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Richard A. Grounds, 2025 Distinguished Alumnus
Richard A. Grounds, Ph.D. has worked with Yuchi Elders to create new young speakers over the last 25 years. After completing his Ph.D. in the History of Religions at Princeton Theological Seminary, he taught at St. Olaf College and in the Anthropology Department at the University of Tulsa.
Under his leadership the Yuchi Language Project was recognized as the Outstanding Host for 2017 by the Tula Global Alliance for working with numerous international visitors over the years sponsored by the U.S. State Department, including Uighurs, Taiwanese, Mongolians, Brazilians, Indonesians, among numerous others.
Dr. Grounds has presented on Indigenous language issues at many universities and colleges. He has promoted Indigenous language issues for many years, presenting at the American Academy of Religion in Toronto in 2002, sponsoring a resolution passed by the World Council of Churches in 2005 to support Indigenous language rights and calling for an International Year of Indigenous Languages while he was a member of the WCC Central Committee, serving as an invited presenter for the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in 2008, presenting a keynote for the U.S. Department of Education NAM Directors in Washington, D.C. (2012), and co-chairing a panel on the U.N. International Year of Indigenous Languages at the Palais des Nations in Geneva for the Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
He is currently the chair of the Global Indigenous Languages Caucus and served as the Expert for the North American Region at the Expert Meeting on Indigenous Languages held by the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in 2016. He served as convener for the University of Pennsylvania conference, “Native American Languages in Crisis: Academia, Technology and Smaller Language Communities,” as consultant for the Smithsonian’s “Recovering Voices” Initiative, and as co-planner for the “National Native Language Revitalization Summit” in Washington, DC. Dr. Grounds was the consistent voice calling for an International Year of Indigenous Languages since the beginning of the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in 2002 which was declared by the U.N. General Assembly for 2019. He presented at the U.N. International Year of Indigenous Languages International Conference, in Yakutsk, Russia in far east Siberia and participated in the 2020 planning meeting for the upcoming U.N. International Decade of Indigenous Languages in Mexico City.
Dr. Grounds’ recent chapter on Yuchi language revitalization in the face of intellectual colonialism appears in Indigenous Languages and the Promise of Archives, (2021) from the University of Nebraska Press. He has co-written with his daughter, “Yuchi: Family Language without A Language Family,” in Bringing Our Languages Home, ed. By Leanne Hinton (2013). Dr. Grounds received the Humanities in Education Award from the Oklahoma Humanities Council for 2013 and is active in Pickett Chapel, the local Yuchi Methodist church, and at Polecat Yuchi Ceremonial Ground.
