ABSTRACT
Reichard’s Wiyot studies are generally considered to have been superseded by the later and far more comprehensive work of Karl Teeter (1964; Teeter & Nichols 1993), but current specialists in Salish and Athabaskan languages acknowledge the sustained value of her grammars of Coeur d’Alene and Navajo. That value rests not only on her presentation of the grammatical structure of those languages but also on matters of more general interest drawn from Reichard’s insights into linguistic variation, her focus on meaning, her pursuit of underlying patterns in the formation of words, and her collaborative work with native speakers of the languages she studied, all of which prefigured concerns of the second half of the twentieth century. Why, then, was her workespecially for Navajo-so long disparaged and why does she remain obscure among the wider communities of linguists and linguistic historiographers?
