Defying Maliseet Language Death: Emergent Vitalities of Language, Culture, and Identity in Eastern Canada

2. “Tipping” toward Maliseet Language Death

2. “Tipping” toward Maliseet Language Death In the late nineteenth century the United States expansion had stretched out to the West Coast and the dream of transcontinental “manifest destiny” was finally fulfilled. In the taming of the West there was still someworktobedoneinpacifyinghostileIndians.Themilitarymachine that was usedtowin the “warbetween the states” was turnedtowinning the West. Delaying the winning of the West were Native Americans who stood in the way of “progress.” It was this sense of progress that allowed politicians and military leaders to “remove” Native Americans from their tribal lands. If that strategy did not work, then eradicating them would (this was the nineteenth-century iteration of a long process of colonizing the New World that started in 1492). Concurrent with forced progress at the hands of U.S. politicians and the U.S. military was the development of scientific paradigms of progress. These paradigms are reflected in the preoccupations of evolutionists and social Darwinists (Albert Gallatin, Samuel Morton, Ephraim Squier, and Lewis Henry Morgan being the most notable). Even though the paci- fication and removal of Indians in the West were traumatic events for Native Americans, the lasting social and scientific legacy of race and progressive hierarchies continues to have detrimental consequences today (Wilson and Yellow Bird 2005; Cobb and Fowler 2007). When the two progressive programs came together (Hinsley 1981) it produced a | “tipping” toward maliseet language death 32 popular imagining of American Indians, namely, the vanishing race. The irony of the vanishing race imaginary is that it seems the race is still vanishing!1 The popularity of Edward S. Curtis photographs today continues to promote that myth of vanishing while freezing Native Americans in sepia tones of still photographs as though Indians were trapped in amber for all time.2 At the time Curtis was taking his photographs ethnologists and ethnographers were also rushing West to preserve what was left of the vanishing race before it was lost forever. Pioneering figures such as Frank Hamilton Cushing ventured out to salvage the remnants of Indian cultures. However, Cushing provided the authorities of the new science of ethnology with some methodological challenges (Hinsley 1981) that continue to be debated today. The challenges include grappling with the danger of going native, developing an objective/scientific method for salvaging vanishing peoples while preserving their pristine state, and keeping a professional distance to avoid the contamination of the ethnographer or ethnologist. Franz Boas was determined to provide such an objective scientific approach to preserving the vanishing peoples and their languages and cultures (Boas 1940). From his “everything is important” method of collecting ethnographic material he advocated a four-field approach to cultural anthropology. A significant component of this approach consisted of linguistic recording and analyses. The project resulted in the recording of American Indian languages before they were lost forever. It was via that attention to vanishing American Indian languages that American anthropology began to address what is today called language death. Nineteenth-century scholars were witnessing the detrimental effects of linguistic colonialism (Greenblatt 1992; Pagden 1993) on NativeAmericanlanguagesbeginninginthesixteenthcentury.Colonial ideologies (Errington 2008) would lay the foundation for subsequent Native American language extinctions. In the late nineteenth century these colonial ideologies would perpetuate linguistic chauvinism (Harris 1993:20) favoring European linguistic heritage as superior to the “primitive” or “barbarous” native languages. Furthermore, the early “tipping” toward maliseet language death | 33 studies on non-European languages had two primary “motives: conquest and conversion” (Harris 1993:20). Fortunately, assumptions about language based on European languages were challenged by research in American Indian languages, most notably by Franz Boas (Boas 1940; Harris 1993), Edward Sapir (Mandelbaum 1985), and Benjamin Lee Whorf (Whorf 1970). Boas in particular, in 1917, set the agenda for research in Native American linguistics in his introduction to the “International Journal of American Linguistics” (Boas 1940). In the introduction Boas acknowledges the difficult task of documenting language change through extended contact with European languages (1940:201). Not only were vocabularies lost, but the languages were undergoing morphological and syntactic changes as well. The anthropological identification of language death and the processescontributingtodeathtook majorstepswithcomparativeanalyses done in the 1970s and since. Nancy Dorian’s work on East Sutherland Gaelic (1981) was an important study that detailed the social factors contributing to language death. Her effort to bring together scholars who were working on similar language cases reflected a professional move toward a broad...