American Indian Studies Research Institute

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unpublished sources on Hidatsa as well as a substantial Hidatsa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.