American Indian Culture and Research Journal

•

•

This guest editors' introduction to the journal issue "Language Lives in Unexpected Places" contextualizes this special issue of American Indian Culture and Research Journal, an attempt to oppose ideas of disappearance through the continued reclamation of Indigenous languages. We connect this collection of papers with the publication of the special issue “American Indian Languages in Unexpected Places,” published previousely in this journal. The guest editors of that issue, Anthony Webster and Leighton Peterson, focused on the work of historian Philip Deloria, which highlights the ways perceptions of the “expected” and the “unexpected” of American Indians as well as linguistic anthropology’s attention to language inequalities and differing linguistic ideologies. Like Webster and Peterson’s earlier intervention, we seek “to place linguistic anthropology into meaningful dialogue with contemporary indigenous studies” (Webster and Peterson 2011). In this essay, we highlight some of the more recent themes and resonances between the disciplines and how the perspectives of linguistic anthropology can help us to theorize contemporary processes of settler colonialism, racism, and decolonization—both within and outside of academia. 

Poem

What does it mean to “relanguage”? I offer this term as a proposal and an approach toward change within and across disciplinary fields that investigate linguistic form and practice. It addresses the call to “decolonize” the academy while also recognizing the limits of decolonization in settler colonial contexts. Linguistic representations are not in and of themselves pejorative or “racist/racializing” or “colonizing.” Their interpretive framings by audiences and publics—as part of socioculturally, ideologically inflected processes of differentiation and acts of discrimination—result in acts of recognition that may, can, and do perpetuate already-entrenched stances and biases that result in “semiotic marginalization,” the enfigurement and ranking of certain language users as subordinate to other language users (and languages). This is not unfamiliar, but upending these institutionalized and culturally grounded interpretations is difficult. To exemplify relanguaging as a process for addressing semiotic marginalization, I reconsider previous fieldwork in three parts: language documentation, language revitalization, and language in media. I show that relanguaging happens whether or not we recognize it in the moment through the nonconforming voices, perspectives, and linguistic forms that are often the “noise” in a dataset. In tandem with reflexive research and collaboration, relanguaging confronts the marginalizing effects of a white, “Western” gaze.

This paper looks at a 1968 speech by Jessie Dalton, a Tlingit woman from Hoonah, Alaska. Dalton’s speech was performed at a memorial gathering with the goal of removing grief from the mourning clan. To remove their grief, she uses here linguistic and cultural skills strategically. I utilize the concept of chronotope and fine-grained linguistic analysis to discuss the ways that Tlingit oratory constructs Tlingit space-time to promote community healing and decolonization. Through the discourse analysis, I show that Dalton collapses the time and space between the past and now, constructing worlds where the ancestors are in the same space as the living. To create a chronotope where the ancestors are present, Dalton uses linguistic tools such as demonstratives and focus marker spatiotemporal deixis to create proximity between the audience to the past. She also uses semiotic relations through clan motifs and objects, representing the past and used in the present to populate these worlds. Through these chronotopic worlds, Dalton reveals Tlingit understandings of time-space. These chronotopic worlds further create a space of precolonial contact for the living.

This article discusses the Yo’eme Language and Cultural Board Game, developed as a language revitalization product and activity for the Yo’eme language community. Aimed especially at youth and young adults, the game is designed to be a decolonizing intervention that fosters language ideological clarification. While it promotes knowledge of the heritage language and culture in a playful but active way by rewarding gamers for correct answers and for engaging in intergenerational communication, it encourages some community members to revise their perceptions of the language as “static”—limited to a traditional past and inappropriate for dynamic interaction in the present. The game is constructed in accord with a Yo’eme cultural logic that deemphasizes the achievement of a single “winner” in favor of the group progressing in knowledge and language acquisition at various levels. Evidence acquired from use of the game with Yo’eme learners suggests that playing the game not only provides linguistic and cultural knowledge but also develops critical Indigenous conciousness and contributes to the health and well-being of users.  

Working across multiple ethnographic contexts, this paper surveys the use of digital technologies in language reclamation projects, considering what these mean for anthropologists, archivists, and community members as well as accompanying visions of crisis and futurity. Drawing on experiences working as part of Pueblo language reclamation projects, I consider the ways that tribal members have utilized new practices with digital technologies since the onset of the pandemic. The second part of the paper explores how digital tools can be used to store, analyze, and grant access to Indigenous languages by comparing the approaches to digital language archiving used by the website Ethnologue and by users of the Mukurtu content management system. I conclude with a discussion of what these new media practices tell us about differing visions of crisis and the imagined futures for both community members and academics.

In Ecuadorian Amazon, Napo Kichwa people have turned to live performances and the production of various forms of media to confront settler colonial disruption and language shift. In this article, I consider the multimodal reclamation of language and culture through a fiber called pita (Aechmea magdalenae). By remembering and reclaiming cultural practices and environmental knowledge—like the production of pita—alongside embodied language, the growth of pita in a local ecology of broadcast and performance media allow participants to reweave lifeways in the context of ongoing disruptions. Broadcast and performance media become a place-based, multimodal means to reclaim lifeways and linguistic practices.  

The Aymara language is increasingly present in Bolivia’s largest metropolitan region. Developments in public transit transform residents’ relationship to urban social space and the location of Aymara within it. Transit signs include existing Aymara toponyms, but also descriptions of urban space without correspondence to Spanish toponyms. This essay combines text analysis with accounts of riders' experiences to argue the material textuality of bilingual signage suggests an assertion of Aymara hegemony in the city. Rather than just preserving heritage, this language policy intervention of bilingual signage throughout the city extends Aymara toponyms beyond areas of Indigenous confinement.

Textual bricolages, colloquially known as memes (along with other highly textualized media), have come to communicate a vast array of political and ideational alignments among interlocutors who consort through media transferals on social media platforms. Here I focus specifically on how particular memes are strategically constructed and distributed through social media as transferable and transmutable markers of identity capable of establishing and distilling an insider group membership among culturally competent interlocutors while simultaneously establishing outsider status to those for whom the texts remain opaque or meaningless. While memes are often used to establish social and ideological alignments, the textual composites I consider here are constructed from semiotic resources which are relevant to, and indexical of, Native North American identities. I compare memes and other texts that are representative examples of how identity work is conducted through tactics of intersubjectivity within electronic spaces. I submit that these compound texts represent sites of resistance to hegemonic discourses by cultivating groups of belonging within a visible public realm. Because prevailing discourses that insist on the disappearance of Indigenous peoples from sites of colonial interest endure, these Indigenous created counternarratives, constructed within highly modern social spaces, are a powerful means for reclaiming authorship of representation and interrupting the established discourse of failure and disappearance. I show that, despite a dominant discourse that insists on the impossibility of a modern indigeneity, the creation of Indigenous memes for social media is actually part of ongoing collaborative projects of resistance—irrefutable evidence of ever-emergent modern Native American identities.

More than 400 years of contact and concomitant linguistic colonialism has forced the great majority of Native American languages of the Northeast into extinction. Though many distinct Native American communities have disappeared, vestiges of their languages still exist in the usual and expected places—place names and historical documents. The few remaining languages continue to resist colonial domination and projected extinction by the end of the twenty-first century. Despite centuries of linguistic colonialism and trajectories toward “language death,” contemporary Native American language advocates are engaged in innovative revitalization and reclamation programs that repurpose historical documents to promote unexpected forms of “language life” and new forms of linguistic sovereignty. This essay traces shifts in language ideologies from colonial linguistic imperialism and the extinction of Native American languages to Native American linguistic repatriation, the promise of language life, and emerging forms of linguistic sovereignty. Key developments between language experts and Native American language advocates are identified as they offer insights into the unexpected domains of Native American language life. 

Commentary

Book review

Book review

Book review

Book review

Book review

Book review

Book review

Book review

Book review

Book review