SCLC 44 call for papers

Hello Everyone,

We are pleased to announce that Hiráaca Maa Aru Cáawi will host the 44th Siouan and Caddoan Languages Conference (SCLC) at the North Dakota State Heritage Center and Museum in Bismarck, ND from May 24th through May 26th, 2024.

The SCLC is an annual gathering of linguists, anthropologists, indigenous educators and scholars, and other researchers to promote the study of the Siouan and Caddoan language families. We welcome papers and panels dealing with the study of these languages, but we frequently hear other papers dealing with the intersection of another field and these or related languages. Some of these other fields include, but are not limited to, anthropology, archaeology, art, ethnography, ethnobotany, folklore, history, language education, linguistics, music, Native studies, sociology, and traditional beliefs. We encourage workshops on teaching methods and pedagogical practices from language communities as well.

The deadline for abstract & workshop proposal submissions is March 29th, 2024. Submissions can be sent to coreyjroberts@arizona.edu or kasak@ou.edu. Proposals for Community Language Workshops can be sent to lisacasarez@arizona.edu. Please submit all abstracts, panel and workshop proposals in a .pdf or .doc/.docx file. A proceedings volume is planned. Further details on these proceedings are forthcoming.

For any questions or concerns, please contact the organizers at hiraacaarucaawi@gmail.com. Presenters and attendees who cannot physically be present at the conference are welcome to do so remotely over Zoom, as this conference will be done in a hybrid format. See the conference website for further details: https://www.siouan.org/.

We hope to see many of you all in Bismarck in the Spring!

Best,

Lisa Casarez

MHA Nation

Executive Director of Hiráaca Maa Aru Cáawi

SCLC 43 wrap-up

The 43rd Siouan and Caddoan Languages Conference met this past weekend at the Sam Noble Museum on the campus of the University of Oklahoma. The meeting represented the seventh time that the conference met in the State of Oklahoma, but the first time that the conference was held in Norman. The program can be found here: SCLC 43 Program.

Upon the conclusion of the last presentation, the conference moved into the business meeting. It has been decided that the conference will be held in Bismarck, North Dakota next year. More information on the specific date and venue will be available in the coming weeks.

A proceedings volume will follow this conference. Since there was no conference proceedings volume from last year’s conference, the eventual call will include papers from SCLC 42 and SCLC 43 in a combined volume. Details on this volume will follow with a formal call for papers in the coming days.

SCLC 43 call for papers announced

The call for papers is live for the 43rd Siouan and Caddoan Languages Conference. The University of Oklahoma and the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History will host the conference from May 26, 2023 to May 28, 2023.

Please see the Conference Info tab for more information, and feel free to email any questions to kasak [at] ou.edu.

Post-SCLC 41 wrap-up

The Siouan and Caddoan Languages Conference once again was held remotely via Zoom due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet again, Edwin Ko at the University of California, Berkeley did an excellent job organizing a virtual conference and keeping everything running smoothly.

This was the first conference in several years to involve a presentation on a Caddoan language, and this will hopefully be the start of more work on this language family.

Since the last SCLC, (at least) four scholars culminated their advanced degrees with theses dealing with topics in Siouan languages:

• Hendrickson, Laura T. 2020. Demonstratives and determiner-phrase structure in Hidatsa narrative discourse: A morphological, syntactic, and semantic analysis. Fresno, CA: California State University, Fresno M.A. thesis.

• Roberts, Corey. 2020. A grammar sketch of Tutelo-Saponi. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona M.A. thesis.

• Marsault, Julie. 2021. Valency-changing operations in Umóⁿhoⁿ: Affication, incorporation, and syntactic constructions. Paris, France: Université Sorbonne Nouvelle dissertation.

• Panick, Sean. 2021. r-Nasalization in Hoocąk: A diachronic and synchronic perspective. Long Beach, CA: California State University, Long Beach M.A. thesis.

If there are any other theses or publications dealing with Siouan or Caddoan languages, please use the contact form to let us know so that we can promote the recent work done by those scholars.

Next year’s SCLC will be held in person at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia thanks to the Department of Anthropology there. This will be the first time that the SCLC has been held on the East Coast. This move is meant to make the conference more accessible to groups living east of the Appalachians. The following year’s conference is tentatively to be held in Norman, Oklahoma at the University of Oklahoma.

Presenters at SCLC 41 have been sent an invitation to submit their papers to the Proceedings of the 41st Siouan and Caddoan Languages Conference. Publication of the Proceedings of the 40th Siouan and Caddoan Languages Conference has been delayed slightly, but should be available within the next few weeks.

If there are any other efforts relating to Siouan or Caddoan languages, please leave reach out through the contact form to increase the visibility of your work!

Call for submissions for Proceedings of the 40th SCLC

Pursuant to the discussion at the SCLC 40 Business Meeting, we will be putting together a proceedings volume for the conference. If you have not found a home for your paper, all presenters at SCLC 40 are most welcome to submit their paper to this year's proceedings volume to me at kasak [at] ou.edu.

Given the size of the attached files and the desire to not trigger any spam filters, I have not included any zipped files. For now, the deadline for papers is Friday, October 30th, but if any authors foresee an issue with that, please let me know and I can work to accommodate your timeline.

This message contains the following items: 

• A Word document (.docx) file that is both a style guide and template 

• A .pdf copy of the Unified Style Sheet of Linguistics 

• Three files for LaTeX users, including a LaTeX template (.tex) file with commented-out instructions, a bibliography management (.bib) file, and a bibliography style (.bst) file [NB: Put all three of these files in the same folder when you compile].

The proceedings will be typeset in LaTeX, but Word submissions are perfectly acceptable. Unlike in previous years, the end result will use the Times New Roman font, so it is recommended that authors use this font when writing in Word to gauge how things will look when typeset. 

Those wishing to directly write their papers in LaTeX can use the attached .tex file with the accompanying .bib and .bst file if the author(s) wish to also use BibTeX. Using BibTeX is not required for those writing in LaTeX, but it is strongly recommended.

Once we hit the submission deadline, I would appreciate any help with the editing process: reviewing, proofing, typesetting, etc. In particular, anyone wishing to be a co-editor who has experience with LaTeX would be most welcome. After receiving all papers from interested parties, we are looking to have a turnaround of a few weeks on getting back decisions and comments. In an ideal world, we will have a finalized volume sometime by the end of 2020, but it could spill into early 2021, given historical precedent for these proceedings. 

Please let me know if anyone is interested in helping out with this process. The biggest reason the proceedings take a while to come out is the typesetting process, so I would greatly appreciate help from anyone who can use LaTeX as a co-editor, though all help is most certainly welcome.

Best,

Ryan

Proceedings of the 39th SCLC published

On July 31st, the SCLC 39 proceedings were published. The papers that appear in this volume contain representatives of various Siouan languages from different parts of the United States. The topics ranged from lexicography to folklore to morphosyntax, and were a great representation of the diverse subjects of inquiry that we typically see at the SCLC.

The proceedings are available here: siouan.org/proceedings/sclc39.

SCLC 40 wrapped up today

Due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, SCLC 40 was held online from May 21 through May 23. Over the three day conference, attendees heard presentations on a variety of topics, ranging from semantics, syntax, phonetics, and historical linguistics that involved Siouan languages.

A lot of good ideas came up during the business meeting. Some of these ideas appear below:

• Future SCLC locations and procedures

  • Meeting locations for the next two years have been proposed for Crow Agency in Montana for 2021 and somewhere on the East Coast such as Virginia in 2022, due to the fact that SCLC has never been held on land traditionally held by Siouan- and Catawban-speaking peoples there.

  • Not dates have been set yet, but mid- to late May was the most agreeable date range.

  • Interest in

• Informal monthly meet-ups online

  • Informal monthly meet-ups online that can involve people bringing up a general topic (e.g., demonstratives) with the ability to have break-out sessions or discussions related to a particular language or branch of the language family.

  • These discussions should be advertised ahead of time to be accessible to community members and other scholars and minutes of these meetings will be posted online.

  • The topics and languages brought up during these meet-ups is open to community feedback, and anyone interested should be on the lookout for messages about this on the Siouan Listserv.

• Proceedings of the 40th Siouan and Caddoan Languages Conference

  • The SCLC 39 Proceedings should be released by the middle of next month (June 2020), and a call for papers for the Proceedings of the 40th Siouan and Caddoan Languages Conference, with a deadline for submissions and subsequent key dates to be determined.

  • Anyone interested in assisting with the publication process (i.e., editing, proofreading, and/or typesetting in LaTeX) should contact ryan.kasak at gmail.com for additional information.

In the comings weeks and months, we hope that this website becomes a more active resource on what is going on in Siouan and Caddoan linguistics, such as conference presentations, published papers and books, workshops, and other items or events related to Siouan and Caddoan languages. More long-term, we also hope to flesh out the bibliographies for both Siouan and Caddoan languages to make sure that this information is available to anyone, where possible.

Please feel free to go to the Contact page with feedback or suggestions.

The SCLC 38 Proceedings have been published!

For the first time in over three decades, the Siouan and Caddoan Languages Conference has a proceedings volume. With the aim of increasing knowledge of Siouan and Caddoan languages and fostering discussion and research into aspects of the language and culture of Siouan and Caddoan peoples, we hope that this proceedings represents the first of many to come in the future. It is available on this website under “Proceedings,” or at its permanent web address: https://neiudc.neiu.edu/sclc/.

These proceedings are Open Access, and no one is profiting off the information contained within. If there are any questions about these proceedings, please contact its editor.

A new website with a not-so-new purpose

What is this?

Great question! First and foremost, this website aims to be a hub for looking into resources on Siouan and Caddoan languages, as well as to be used to keep track of information on the annual SCLC. The hope is that back-cataloging of handouts and presentations can be included on here, as well as provide webspace for future SCLC proceedings, plus conference handouts and presentations with the authors' permission. New publications or language efforts dealing with Siouan or Caddoan languages will also appear here.

Why now?

Over the years, there have been a number of ways through which Siouanists and Caddoanists have kept in contact. The oldest consistently-running method of communication is the Siouan Languages Mailing List. This listserv has been in use since August 31, 1998, when John Koontz sent out a test email, and is currently hosted by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. A Facebook group recently coalesced after the 37th SCLC in Joplin, MO in 2017.

Recent discussion on the Siouan List points to the fact that moving the Siouan List to a Google Group might help solve some issues of accessibility with the listserv, as well as mitigate the issue of certain people not having Facebook accounts. A Google Group would also maintain an archive of discussion, as the Siouan List ceased being archived in October 2014.

Whither SCLC?

The need to attract new scholars to study Siouan and Caddoan languages ultimately involves maximizing access to content and content creators. There is no central location for someone beginning a search into a particular Siouan or Caddoan language, nor is there a public record of what has been presented on at SCLC except for various postings to listservs or websites hosted by institutions that will likely change how online content is organized in the future, rendering all those websites defunct. The lack of proceedings published minimizes the scholarly footprint of the word done within Siouanist and Caddoanist communities, so this website aspires to ameliorate this lack of a permanent home for Siouan and Caddoan content to be made available.

The following next steps need to be taken:

1. Once that Google Group has been created, a link will be included here.
2. At SCLC 38 in Chicago, we should discuss assembling a proceedings.
3. SCLC 38 handouts and presentations should be uploaded here with the permission of the authors.
4. A request to previous presenters to submit any handouts, presentations, papers, and other materials created for past SCLCs to start making prior research available to the public.
5. Make tribal educational institutions (schools, colleges, language programs, etc.) aware of this site and its resources, and then request any materials they wish to contribute and provide any resources present here to them in order to help pool resources together and show our commitment to repatriating linguistic data back to their community of origin.
6. Create an online bibliography of Siouan and Caddoan publications with links to JSTOR, Springer, or other online repositories where available.

This is a lot to do, but if SCLC is to continue to stay relevant and vibrant, more people need to feel empowered to work on these languages. More information to come in the near future.