Among Oklahoma's 2,636-member Wichita tribe, octogenarian Doris McLemore is the sole person who fluently speaks the native language. And Terri Parton, president of Wichita and Affiliated Tribes, says that makes her both a treasure and an imperiled, cultural linchpin. Developing a coterie of community-based American Indians who are restoring, recording and inputting tribal languages into a publicly accessible online database is a broad aim of the project focusing on Oklahoma, which has 39 officially recognized tribes. In addition to Wichita, the participants include the Alabama, Apache, Shawnee and Natchez Indians. Linguists and historians partly link the language loss to compulsory efforts to keep American Indians from communicating in their tribal tongues.