When Professor Keren Rice went North from Toronto in 1973, she entered “a completely different world” in order to study the Slavey language, which was then in danger of slowly dying out in the Mackenzie River Valley, where it had been spoken for thousands of years.

Her first home was in a tent on the river bank, next to an old log church in Fort Good Hope where the interior was painted in religious scenes vibrantly colored with native dyes mixed with fish oil.

Now, 38 years later, the professor in linguistics at the University of Toronto has been awarded a prestigious Killam Prize, which comes with a $100,000 award, for helping to maintain the language, in part through her definitive book, A Grammar of Slave, which is still in use two decades after it was first published.

Read more:  The Globe and Mail

Thanks to @hyperlingo on Twitter