Daryl Baldwin is a citizen of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma and currently serves as the Executive Director of the Myaamia Center at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He has worked with the Myaamia people developing language and cultural materials since 1995. Learn more about Daryl.

Dr. Gabriela Pérez Báez is an Assistant Professor in the Linguistics Department at the University of Oregon. She is the Director of the Language Revitalization Lab and works closely with the Northwest Indian Language Institute. Gabriela is Co-Director of the National Breath of Life Archival Institute for Indigenous Languages alongside Daryl Baldwin. Gabriela served as Curator of Linguistics at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution and in its Recovering Voices initiative. Her research centers on revitalization practices around the world. In her native Mexico, Gabriela works with Zapotec communities and has published on migration and language vitality, verbal inflection and derivation, semantic typology, and language and cognition. Gabriela is the compiler of two dictionaries of Isthmus Zapotec within a participatory and interdisciplinary model. She holds a doctorate in linguistics from the University at Buffalo.

Jerome Viles (Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians, Chee-me’, Lower Chinook) is the National Breath of Life Workshop Coordinator. He was born and raised in Eugene, Oregon where he lives with his partner and child. Jerome has been engaged in language revitalization efforts for his ancestral languages of Nuu-wee-ya’ (Oregon Dene) and Chinuk Wawa for nearly a decade. He received a B.A. in Linguistics and a M.A. in Nonprofit Management, both from the University of Oregon to aid in his language revitalization work.

Jerome specializes in archival language research and works with members of his family and community to bring language from archives back into daily use. Since 2016, he has worked as part of a team at the Northwest Indian Language Institute (NILI) to build a digital archive of Nuu-wee-ya’ archival language materials. These efforts have been supported through partnership with the Myaamia Center. This partnership resulted in his team’s creation of the Nuu-da’ Mv-ne’ Digital Archive hosted on the Myaamia Center’s Indigenous Languages Digital Archive (ILDA) platform. Jerome is currently with the Myaamia Center as the Breath of Life Workshop Coordinator working to provide ILDA to other Native American communities engaged in archives-based language revitalization.

Dr. Cam Shriver is a Research Associate at the Myaamia Center and Visiting Assistant Professor in the History Department at Miami. He researches Myaamia reserves and land transactions in nineteenth-century Indiana and Ohio, and periodically writes on the Myaamia Community Blog, ‘aacimotaatiiyankwi.org.’ His research has been supported by the American Philosophical Society and National Endowment for the Humanities, and he has held fellowships at the John Carter Brown Library, the Newberry Library, and the Huntington Library. In addition to his work on Myaamia real estate, his current book project analyzes intelligence-gathering practices among Miami-Illinois and imperial communities—French, British, and American—in the eighteenth century. Dr. Shriver completed his PhD in history at Ohio State University in 2016. He teaches Native American History and “Introduction to the Miami Tribe” at Miami University.

Dr. Douglas Troy serves as the Coordinator of Application Development in the Myaamia Center and as a Software Developer for the National Breadth of Life Archival Institute for Indigenous Languages.  As such, he directs the development of a variety of software tools to support archive-based language and culture revitalization including the Indigenous Languages Digital Archive (ILDA), Aacimwahkionkonci ‘Stories from the Land’, the Myaamia online dictionary and mobile apps, and the National Breadth of Life website. He oversees a software development team of graduate assistants from Miami’s College of Engineering and Computing where he is Professor Emeritus.  Prior to his current role he served as Associate Dean in the College of Engineering and Computing, as Chair of the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering and was a tenured professor in the department. Doug has over 40 years of experience in the research and development of software.

Dr. Mike Gonella earned his Ph.D. at Miami University in 2007 working with the Myaamia Center since its inception. His dissertation, Myaamia Ethnobotany began the formal, contemporary documentation of all extant Myaamia plant knowledge, including information from historical writings and interviews with living Myaamia elders. The ethnobotanical information he gathered in his research was organized into a basic database for use by members of the Myaamia community and Myaamia scholars. Currently, he is chair of the Environmental Horticulture Department at Santa Barbara City College, while continuing his work with the Myaamia Center further developing the web-based Myaamia Ethnobotanical Database. He lives with his wife and three daughters in California.

Dr. Cameron Shriver is a Research Associate at the Myaamia Center and Visiting Assistant Professor in the History Department at Miami. He researches Myaamia reserves and land transactions in nineteenth-century Indiana and Ohio, and periodically writes on the Myaamia Community Blog, ‘aacimotaatiiyankwi.org.’ His research has been supported by the American Philosophical Society and National Endowment for the Humanities, and he has held fellowships at the John Carter Brown Library, the Newberry Library, and the Huntington Library. In addition to his work on Myaamia real estate, his current book project analyzes intelligence-gathering practices among Miami-Illinois and imperial communities—French, British, and American—in the eighteenth century. Dr. Shriver completed his PhD in history at Ohio State University in 2016. He teaches Native American History and “Introduction to the Miami Tribe” at Miami University.

Kara Strass is Director of Miami Tribe relations at the Myaamia Center. a citizen of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma, is originally from Huntington, Indiana. It was there, within the traditional homelands of the Myaamia people, that her Myaamia identity was fostered by her family, especially her grandmother. Today, she resides in both Oxford, Ohio, and Bloomington, Indiana with her husband Kristoph.

Kara received an M.S. in Student Affairs in Higher Education from Miami University in 2016. Kara’s graduate studies focused on Student Development Theory, and specifically how these theories can be applied to make Myaamia students successful in their college endeavors.

Kara joined the Myaamia Center in 2016 and became the Director of Miami Tribe Relations in 2020. As the liaison between the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma and Miami University, Kara strives to strengthen this relationship, which is now 50-years old. Additionally, Kara serves as an advisor and mentor to the Myaamia students who attend Miami University as part of the Myaamia Heritage Program.

Dr. David Costa is the Program Director for the Language Research Office at the Myaamia Center.  He completed his Ph.D. in linguistics at U.C. Berkeley in 1994, with his dissertation on the Miami-Illinois Language. Costa is involved in a long-term project to analyze and annotate the data from the language manuscripts that have been uploaded into the Indigenous Languages Digital Archive (ILDA), in addition to helping with the design of Myaamia language curricula, answering language inquiries from members of the Miami Tribe, and ongoing research on the Miami-Illinois language. He has worked with the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma on language revitalization since 1995.

Dr. Hunter Thompson Lockwood (Ph.D. U. Wisconsin-Madison, 2017) is a project coordinator in the Language Research Office under Dr. David Costa. He has worked for the Myaamia Center since 2019, assisting Dr. Costa in analyzing and annotating historical attestations of the Miami-Illinois language on the ILDA platform as part of the ongoing language revitalization work at the Center. He also works with Dr. Douglas Troy and Jerome Viles to design and test upcoming iterations of the ILDA software. His research covers a diverse array of topics, including the grammar of questions and the meaningful pieces that make up Miami-Illinois words. Additionally, he has worked with speakers of Ojibwe and Potawatomi since 2008.

Dr. Haley Shea (Miami Tribe of Oklahoma) is a Research Associate at the Myaamia Center and Visiting Assistant Professor in the Educational Psychology Department at Miami. As myaamia tribal member, is originally from Huntington, Indiana. Haley grew up participating and engaging in tribal programming, beginning as an Eewansaapita summer camp participant and eventually moving on to the role of counselor and later researcher.  Haley then attended Miami University for her undergraduate career, studying Psychology and Spanish (class of 2013) as well as participating in the Myaamia Heritage Awards Program. After graduating, she earned a Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology from Iowa State University and completed her doctoral internship at Miami University’s Student Counseling Service. 

Currently, she has a joint appointment as a Research Associate at the Myaamia Center and a Visiting Assistant Professor in Educational Psychology at Miami University.  She is currently the co-chair of the Nipwaayoni Acquisition and Assessment Team (NAAT) and engages in research on how language and cultural revitalization within the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma impacts the tribal community on four primary factors: academic attainment, health/wellness, community engagement, and national growth and continuance.