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

5. “We Are Our Language”: The Political Discourses of Language Endangerment

5 “We Are Our Language” The Political Discourses of Language Endangerment [T]hose who seek to defend a threatened linguistic capital . . . are obliged to wage a total struggle. One cannot save the value of a competence unless one saves the market, in other words, the whole set of political and social conditions of production of the producers/ consumers. (Bourdieu 1991:57) It was the middle of a snowy Yukon winter, near the shortest day of the year. The thermostat recorded a temperature of 250 degrees outside, and if it weren’t for the snow reflecting the illuminated night sky, it would be pitch black. As I wrote out verb paradigms for Kaska, the radio news broadcast reported that another First Nations person was stabbed to death (by accidentally falling on a knife repeatedly), another guy froze to death on his way home from a friend’s, and elders throughout the Yukon were being hospitalized for pneumonia. Suddenly my obsession with documenting and analyzing Kaska grammar seemed even more urgent and yet not urgent at all in the face of these tragedies. Even more absurd was the thought of myself standing in front of a council of elders and telling them that their language was dying, that there were only a few speakers left, and that “we” needed to document more of the language before it vanished. The absurdity, however, was in the imagined rhetoric, not the goal of preservation and revitalization. Against such depressed, and occasionally violent, social backdrops, language issues would appear to be of less importance and urgency than other com- Political Discourses of Language Endangerment 137 munity concerns. Statements like “There is only one speaker of Tagish left” or “The Kaska language is dying” may not have as much force in social situations where it is not just the language that is dying. As Bourdieu suggests in the quote above, however, these statements work to “save” the conditions of production underlying the sociolinguistic marketplace. One of these conditions is the discourse surrounding language. Endangered or otherwise, one avenue for changing a sociolinguistic environment is by changing the discourse surrounding the linguistic situation. For language endangerment, this entails diversifying the discourse of endangerment, to create, or expand, the linguistic marketplace. Indigenous language issues also emerge as an opportunity to address a variety of social problems (such as addiction, illiteracy, and poverty), while providing people with an opportunity to reclaim their own heritage or to celebrate its persistence. Such language projects, however, require institutionalresourcesandarethereforeconstrainedbythepoliticalcontextswithin which they are formulated. The discourses of language advocacy, a dimension of these projects, often reflect these institutional constraints. In separate articles on language endangerment rhetoric, Jane H. Hill and Leanne Hinton identified two different categories of discourse: “expert rhetoric” and “community-internal” discourse (Hill 2002; Hinton 2002). Within these categories , a variety of discursive themes, from ecological metaphors and the depiction of language as the heritage of humanity, to the role of language in the construction of an identity, have been deployed, where the goal, as Hill has pointed out, has been in part to “establish new markets, not only in the extended sense advanced by Bourdieu (1982), but in the narrow sense of providing salaried positions for speakers of endangered languages” (Hill 2002:124). These expert ways of talking about language, however, do not always map directly onto community-internal or local discourses about language circulating among the people whose languages are shifting out of use. One reason, then, that reversing sociolinguistic changes may be such a daunting, seemingly insurmountable task, pertains to the mismatches, or disjunctures, between expert and community-internal rhetoric, as well as corresponding conceptualizations of language. That is, different people have different understandings of endangerment, of success, of what it means to “save” a language, and methods appropriate to the task (see Nevins 2004 on Apache; England 2003 on Mayan; see also Whiteley 2003). The goal of this chapter is to reveal some of the ways in which institutional, expert discourse and community-internal discourses about language dialogically inform, oppose, or disengage with each other across different contexts, resulting in different degrees of disjuncture. There are three genres of discourse that I examine: community-external or expert rhetoric, local community-internal discourse, 138 WE ARE OUR LANGUAGE and global community-internal discourse. The data illustrating these genres come from government documents, meetings, and interviews. Beginning with the discursive themes of community-external advocacy, or “expert rhetorics,” followed...