WWU Dean's Lecture Series: Firelight on the River: Siberia’s Ket People and Ancient North America

Western Washington University Professor of Modern & Classical Languages Edward Vajda gives a talk on original fieldwork with Ket elders during six different trips to Siberia over the past two decades and includes stunning photos of traditional and modern Ket lifeways as a backdrop to historical, linguistic and anthropological discoveries. The Kets are proving to be the oldest inhabitants of northern Asia, and their language, with its unique word tones and complicated verb prefix system, appears related to languages spoken in North America by the Tlingit and Dene (Athabaskan) peoples.
Vajda has been a professor in Western Washington University's Department of Modern and Classical Languages since 1987. He teaches courses in introductory linguistics, morphological theory, historical linguistics, Russian language, folklore and culture, and Eurasia's nomadic peoples. His research focuses on the languages of Northern Asia and includes original fieldwork with Ket, a severely endangered language spoken today only by a few dozen elders in the remote Yenisei River basin.
From 2005 to 2015 he was affiliated with the Linguistics Department of Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (Leipzig, Germany), where he proposed evidence that Ket is related to the Na-Dene languages of North America, the first widely accepted linguistic link between an Old World and a New World language family. He received Western Washington University's Excellence of Teaching Award in 1992 and Paul J. Olscamp Distinguished Research Award in 2011.