said, what could W&M do to help the communities on this journey of language reclamation and revitalization?" said Danielle Moretti-Langholtz, the Thomasina E. Jordan Director of the American Indian Research Center. The university's response: funding a postdoctoral fellowship to lay the groundwork for sustained research and engagement.
"I was thrilled to see all the young people from the Virginia nations speaking the words of our elders and excited to see them breathe life back into those words again," said Chief Anne Richardson, Rappahannock. "I appreciate all the hard work from the William & Mary and PAIR Team in assisting us in restoring our language so that my great-grandchildren can speak the words of my grandparents."
Participants gather for the opening of William & Mary's first Indigenous Language Symposium at the Muscarelle Museum of Art, February 21, 2026. The event, co-hosted by the American Indian Research Center and the Powhatan Algonquian Intertribal Roundtable (PAIR), drew sixty-five tribal members from Virginia and the Eastern Seaboard. (Photo by Grace Helmick)
Meg Harvey, hired from Brown University on the strength of her work with the Tunica-Biloxi Tribe of Louisiana, stepped into that role. Over two years, Harvey, Moretti-Langholtz and Buck Woodard of the Department of Anthropology worked with tribal communities and PAIR to build the symposium from the ground up.
Communities ranked and selected presenters and shaped the day's structure. The event drew sponsorship from across the university: the Dean's Innovation Fund, Strategic Cultural Partnerships, the American Indian Research Center, the Muscarelle Museum of Art, the Negrotto-Sapnar Endowment for Native Studies and the Department of Anthropology.
"Reawakening languages like those spoken at the symposium face unique challenges that even other minoritized languages do not," Harvey explained. Communities must work through centuries-old documentation, cultural knowledge, and research spanning ecology to ethnomusicology. "The incredible progress made by each of these communities is a true labor of love."
Sabine Krigsvold '28 (Pamunkey) opened the day with W&M's land acknowledgment. Wayne Adkins, Second Chief of the Chickahominy, offered a prayer in the reconstituted Virginia Algonquian language.
What followed was programming deliberately split in two.
The morning belonged to the tribal communities: a closed session offering precious space to engage openly on sensitive matters of cultural importance - a recognition of the vital importance of Indigenous sovereignty. Massachusetts-based Jessie Little Doe Baird and Tracy Kelley Wilson of the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project led workshops on policy and planning for representatives of the Pamunkey, Mattaponi, Rappahannock, Chickahominy, Nansemond and other nations. The Wôpanâak team has pursued Wampanoag language reclamation for 30 years in partnership with MIT.
"Pedagogy was very much at the center of everything," Moretti-Langholtz said. The afternoon proved it. The Tunica-Biloxi Culture Program - Ryan Lopez, Elisabeth Pierite and Rebecca Moore - demonstrated immersion teaching methods and lesson plans rooted in language families once spoken at William & Mary in the 18th century.
Tribal representatives engage in afternoon workshop sessions led by the Tunica-Biloxi Tribe of Louisiana Culture Program. Public sessions demonstrated immersion teaching methods rooted in language families once spoken on W&M's campus in the eighteenth century. (Photo by Grace Helmick)
Fourteen anthropology undergraduates served as participant-observers, gaining fieldwork experience on their own campus. Woodard calls it applied anthropology: research oriented toward solving human problems alongside the communities it serves.
"We're trying to advocate for the research, the community, and the institution coming together in one space," Woodard said.
Students from Harvey's anthropology course joined the afternoon sessions. Kayla Locklear (Chickahominy) and Lisa Brighteyes Richardson Deresz (Rappahannock), both PAIR representatives, delivered closing remarks.
"The whole group - they were laughing, people at different roundtables standing up and trying different words," Moretti-Langholtz recalled. "Two very different parts of the day."
The collaboration rests on a foundation older than the university itself. When the Brafferton Indian School operated on the W&M campus in the colonial era, Indigenous students from multiple nations lived and studied in several different languages - a multilingual environment that Harvey's research is now recovering and reframing.
That 18th-century reality is the through-line connecting the university's earliest chapter to the tribal partnerships taking shape today, as the nation reckons with the first 250 years of its history.
"This is a civic leadership project in that we're working with the tribal communities and their leaders," Woodard said. "We both bring resources to the table. It's a true dialogue."
The symposium's public sessions are expected to yield a peer-reviewed article examining William & Mary's historical and contemporary role in Indigenous language learning. Woodard and Harvey have begun archival and collections research at UNC Chapel Hill and are planning fieldwork with descendant community members of the Catawba, Cherokee and Nottoway, building out the biographical and linguistic record of Brafferton students.
The path forward, Woodard said, will continue to be shaped in conversation with the tribes - a commitment not to a single event, but to the long work of reciprocity between a university and the communities whose languages were spoken on its campus long before English was.
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