Brent D. Galloway

Brent D. Galloway (born 1944 Oakland, California) attended the University of California at Berkeley 1961–1965 (B.A. in Linguistics, California State University at San Francisco 1965–66, and the University of California at Berkeley 1966–1974 (C. Phil. 1971, Ph.D. 1977). He did linguistic field work in 1970 with Haisla Kwakiutl and Upriver Halkomelem. From 1971–1977 he did work on Upriver Halkomelem, culminating in his Ph.D., A Grammar of Chilliwack Halkomelem (@700 pp.). In summer of 1974 he also began work with elders of the Nooksack tribe in Whatcom County, Washington. In January 1975 he moved from California to work for Coqualeetza Education Training Centre at Sardis, B.C., to start and head their Halkomelem Language Program. He developed the Stó:lo orthography adopted officially several years later and now in use throughout the Fraser Valley. He developed language lessons, a 15,000 word card file dictionary, an ethnobotany, an ethnozoology, and the first Stó:lo calendar. He taught three ten–week Halkomelem Teacher Training Courses through Fraser Valley College. Chief Dan George came to the first graduation. He trained an elder to take over the job as head of the Halkomelem Language Program and left Coqualeetza in 1980.

He continued to work with both the Stó:lo elders and the Halkomelem Workshop of the Nooksack elders and has continued field work with Halkomelem periodically ever since. In 1984, 1985, and 1987, he worked with the last two fluent speakers of the Samish dialect of Northern Straits Salish and published a grammatical sketch of that language in 1990. He has since been working on a dictionary of the Nooksack language based on the fieldwork of previous linguists and some of his own with the last speaker and last two partial speakers.
In 1988 he accepted a job as Head of the Department of Indian Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics at the Saskatchewan Indian Federated College and the University of Regina in Saskatchewan. He did that for 6 years and then coordinated the Linguistics program for the University of Regina for several years until 1998. He continues as a professor and is completing dictionaries on Upriver Halkomelem, Nooksack, and Gullah (spoken in South Carolina and Georgia). In 1999, he returned for two months to teach a Halkomelem Language Immersion course at Chilliwack.

Professor Galloway also writes classical music. In 1998, two of his pieces, “Mexican Colors” and “The Night Before Christmas”, were performed by the Regina Symphony Orchestra.