From Erasure to Revival: Princeton Seminary Alum Leads Effort to Preserve the Yuchi Language

While studying for his doctoral degree at Princeton Theological Seminary, Richard A. Grounds, PhD ‘95, came across a disturbing notation about the Yuchi Nation, the indigenous tribe from which he is descended. “I read that the Yuchi Nation are extinct,” he recalled. Knowing that to be false, he devoted his life to changing the narrative.
Dr. Grounds is Executive Director of the Yuchi Language Project, whose mission is to preserve the rich heritage of the Yuchi people by creating new young speakers of a language that has been falsely reported as extinct.
The son of a Yuchi father and a European mother, Dr. Grounds grew up in a conservative Christian household. His first spiritual language came from the King James Bible, and Dr. Grounds grew up recognizing the importance of words “and the value of living by them, instituting them in your life and having that cultural tradition to guide you on your pathway.”
He added, “It was a very direct understanding of the value and important power of those words. On a practical level, we grew up reading the bible for family devotions every night with a deep understanding of the importance and value of the teachings in the Scriptures for how we are to live our daily lives.”

The extraordinary faculty he met while visiting the campus of Princeton Theological Seminary informed much of his decision to attend. He added, “The Seminary was also really good at bringing in diverse guest faculty,” which provided him with not only a global perspective but also the ability to engage with faculty who refused to whitewash the treatment of Indigenous peoples by colonial powers.
Bringing his life’s work into sharper focus, Dr. Grounds recalled his time at Princeton Seminary as “absolutely enriching—full of diversity, complexity, and numerous global perspectives. In seminars, you had graduate students from all over the world. The discussions in these seminars were processed through the diverse lenses of local histories and visions from all these different graduate students who had come from around the globe. It created such a rich exchange.”
He stressed, “The biggest impact (of Princeton Seminary) had to do with growing and aiding my appreciation for the complexity, the diversity, the richness of all of Creation.”

A Disturbing Discovery
While conducting research at Firestone Library, Dr. Grounds, whose grandmother is full-blooded Yuchi, came across an article, presented as fact, in a dictionary on Native American tribes claiming that the Yuchi Nation was extinct.
“The reference section is normally the place for straightforward, reliable information that’s not highly interpretive or speculative. It was shocking to read that I was extinct.”
While continuing his studies in Princeton, Dr. Grounds was further confronted by a publication from a hundred years prior, which also stated that Yuchis were, “in fact, an extinct nation, and their language is almost forgotten.”
As Dr. Grounds noted to the contrary, “In the 1880s, literally every living Yuchi was a fluent native speaker of the language. These surreal claims of Yuchi extinction—along with other numerous such claims that I began finding—were also a formative part of my education at the Seminary,” says Dr. Grounds.
It was stunning to learn—in such a direct, personal way—about the explicit support of academia for the larger colonial assault on Indigenous Peoples through a kind of intellectual colonialism and false portrayal of Indigenous Peoples within that framework.
He added, “In the colonial alchemy, it would simplify things if Indigenous peoples would just disappear.” It was not only erasure through physical genocide, but intellectual erasure as well, Dr. Grounds explained.
Through decades of systematic government and church suppression, most notably through the scourge of boarding schools, Native children were punished for using their native tongue, effectively stopping the transmission of Indigenous languages.
These were the contrasting lessons which influenced Dr. Grounds during his graduate days at the Seminary: one, about the great love of diversity by the Creator, and the other, about the larger colonial project intent on destroying that diversity and erasing all differences of world view represented by Indigenous languages. His dissertation work would reflect these critical perspectives.
That summer, Dr. Grounds returned home to the Elders of the Yuchi tribe, who, he pointed out, were unaware of what he had learned. “Instead, they were continuing our ceremonies and dances around the summer solstice, which have never stopped for thousands of years, since time immemorial.” Dr. Grounds related that, “Our Elders often tell us that our languages are gifts from the Creator.”
After that summer, the founding Elder of the Yuchi Language Project, Mose Cahwee, opened all his prayers with the Yuchi expression, yUdjEha nAnô, sô KAnAnô, which translates as, “We Yuchi people, we are still here.”
The Yuchi Language Project grew out of the vision of our elders who were trying to pass forward the knowledge carried in the language about how to live in a good and proper way, according to our original instructions from the Creator
“We find there’s so much built into the language about understanding the interconnection of the world. It is a worldview that is ancient but rich. Our language speaks about the world in a completely different way than European languages.”
Through the work of the Yuchi Language Project, young parents are once again raising and educating children in the Yuchi language. The Project develops grants to fund their work with remaining Elders who carry valuable language, stories, and cultural knowledge that is often relayed through recording sessions for future generations.
Dr. Grounds has experienced the joy of this work through teaching and working alongside his own children. “When my two children were younger, we home-schooled so we could work with the Elders to learn the Yuchi language, history, stories, and songs, because we knew their time was passing.”
Dr. Grounds believes he has the best job on the planet. “I’ve had the great privilege of working with our gifted, beautiful elders for years, our community families and children, as well as with the broader global Indigenous community.

For more than 25 years, he has promoted the preservation of Indigenous languages and cultures on a national and global level, as a member of the Central Committee of the World Council of Churches and the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues where his efforts, along with other advocates, resulted in the United Nations International Year of Indigenous Languages in 2019, and the United Nations International Decade of Indigenous Languages, celebrated from 2022 to 2032.
“The critical piece is to get the language to our Indigenous communities and give them the support necessary to revitalize their languages. We are trying to restore the languages at the community level, which is not to exclude good support from academic institutions, churches, or individuals.”
Reflecting on his years at Princeton Seminary, Dr. Grounds noted, “one of the amazing, extraordinary things that we learned through the faculty, which brought such richness around the diversity of Christianity, the interfaith process, was the complexity and richness of all creation, and that the Creator God is all about diversity.”
Dr. Grounds noted that there are almost 7,000 languages on planet Earth. “While our Indigenous peoples constitute only three percent of the global population, our languages comprise over 4,000 of those 7,000 languages. We carry the majority of the world’s cultural diversity.”
He added, “That is what we know. That is what we have learned, and that is what we are celebrating. There is a rich complexity reflected in the diversity of global human languages. We are doing the work of the Creator.”