A World of Indigenous Languages

Politics, Pedagogies and Prospects for Language Reclamation

Teresa L. McCarty, Sheilah E. Nicholas, Gillian Wigglesworth

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781788923057
• eBook ISBN: 9781788923088
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Bildungspolitik

Spanning Indigenous settings in Africa, the Americas, Aotearoa/New Zealand, Australia, Central Asia and the Nordic countries, this book examines the multifaceted language reclamation work underway by Indigenous peoples throughout the world. Exploring political, historical, ideological, and pedagogical issues, the book foregrounds the decolonizing aims of contemporary Indigenous language movements inside and outside of schools. Many authors explore language reclamation in their own communities. Together, the authors call for expanded discourses on language planning and policy that embrace Indigenous ways of knowing and forefront grassroots language reclamation efforts as a force for Indigenous sovereignty, social justice, and self-determination. This volume will be of interest to scholars, educators and students in applied linguistics, Ethnic/Indigenous Studies, education, second language acquisition, and comparative-international education, and to a broader audience of language educators, revitalizers and policymakers.

Part 1

Policies and Politics in Indigenous Language Reclamation

1Configuring Language(s) and Speakers: The History and Politics of an Aboriginal Ethnolinguistic Identity in the Yukon, Canada

Barbra A. Meek

Language politics and policies mediate and are mediated by conventional conceptions of difference, often ideologically pitting marginalized and/or Indigenous peoples and languages against economically and politically dominant ones (and reifying lesser known languages as subordinate). This chapter examines the history of regimenting difference between First Nations peoples and other Canadian nationals in relation to race, ethnicity and language, and subsequent attempts to reconfigure this subordinate-dominant scaling, focusing especially on changes in Aboriginal policy that have occurred in the Yukon Territory since the 1800s. I begin by detailing how difference is recognized in terms of race and language in the reflections and correspondences of Hudson Bay traders when describing people they encountered in the economically underdeveloped region now known as the Yukon Territory. I connect this concept of difference to the legal framework defining Indian status (i.e. the ‘Indian Act’ of 1876). I then compare early concepts of racial/ethnic difference with categories of ethnolinguistic difference emerging in the 1970s and 1980s alongside national discourses of multilingualism and multiculturalism and movements for Aboriginal self-determination. Epitomizing this national transformation in Canadian–Aboriginal relations, the Yukon Territory created its own language policies, equally recognizing English, French and eight Aboriginal languages spoken in the Territory. The 21st century ushered in one more change, a re-imagining of ethnolinguistic categories in terms of citizenship rather than racial/ethnic membership. This last iteration begins to transcend the legacy of difference plaguing most settler societies and to ensure a process of linguistic sustainability.

Introduction

The past few decades have seen a surge of interest and investment in Indigenous language issues and projects. A response to histories of oppression, of political and economic subjugation, advanced through various practices of domination, this surge has resulted in both a growth in the funding and implementing of language projects institutionally and ‘on the ground’ (within Aboriginal and other Indigenous language communities, as well as between institutions and communities), and the expansion of research on topics ranging from language endangerment and revitalization to language maintenance through second language acquisition and the role of language ideologies and social practices in affecting current (and historical) sociolinguistic patterns and variation.

The discursive landscape within which these theories and practices have emerged continues to maintain a subtle conceptual juxtaposition of late modernity in the distinction between the Indigenous peoples who are invested in the recognition and recovery (or re-creation) of particular linguistic varieties and some ‘elite’ others who control the institutional representations, subtly reinforcing a configuration of cosmopolitan privilege in opposition to rural Indigenous oppression (cf. Huayhua, 2010; see also Hill, 2002). In both cases, two kinds of fluency are imagined in relation to two kinds of social origins that converge in the mutually entangled project of ‘saving’ a ‘language’ – the emblematized ‘fluent,’ ideally monolingual, imaginatively pre-contact, non-Western Aboriginal language ‘speaker’ (Moore et al., 2010: 12; see also Moore, 2012: 60, 73) and the institutionally authorized and ‘fluent’ scholar-researcher most likely trained in the Western arts of categorization and enumeration.

To highlight the urgency of the need for Indigenous language revitalization, such extreme discursive oppositions are useful. They are well suited for attracting the attention and support of local, national and global audiences. By doing so, these discursive oppositions mediate and perpetuate already-entrenched political-ideological positions and divisions. The realization of these oppositions in ‘elite’ rhetoric is one that many linguistic anthropologists have begun to interrogate, especially in relation to divisions of ethnolingusitic difference (e.g. Duchêne & Heller, 2007; Errington, 2003; Hill, 2002; Moore, 2006, 2012; Moore et al., 2010; Muehlmann, 2012; Suslak, 2009, 2011; Whiteley, 2003; see also Silverstein, 1996). Not as closely explored are the racialized divisions underscoring and emerging from these elite, privileged rhetorics (for an exception, see Kroskrity, 2011; Muehlmann, 2007), or the ways in which people are complicating and challenging these divisions today (Kroskrity, 2009; Kroskrity & Reynolds, 2001; Meek, 2010, 2014). Moving in this latter direction, this chapter examines the history of regimenting difference between First Nations peoples and other Canadian nationals ethnolinguistically – that is, in relation to race, ethnicity and language in the Yukon Territory, Canada – through changes in the representational categories and nomenclature appearing in ‘elite’ territorial documents since the 1800s when the Yukon Territory became officially recognized by the Canadian government. By focusing on the particular case of Kaska language revitalization, the final sections consider how these metrics of difference intersect representational practices of language in an ongoing project called the Kaska ‘talking’ dictionary (https://kaskadictionary.wordpress.com/; https://soundcloud.com/kaskadictionary/).

The use of ‘ethnolinguistic’ as a label refers to the conceptualization of groups of peoples in terms of linguistic practice, either current or historical Indigenous language practices – often referred to as ‘ancestral’ or ‘heritage’ languages in government documents. Ethnolinguistic relationships are ideological ones which identify and link particular language varieties and practices to particular groups of people; these relationships categorize people according to perceived or imagined (socio-)linguistic and ethnic similarities (along with other dimensions of semiotically constituted sameness) (Hymes, 1964; Silverstein, 2003). In the Yukon today, for example, this alignment of peoples and languages appears most literally in the government-funded Aboriginal language maps and the motto ‘We Are Our Language’ (for a detailed analysis of these media, see Meek, 2010). In these images produced by the territorial government and its subsidiaries, languages, groups of Aboriginal peoples and territories are discretely linked and compartmentalized, situating Kaska-speaking groups in the southeast corner of the territory, Tlingit-speaking groups in the southwest corner, Gwich’in speakers in the northernmost area of the territory, and so forth. These alignments and categories of people, places and languages gained substantial political traction in the 1990s when the territorial and federal governments began negotiating land claims settlements with the 14 Yukon First Nations (see http://cyfn.ca/ for a history of and current land claims settlement agreements).

An example of an ethnolinguistic orientation converging with the process of land claims settlements appears in the political alignment and stance-taking of Liard River First Nation and Ross River Dena Council. Both First Nations identify as Kaska, an ethnolinguistic label that unites them, such that neither First Nation has reached a settlement agreement nor do they have representation or membership in the Council of Yukon First Nations at the time of this writing (though they are still counted among the 14 mentioned above). These ethnolinguistic categories have become significant political symbols for Yukon First Nations and for the nation-state. However, in the earliest stages of mapping and settlement, Aboriginal groups were identified in relation to geography and race rather than linguistic difference. Contemporary uses of ethnolinguistic labels maintain this socio-historical racialized aspect.

Before Language: Historical Categories of Difference in the Yukon

The earliest documented references to First Nations peoples living in the Yukon Territory by non-First Nations individuals (government employees) were ethnically or racially based rather than linguistically oriented. As Burnaby has pointed out in relation to Canadian policy-making generally, ‘In the 19th century, Canadian legal rights for the “English” and “French” populations focussed on religion rather than language … Legislation specifically on language was rare’ (Burnaby, 2008: 331). Explicit, institutional discourses linking Aboriginal languages and populations were also rare. Within early Yukon documents such as reports, diaries and newspaper articles, the primary distinction was ‘Indian’ and its implicit opposite, ‘(White) European’ (the embodiment of a Hudson’s Bay Company employee). When distinctions were noted, the terms used did not highlight linguistic differences; they referred to landscape features and named geographic locations.

Some of the earliest examples come from Robert Campbell’s writings of his exploration of the Yukon Territory. In 1838, in the service of the Hudson’s Bay Company, Robert Campbell arrived in the northwestern-most parts of the Canadian territories, established a trading post at Dease Lake in what is now British Columbia, and then abandoned this post a year later to continue exploration of these territories. Under commission by the resident governor of Hudson’s Bay Company, Sir George Simpson, Campbell headed north up the Liard River, which flows through the current town of Upper Liard in the Yukon Territory and Kaska settlement areas. At the time of Campbell’s departure up the Liard River, he wrote:

In pursuance of these instructions I left Fort Halkett in May, with a canoe and seven men, among them my trusty Indians, Lapie and Kitza, and the interpreter, Hoole. After ascending the stream some hundreds of miles, far into the mountains, we entered a beautiful lake, which I named Frances Lake, in honour of Lady Simpson. Leaving the canoe and part of the crew near the southwest extremity of this branch of the lake, I set out with three Indians and the interpreter. Shouldering our blankets and guns, we ascended the valley of a river, which we traced to its source in a lake ten miles long, which, with the river, I named Finlaison’s lake and river. (Campbell, in Selwyn, 1889: 137)

Other than referring to some of the men in his party as ‘Indians,’ he expands very little on their linguistic or cultural heritage, noting only their trustworthiness. In a similar document, Dr Dawson describes the pillaging of Fort Selkirk in 1853 by people he refers to as the Coast Indians, and reports that:

the Chilkats, being unable to carry away all their plunder in the preceding year, had taken merely the guns, powder and tobacco. They had cached the heavier goods, which were afterwards found … by the local or Wood Indians. (Selwyn, 1889: 267)

These early descriptions of local residents reveal a dichotomous geographical distinction, a distinction between the ‘Coast’ Indians (the Chilkats) and the ‘Wood’ Indians (the interior groups). Based on historical documents and narratives circulating among contemporary First Nations, this distinction reflected the socio-political hierarchy present at the time between groups living in these areas. It was a distinction based on the fact that the coastal Indians controlled the trade routes between the coast and interior areas. In a narrative entitled ‘Tāltāni yéh Tot’ine yéh Ełegedigeh (War between the Tahltan and Tlingit)’ told by Alfred Caesar, a Yukon First Nations elder, the physical, material and metaphysical power of the Tlingit, the Tot’ine, over other Indians is well illustrated. The following translated excerpt exemplifies the Tlingits’ dominance.

Tahltans came to Tlingits with bows and arrows to fight. [They captured and killed a young Tlingit girl.] [While the Tahltans celebrated elsewhere,] one Tlingit man who was a really powerful medicine man said, ‘What is happening here? The people are all disappearing. Etsí’ Dedele has disappeared as well.’ It [had] snowed; there was deep snow, and he told them, ‘Go around, go a long ways around and look for their tracks.’ They did that and found the tracks of four men walking on top of th...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• A World of Indigenous Languages – Resurgence, Reclamation, Revitalization and Resilience
• Part 1: Policies and Politics in Indigenous Language Reclamation
• Part 2: Pedagogies and Processes in Indigenous Language Reclamation
• Part 3: Prospects and Possibilities for Indigenous Language Reclamation
• Author Index
• Subject Index