Melanie McKay-Cody's research career technically began when she was 10 years old.

That's when, as a student at the Oklahoma School for the Deaf, McKay-Cody found a book about Native American sign languages. 

The signs in the book looked different from the American Sign Language she had been using since she was 5. McKay-Cody, fascinated with her own Native heritage, was enthralled.

"It immediately piqued my interest, and I immediately recognized the differences between these Indian signs and American Sign Language," McKay-Cody said. 

In the decades since that day in the library, McKay-Cody has made it her mission to document, preserve and revitalize North American Indigenous sign languages. An assistant professor in the University of Arizona College of Education's Department of Disability and Psychoeducational Studies, McKay-Cody is one of the world's leading researchers on North American Indian Sign Language, a vast network of sign languages and dialects whose use goes back millennia.

"That book set me out to ask, 'Where did this come from?'" McKay-Cody said while reflecting on that day in the library. "It really did make an impression on me."

Falling in love with history

McKay-Cody was born hearing and raised in southeastern Oklahoma. She became deaf at age 5 due to spinal meningitis, and her family moved to Sulphur, Oklahoma, to be near the Oklahoma School for the Deaf. About a month later, she was signing fluently in ASL.

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McKay-Cody's family, all of whom are hearing, did not formally learn ASL, though her mother and sister picked up some signs. Her dad and brother communicated with her using their own signs.

"Back in those days, parents didn't often sign," McKay-Cody said. "You have to remember, this is the 1960s, when parents weren't really educated about communication and engagement with their children the same way that that we are now."

McKay-Cody grew up knowing about and researching her paternal Cherokee heritage, and in high school she began digging deeper into her lineage, finding ties on her mother's side to nine tribes in the eastern U.S., including the Shawnee Tribe, the Powhatan, the Montauk, the Narragansett and the Pequot. 

"I became really interested and got involved with older deaf folks who would tell their stories," she said. "That really got me interested in history, and I really fell in love with it."

'There was something there'

McKay-Cody attended Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., a bilingual institution whose mission is to ensure the intellectual and professional advancement of deaf and hard-of-hearing people. She spent her days studying museum studies, art history and the history of the American West.

While working at the National Archives and in Gallaudet's archives, McKay-Cody came across historical records on Native sign languages. She took them home and pored over them, knocking dust off the pages as she read.

After graduating in the late 1980s, McKay-Cody took a temporary research position in Santa Fe, where she catalogued and cleaned artifacts for an anthropology lab. The work wasn't glamorous, she said, but it helped prepare her for the historical research she would later do.

One day, McKay-Cody was asked to analyze Puebloan petroglyphs carved on the walls of a canyon near Santa Fe. As McKay-Cody studied the drawings, she was reminded of Native hand signs she had seen in her research. She sensed that there was more to the way the artists communicated than what was on the rock.

"By observing all the different canyons, I just knew that there was something there," she said. "I just needed the training that would coincide with that."

The 'missing puzzle piece'

That training would continue in the Southwest. McKay-Cody began her master's program in sign language studies at the U of A in 1993.

By then, McKay-Cody was not the only researcher studying the history of sign language in Native communities. Sam Supalla, a researcher in the U of A College of Education, had published research about sign language use on the Navajo Nation. 

McKay-Cody felt called to do similar work, but with a focus on sign languages used by Indigenous peoples across the Great Plains of the central U.S. and southern Canada.

"I felt like I was the missing puzzle piece that needed to be a part of this," McKay-Cody said.

In the decades since, McKay-Cody and other researchers have sketched out a map to better understand the network of countless sign languages and dialects used by Indigenous communities across nine regions of North America. Collectively, these languages are known as North American Indian Sign Language. Some languages are colloquially referred to as Hand Talk.

Many of the minor differences between the languages were for practical reasons, McKay-Cody said. Tribes in the northern plains of Canada, for example, would encounter entirely different animals and have different ceremonies than tribes in the southern plains. 

Much of these differences were documented through McKay-Cody's research for her first master's dissertation, published in 1996, which focused specifically on Plains Indian Sign Language, a subset of North American Indian Sign Language that refers to a set of languages that were used in the Great Plains of the U.S. and Canada.

"Sometimes, I will be signing with one group and the group will say, 'No, no, that's the sign that belongs to the other group,' and vice versa," McKay-Cody said. "So, that's a moment where I document the differences between the two tribes' sign languages."

Since completing her master's program at the U of A, McKay-Cody has focused on translating, documenting and revitalizing North American Indian Sign Language. That took her to the University of Kansas, where she earned a second master's degree, in linguistic anthropology, in 2014.

With two decades of research experience since her time in the canyon near Santa Fe, McKay-Cody now had evidence for what she sensed when she first saw the drawings: that some of them were based on corresponding hand signs that Puebloan people used to communicate. 

For example, a horizontal line across a figure's torso looked just like the line a signer would draw across their stomach with their hand to say they're hungry. A drawing of a line with a half circle appeared just like an arm reaching out with a cupped hand, or the sign for "water."

"I was able, as a deaf person, as a Native signer, to see that and make those connections from my own Native sign knowledge to the images," McKay-Cody said.

A 'heavy responsibility'

Since she began studying North American Indian Sign Language, McKay-Cody has become one of the foremost experts at the intersection of Native and Deaf identity. She returned to her home state to earn a doctoral degree in sociocultural and linguistic anthropology from the University of Oklahoma in 2019.

She was featured prominently in a 2022 video by the media outlet Vox explaining the history of North American Indian Sign Language.

When Gallaudet University, McKay-Cody's alma mater, planned to install a mural featuring Native deaf signers, McKay-Cody helped ensure the signs were accurate.

When the National Association of the Deaf, in partnership with the NFL, wanted to nominate Native American sign-language performers for the 2023 Super Bowl's pregame show, they turned to McKay-Cody. She referred them to Colin Denny, a U of A research assistant who went on to perform sign language for "America the Beautiful."

Judy Heumann, a renowned advocate for the rights of disabled people, interviewed McKay-Cody for her podcast, "The Heumann Perspective," in February 2023, just weeks before Heumann passed away.

"As a deaf Native person, I will say that I do carry quite a load. I do view that as a heavy responsibility, because nationwide, I am the only person pursuing this very specific field," McKay-Cody said. "There's really no one else doing this work."

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McKay-Cody is now largely focused on building a video dictionary, with the help of a network of Native signers, that collects as many individual signs from across North American Indian Sign Language as possible.

The dictionary currently includes 900 terms representing 13 tribal sign languages and dialects and is stored and managed by University Libraries and with participating tribes' language programs. Each entry includes an English translation, a video of a Native signer signing the term, and an explanation in English of how to make the signs. McKay-Cody is working with 15 tribes across the U.S. to film the signs and ensure their historical accuracy.

While McKay-Cody expects parts of the dictionary could eventually become public, she plans to restrict access to some of the terms to members of the tribe who originated the language. How widely the signs are shared will be determined through discussions with each tribe.

Restricting access, McKay-Cody said, ensures that the tribes have control over their own languages.

"The language belongs to Native people," she said. "Native people are afraid of their language, of their Hand Talk, being polluted by ASL. So, a goal for the dictionary, when I'm done, is to make sure that those tribes who have been involved in the research, who have been doing the work and are interested, will have access to that."

A grant from the National Science Foundation in partnership with the National Endowment for the Humanities, for about $440,000, is funding the video dictionary project.

McKay-Cody's career, she said, has come full circle since the day she picked up that library book when she was 10.

"Back then, if somebody had told me, 'You're going to go on to a Ph.D. and travel the world and do research, I never would have believed them," she said. "That little 10-year-old me could never have imagined where I would be today."