George Bryant was born in 1921 and grew up in a Quechan-speaking family. He attended school on Fort Yuma Reservation and later at the Phoenix Indian School, Yuma High School, and the Sherman Institute. As a young man he enlisted in the United States Marine Corps, serving in combat in the Pacific in World War II and in Korea. Later he was elected to the Quechan Tribal Council, where he was involved in getting the federal government to restore tribal lands and in planning many of the projects that have made the tribe successful today. He is now retired and lives in Yuma, Arizona. Bryant follows a family tradition of working to preserve the Quechan language. His grandfather, Chappo Bryant, and his father, Michael Bryant, were both involved in linguistics projects with linguist A. M. Halpern in the 1930s. George Bryant has been working with linguist Amy Miller since 1998. He is the primary contributor to the forthcoming Quechan Dictionary, and (along with Barbara Levy, Millie Romero, and Amy Miller) he devoted many years to translating stories for the forthcoming volume Stories from Quechan Oral Literature from the Collection of A. M. Halpern.
Amy Miller earned a PhD in linguistics from the University of California, San Diego, where she studied with Margaret Langdon. She is the author of A Grammar of Jamul Tiipay (2001), co-author of the Barona Inter-Tribal Dictionary (2008), and co-editor of Kar’úk: Native Accounts of the Quechan Mourning Ceremony by A.M. Halpern (1997). She has been studying and documenting Yuman languages since 1984.
