Sally Rice is a professor emerita of linguistics at the University of Alberta, where she took up a position soon after earning her PhD in 1987 at the University of California, San Diego, under the supervision of Ronald W. Longacker. [1]
Rice is known for her scholarship on the indigenous languages of Canada, especially those of the Athabaskan language family. [2] She was one of the founding directors of CILLDI, the Canadian Indigenous Languages and Literacy Development Institute, [3] which since 2000 has been an annual tri-Faculty summer institute to provide training in Canadian First Nations languages development. [4]
"There are more than 60 Aboriginal languages in Canada. With the exception of Cree, Ojibway and Inuktitut, all Canadian Indigenous languages are endangered, many critically so. Indigenous communities, colleges and universities are working to preserve — and in some cases, restore — these languages, but so far there has been no national initiative dedicated to Indigenous language sustainability in Canada."
— Sally Rice, 2016, ANVILS, University of Alberta
Sally Rice was part of a collective of language advocates and educators which including Donna Paskemin and Heather Blair, who established CILLDI in 1999 with its first summer institute held on the Onion Lake First Nation, Saskatchewan offering one course entitled "Expanding Cree Language and Literacy". [10] [11] CILLDI, which is hosted at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, is an intensive annual "summer school for Indigenous language activists, speakers, linguists, and teachers." [12] It is a "multicultural, cross-linguistic, interdisciplinary, inter-regional, inter-generational" initiative. [4] Rice is on the [13] [14] CILLDI Advisory Council. [15]