In Memoriam Blair A. Rudes (1951-2008)

Volume 39 of the Papers of the Algonquian Conference is dedicated to our co-editor, Blair Rudes, who died suddenly after an afternoon at the gym on March 16, 2008. At the fall 2007 Algonquian Conference, Blair and I agreed to work together on securing the future of the publication. We decided that Karl Hele and I would produce a paper version at the University of Western Ontario, thereby keeping a base in Canada for Algonquian studies, and Blair would develop an electronic format at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (UNCC) where he was an Associate Professor of English and had taught since 1999. This editorial division of labour seemed like a marriage made in the best of all possible worlds; it is still hard to understand fully that he is gone. Blair and his older brother Bryan grew up in Gloversville, New York, in the Adirondack Mountains. His fascination with languages was attested early. He taught himself Russian from the back cover of Tchaikovsky's 1812 overture at the age of 10 or 11. About this time, his mother died and the brothers went to live with their grandparents. Blair turned to Irish Gaelic to explore his mother's heritage. He switched to American Indian languages in part because so many of them faced extinction. He taught in Romania for two years and traveled widely. Blair worked on Tuscarora for more than three decades. His Tuscarora Roots, Stems and Particles: Towards a Grammar of Tuscarora was published by the University of Manitoba's Algonquian and Iroquoian Linguistics series in 1987, one of many exemplary projects that Algonquian linguists owe to the editorial work of H. C. Wolfart, John Nichols and Arden Ogg. His Tuscarora-English/English-Tuscarora Dictionary was issued by the University of Toronto Press in 1999 as one among a series of systematic dictionaries of Iroquoian languages. When he began his

Papers of the 39th Algonquian Conference, eds. Karl S. Hele & Regna Darnell (London: The University of Western Ontario, 2008), pp. xv-xvii. XVI BLAIR A. RUDES

Tuscarora studies, there were more than fifty fluent speakers at Six Nations at the Grand River in Ontario, Canada and the Tuscarora Indian Nation at Lewiston, New York; he has continued to work with the few remaining speakers and with Tuscarora people attempting to reclaim their language. The Tuscarora Indian Nation honoured these contributions in 2006. He supplemented the knowledge of these few speakers by extensive archival work providing a time depth of more than 300 years. In 2004 Blair took on the daunting task of reconstructing Virginia Algonquian as consultant and dialect coach for the Terrence Mallick film The New World. Because the Powhatan language had been extinct for 200 years, he was forced to rely on historical inference from related languages and on scanty historical documents. His second Hollywood effort was as Mayan Dialogue Coach for the 2008 Dreamworks production The Ruins. The Powhatan language reconstruction was widely publicized. Blair himself particularly enjoyed bringing Native American languages to the public and working with the actors. At the time of his death Blair was completing a three- volume work The Catawba Language, also a product of many years research. In 2007, the South Carolina General Assembly passed a bill honoring his contribution to the South Carolina Commission for Minority Affairs. The State University of New York of Buffalo, where he received all three of his academic degrees in linguistics (PhD 1976), bestowed on him their Distinguished Alumni Award. Another of Blair's long-term projects was as consultant linguist and ethnohistorian for the Golden Hill Paugusset Federal Recognition case. Working with Blair on interpreting the continuity of this tribe based on fluctuating membership as reflected in genealogies contributed greatly to my own understanding of the dynamics of Algonquian mobility and resource exploitation. Students, colleagues and friends will remember Blair's BLAIR A. RUDES XVll humour, charm and joie de vivre - never mind his late night phone calls to pick one's brains about his latest idea. He began his academic career late and thrived on teaching, on conveying his love for languages and the puzzles they presented to the linguist. He serves us well as a model of academic endeavour. I am indebted to Ralf Thiede, Eric Home and the UNCC press release for much of the information above.

Regna Darnell PAC Co-editor