To what extent are endangered languages a priority in modern linguistics? Are graduate students encouraged to document moribund or endangered languages for their dissertations? How much encouragement is there to compile a dictionary of one? How many academic departments encourage applied linguistics in communities for the support of endangered languages? How many departments provide appropriate training for speakers of these languages who are most ideally suited to do the most needed work? Obviously we must do some serious rethinking of our priorities, lest linguistics go down in history as the only science that presided obliviously over the disappearance of 90% of the very field to which it is dedicated. (Michael Krauss, 1992:10)

If it wasn't for his work, we wouldn't have our language. He single-handed preserved our language … You can't put a price on something like that. (Jim Pepper Henry, a Kaw tribal member, quoted in The Wichita Eagle's obituary of Robert Rankin, 2 March 2014)

Johnnie Ray McCauley, who was Kaw, told The Eagle in 1996: “I just want to hear it again. There has been no one else to talk it with.” McCauley died in his home a few months after receiving the CDs. When he was found, he was wearing headphones and the CD recordings of his late aunt speaking the family's native Kaw Indian language were still playing, according to his obituary in The Eagle. (From The Wichita Eagle's obituary of Robert Rankin, who had recorded Mr. McCauley's aunt's stories along with other narratives on reel-to-reel tapes in the 1970s, digitized and converted the tapes to CDs in 1996, and presented the Kaw community with a set of the CDs that same year.)