The Poetics of Language Revitalization: Text, Performance, and Change

In the Boasian-Americanist tradition, text collection emerged as a crucial dimension of anthropological study and became a cornerstone of Native American research. Keeping methodologically with the focus on texts, Hymes directed analytic attention toward the structuring of the text itself—from grammar to performance. More recently, such texts and analyses have emerged as a critical component of language revitalization efforts. Through an analysis of texts and performance across four language revitalization projects in the Yukon Territory of Canada, we show how different strategies for entextualizing aboriginal languages and for incorporating texts into education render salient certain aspects of the poetics of these texts while diminishing or erasing others. We ultimately argue for a scholarly approach to Native American storytelling/poetics that recognizes the boundaries of performance and innovation as shiftable, expanding the investigation and the preservation of Native American text practices. A commentary to this essay by Charles L. Briggs appears later in this special issue.