The Domestication Genocide of Settler Colonial–Language Ideologies

Settler colonial–language ideologies serve as one tool of dispossession within settler colonial assemblages of genocidal accumulation. We focus on the role of settlers in learning, codifying, and teaching Indigenous languages in order to analyze the language ideologies at play when language becomes colonized alongside the colonization of land. We develop a comparative reading of Dakota and Lakota bilingual-language instruction through the materials of Stephen R. Riggs during the nineteenth century and Ann Nolan Clark during the mid-twentieth century in order to examine the instantiation and continuity of settler colonial–language ideologies. We contrast these ideologies with how language ideologies formed in Europe as a component of the formation of race, which naturalized a link between people and land through defining conceptions of the human and the rational political subject. However, in settler colonial contexts this link between people and land, through language, does not function in the same way. Instead, Indigenous peoples' land is imagined as terra nullius and Indigenous peoples as less than human. We propose the concept of domestication genocide to demonstrate how settler language ideologies link land, legibility, and animacy as a part of these language teaching programs.