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.