St̓át̓imcets

— Lorna Williams, the chair of the First Peoples’ Cultural Council, created the writing system of her language, St̓át̓imcets, in 1973, by changing the Roman script to represent her language’s sounds. When the writing system was complete, she sent the details to a man in Hawaii, who modified an electric typewriter so that the language could be typed. The process was painstaking, and it marked a breathtaking technological leap: in the span of two years, St̓át̓imcets went from a language of the tongue to one of the IBM Selectric.