Parker Paul McKenzie (Kiowa language: Yí:sàum)[Dane Poolaw (2023) ǥáuiđòᵰ꞉gyà–tʼáukáuidóᵰ꞉gyá : Kiowa–English student glossary.](November 15, 1897, near Rainy Mountain – March 5, 1999, Mountain View) was a Kiowa Native American linguistics, who developed the Kiowa language orthography.
Early life
McKenzie was born in a
tipi, and
Baptism in the
Washita River. He was educated at the Rainy Mountain Kiowa Boarding School, where it was mandatory to speak the
English Language; those who used the
Kiowa language were threatened with physical punishment. Afterwards, he attended the Phoenix Indian School, Union High School, Lamson College, and Oklahoma State University.
McKenzie attended the Phoenix Indian School with Nettie Odlety (c. 1896 – 1978), whom he married on August 23, 1919. At school the couple wrote each other letters in Kiowa.
Linguistic work
When in 1918 the Smithsonian Institution sent the
anthropologist John Peabody Harrington to
Oklahoma to study the language of the Kiowa, McKenzie was his
translator. This began a decades-long scientific examination and recording of the Kiowa language, which until then had been purely an oral language. They jointly developed a valid
phonetics alphabet, which also resulted in the publication of
Vocabulary of the Kiowa Language (1928) and
Popular Account of the Kiowa Indian Language (1948), in a collaboration that extended into the 1950s. All this time, from the 1920s to the 1950s, McKenzie, never an academic, was a
stenography in the Indians Monies Section of the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
Late in his life, in close cooperation with Laurel Watkins, McKenzie published A Grammar of Kiowa in 1984. Some compared his work with the development of the Sequoyah and Cherokee alphabets. He also translated many texts from English, including Baptist .
Legacy
His contributions to the Kiowa were honored by the University of Colorado in 1991 with the awarding of an honorary doctorate,
and his 100th birthday was honored with a ceremony in the Red Buffalo Hall of the Kiowa Tribal Complex in Carnegie, Oklahoma. McKenzie was a
Freemasonry.
[ Famous Freemasons, M through Z, accessed January 1, 2008]
Death
McKenzie died in 1999 at the age of 101 years, and was interred at Anadarko, Oklahoma.
[ Notice of death] After his death, he was elected to the Oklahoma Historians Hall of Fame.
Family
McKenzie and his wife, Nettie, had five children: two daughters and three sons.
Notes
