Virginia Beavert is a native speaker of the lower Yakima R. dialect of Sahaptin. She grew up near Zillah, and has lived around Toppenish most of her life. She received a B.S. in Anthropology from Central Washington University in 1986; Master of Education, Bilingual/Bicultural Education, University of Arizona, Tucson, 2000; and a Doctorate of Humane Letters from the University of Washington in 2009. Virginia's role in the project was to create sentences for words in the dictionary, model the correct pronunciation of the words and sentences on the 9830 recorded sound files, help decipher Pandosy's spellings, and from time to time ask Sharon, "is X in the dictionary?" In addition to her role as linguistic expert on this project, she also served as cultural authority.

Sharon's role was to ask questions of Virginia, create and develop the database, determine what needed to be recorded, record and process sound files, edit the book manuscript, write 2 introductory essays, set and maintain minimum quality standards, identify needed images and obtain them, and coordinate various parts and people of the project.

Bruce Rigsby contributed important essays to the front matter on the etymology of the names ''Sahaptin'' and ''Yakama/Yakima''. He also scanned 409 pages from his field notebooks in the 1960s and 1970s and made them available for consultation during the development of the dictionary.

Seventy-nine of the images in the printed dictionary (some of these groups of 2 or 3 photos), as well as the cover photograph and most of the photographs in the front matter, were taken by Dave Nelson. He is married to Sharon Hargus.

While a student at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Dave received photographic training from Barry McWayne, UAF museum photographer and well-known photographer and professor Jimmy Bedford. He went on to work as the senior photographer and photo unit manager for the UAF archives between 1978-85. He has varied photographic interests, including outdoor and wildlife photography; sports, dance, fashion and glamor; and underwater.

Assistant Professor of Visual Arts, Heritage University. She contributed four of the photographs in the printed dictionary. She has been a faculty member at Heritage University for 24 years, and teaches Art History, Painting, Metalsmithing and a design course. Her love is Acrylic Painting.

Marlin produced two Ruby scripts which convert the database files into and HTML document as well as insert the sound files, and cheerfully spent hours working with Sharon to get things working just right.

R o b e r t  H s u is a retired professor of linguistics from the University of Hawaii. He developed the Lexware suite of programs, which have been used to create many bilingual dictionaries for diverse languages and language families. Bob's programs work with a plain text database. Lexware modules were used for the Sahaptin dictionary to generate cross-references to other entries within the Sahaptin-English dictionary, generate the English-Sahaptin and root indices, and convert the database, as well as the generated finderlist and root index, to .rtf (Rich Text Format) files, while inserting photos in the right places. (The .rtf files were then converted to .indd by the design/layout team.) Bob also consulted on appropriate structuring of the data in the database, and made many useful organizational suggestions.

Bob has just written another Lexware module which generates cross-references to example sentences. Sharon is using this for another dictionary project.

In 2008, while a graduate student in the Department of Linguistics, Bill wrote a Python script which checked for consistency between the sound file names and dictionary entries. Bill's script superceded one written in 2006 for the project by then-graduate student Jonathan North Washington.

16 artifacts photographed by Dave Nelson belong to the Yakima Valley Museum. Special thanks go to curator Mike Siebol, who responded instantly to Sharon Hargus's e-mail request for photographic access to their collection, and graciously facilitated our day-long photo-shoot there in May 2008.

Pages from 2 rare books belonging to UWSC were photographed by Dave Nelson for the front matter and main dictionary. 5 additional images included in the dictionary comes from their image collection.

1 image in the dictionary comes from their image collection.

5 images in the dictionary comes from their image collection.

1 image in the dictionary comes from their image collection.