Parker Paul McKenzie (November 15, 1897, near Rainy Mountain – March 5, 1999, Mountain View) was a Kiowa Native American linguist, who developed the Kiowa language orthography.
McKenzie attended the Phoenix Indian School with Nettie Odlety (c. 1896 – 1978), whom he married on August 23, 1919.
When in 1918 the Smithsonian Institution sent the anthropologist John Peabody Harrington to Oklahoma to study the language of the Kiowa, McKenzie was his translator.
Late in his life, in close cooperation with Laurel Watkins, McKenzie published A Grammar of Kiowa in 1984.
His contributions to the Kiowa were honored by the University of Colorado in 1991 with the awarding of an honorary doctorate,[1] and his 100th birthday was honored with a ceremony in the Red Buffalo Hall of the Kiowa Tribal Complex in Carnegie, Oklahoma.