William Pacheco, a linguistics graduate student in MIT's Indigenous Languages Initiative, seeks to preserve his native language, Keres, and create a community of educators and scholars focused on its preservation.

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William Pacheco, a member of the Santo Domingo Pueblo and graduate student in MIT's Indigenous Languages Initiative, is working to preserve Keres, an endangered language isolate spoken in seven New Mexico villages with fewer than 10,000 speakers. Keres presents unique challenges: it has no written form, each village speaks a distinct dialect, and English usage among young Pueblos is rising. Pacheco's path led him from K-12 teaching and a Harvard master's in learning design to MIT linguistics, where he is developing generative-linguistics-based curricula that respect Indigenous knowledge systems. He has already piloted novel approaches, including using Keres as a programming language to command a robot through a maze. His broader goal is to standardize community linguist training and build a cohort of Indigenous scholars equipped to sustain Keres for future generations.

Preserving Keres