14 Facts About Gladys Reichard

Gladys Reichard is considered one of the most important women to have studied Native American languages and cultures in the first half of the twentieth century.

Gladys Reichard is best known for her studies of three different Native American languages: Wiyot, Coeur d'Alene and Navajo.

Gladys Reichard received her bachelor's degree from Swarthmore College in 1919 and her master's degree from the same institution in 1920.

Gladys Reichard attended Columbia University for her PhD, which she earned in 1925 for her grammar of Wiyot, written under Franz Boas.

Lawrence Nicodemus, who later came to Columbia University to work with Gladys Reichard, went on to develop a practical writing system for Coeur d'Alene, and to publish a root dictionary, a reference grammar, and several textbooks on the language.

Gladys Reichard returned to work with Navajo during the middle 1930s and continued until the early 1950s.

Gladys Reichard started a Navajo school in which she worked with students to develop a practical orthography for the Navajo language.

Gladys Reichard was made full professor at Barnard in 1951 and remained there until her death in 1955.

Gladys Reichard died in Flagstaff and is buried in the city's Citizens Cemetery.

Gladys Reichard was not interested in historical reconstruction, and expressed impatience with Sapir's attentiveness to the so-called 'phonemic principle'.

Gladys Reichard's transcriptions were therefore virtually always narrow phonetic transcriptions, and they reflected individual differences in speaker pronunciations.

Gladys Reichard's co-author Adolph Bitanny was a Navajo speaker who worked with Reichard in the Hogan School she established during her time in Navajo country.

Gladys Reichard discusses the Hogan School approach in the fictionalized work Dezba, Woman of the Desert, where she reflects on the experiences Navajo speakers had with other educational institutions.

Gladys Reichard published a variety of works relating to anthropology, linguistics, comparative religion and ethnography of art.