Indrek Park has a B.A. in History and Ethnology from the University of Tartu (Estonia), an M.A. in Tibetan Cultural History from Beijing Central University for Ethnic Minorities, and a Ph.D. in Linguistics from Indiana University (2012). His doctoral dissertation, A Grammar of Hidatsa, is based on four years of field study of the language, in the course of which he also studied the Mandan language. He has, also, taught Arikara language courses at Fort Berthold Community College and in the New Town community. Over the past four years, he has been the director of the Mandan Language Project, also located at Fort Berthold, where he teaches Mandan to students in elementary school, drawing on material he recorded from the last speaker of Mandan who recently passed away. In addition to his dissertation and papers he has delivered at linguistic conferences, Park has compiled major unpublished sources on Hidatsa as well as a substantial Hidatsa dictionary database from which a reference dictionary of the language will be based. He has also provided the New Town School District with a Hidatsa student dictionary in printed form, which is currently being prepared for online use. As a result of his ethnographic and linguistic studies, Park is fluent in a number of languages, including Chinese, Tibetan, Korean, and Hidatsa, as well as his native Estonian and Russian.
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