Impact

Xaadas Kil Kuyaas Foundation ‘Precious Haida words’

Notable milestones in our xaad kil mission

2021: Open Format, Beginner Xaad Kil Classes

Easily accessible, twice weekly community classes have now been offered for the past four years.

2022 Online Intermediate Xaad Kil Classes

Currently taught by linguist Ryan Kessler, our free weekly classes are available to students who’ve successfully completed beginner level Xaad Kil.

We currently host up to 40 students between beginner and intermediate- from local Alaska and as far as NY and Germany.

2025 Online Advanced Xaad Kil

Our newest offering, progressing our existing Intermediate speakers into conversation based classes, with special features from elder speakers.

2025: Presented at 60th International Conference on Salish and Neighbouring Languages (ICSL

Towards Low-Resource Text-to-Speech Generation for Indigenous Pacific

Northwest Languages: The case of Haida (X̱ aad Kíl)

Morris Alper, Samopriya Basu, Nathan Bennett, Ryan Kessler, S. Verlaine

Ravana, and Wendy F. K’ah Skáahluwaa Todd

2025 Haida Gwaii Exchange

Programming through our Haida Gwaii exchange pilot invites Lucy Bell and Professor Marianne Ignace to share ceremonial practice and professional development through our Xaad Kil Connection 2025 activation.

Meet our instructors

Ryan Kessler

Ryan Kessler is a professional botanist based in Palo Alto, California. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Biology from Lawrence University, with a minor in Music. A dedicated linguist enthusiast, Ryan studied in the Indigenous Language and Linguistics program at SFU under Dr. Marianne Ignace. Most significantly, he's spent time over the course of a decade among various Haida communities, apprenticing and learning from fluent Haida speakers and elders including Chuck Natkong, Lily Coburn, Lawrence Bell and Delores Churchill, developing fluency in Haida with a specialization in the Kaigani dialect. Ryan has served as an advisor and instructor with the XKKF for more than ten years and is an invaluable proponent for the Xaad Kil learning community. His additional linguistic interests include Mandarin and Japanese. He is currently contributing to the development of a Haida talk-to-text language model to supplement Xaad Kil learning efforts.