We Are Our Language: An Ethnography of Language Revitalization in a Northern Athabaskan Community

Preface

Preface Some have carried it, held it close, protected. Others have pulled it along like a reluctant child. Still others have waved it like a flag, a signal to others. And some have filled it with rage and dare others to come close. And there are those who find their language a burdensome shackle. They continually pick at the lock. —Ofelia Zepeda, “Walking with Language” It’s difficult to imagine growing up without a language. Is it analogous to growing up without parents or grandparents? Is it the loss of something near and dear to our hearts, or is it something simply never realized, like growing up without siblings or pets? My mother never seemed to bemoan the fact that my grandfather, instructed to speak English at Haskell Institute , raised his children the same way—in English. This sociolinguistic practice has trickled down to my siblings and my cousins, most of whom are more interested and invested in learning globally significant languages like Spanish, German, and French, than in revitalizing their ancestral American Indian language—let alone someone else’s ancestral language. On the other hand, the opportunity and the challenge of learning another language have always been celebrated in my family. From listening to recordings of language lessons to being surrounded by speakers of an unfamiliar language, the drive to investigate the linguistic similarities and differences—grammatically, socially, ideologically—has “walked” with x PREFACE me since childhood. As Zepeda’s poem vividly portrays, walking with language—especially an endangered language—is difficult, an extraordinary challenge that is asked, and often demanded, of indigenous peoples. This book is a reflection on and analysis of the time I spent walking with an endangered language, one that may or may not be my own, but one that certainly called to me. Beginning the Journey: Methods and Motivations As an ethnography of language revitalization, the primary goal of this study is to show how the practice and ideologization of Kaska have influenced Kaska language revitalization, focusing especially on moments of disjuncture and the semiotic processes that coconstruct and mitigate such contradictions. By disjuncture, I mean the everyday points of discontinuity and contradiction—between social or linguistic groups, within discourses, practices, or between them, even between indexical orders—that interrupt the flow of action, communication, or thought. Most of the disjunctures I describe in this book are sociolinguistic, points where multiple, shifting , and conflicting language ideologies or semiotic practices collide—or move past one another (see chap. 2). To do this, I have combined various research methods in order to find out what adults and children know in relation to what they speak and what is spoken and expressed around them (see Hill 1993:88 on methodology; see also Ochs and Schieffelin 1979). Generally ethnographic, the methods include formal linguistic description and analysis, participant observation, tape recording, and interviewing. A psycholinguistic comprehension task was also developed and piloted. I do not report on that task here, but I do mention below the importance of comprehension tasks in relation to studying situations of language shift and revitalization. Ethnographic, and more specifically linguistic anthropological, methods provide a way of assessing the impact of different social contexts on a people’s language use and knowledge, with potential insights into an individual ’s retention or loss of specific linguistic structures. In particular, these methods allow for an analysis of interaction patterns and an evaluation of the role these play in the maintenance and acquisition of a (minority) language in a multilingual context. It is important to understand the ways in which these different contexts and patterns may either promote language retention or encourage language loss, in order to determine measures for stabilizing an indigenous language. Additionally, language ideologies are relevant to language development in that the ways in which individuals Preface xi view competing languages may covertly undermine any effort to revitalize or maintain the heritage language. Developmental psycholinguistic methods in general provide a way of assessing a child’s or novice’s linguistic knowledge synchronically and over time. They are useful for examining when children acquire particular linguistic structures or for simply identifying which structures have been acquired. The relevance of comprehension techniques for language shift studies are multiple. First, there is the problem of production reliability where speakers or language learners know more than they produce (McKee 1994). Participant-observation and socially occurring speech are both limited in this way, providing evidence for a...