The Bearer of This Letter: Language Ideologies, Literacy Practices, and the F

Preface

Preface I have a daughter. At the time of this writing she is two years old and is fully engaged in the activities that lead to literacy acquisition. She uses drafts of my book chapters as the paper for her inspired crayon drawings and she “reads” my words by mimicking what she sees me do as I read text aloud. She is lucky, and so am I, in that we see reading and writing as a way to channel creativity and express ourselves. These practices also enable us to inhabit alternate and even imaginary worlds—some far better than our own. These are undeniable beneÀts to reading and writing ; however, these are not the only consequences of literacy practices. As much as reading and writing are about freedom and expression, literacy is also about standardization , routinization, and control. People use documents to inÁuence the actions of others; governments use them to create subjects who must abide by their dictates. While my daughter will eventually learn these lessons as well, her foundational experiences will likely predispose her to a positive view of literacy. This is not the case for everyone. During the late nineteenth century, Native children throughout the United States were often separated from families in the course of x preface the government’s “civilizing” campaign. The Àrst experiences these children had with reading and writing often came in the form of the Bible or a textbook that was written in a foreign tongue (English). They recited texts endlessly , memorized words that rarely expressed their own experiences, and often suffered from physical punishment if they failed in their task or resorted to their own familiar language. Understandably, these children’s literacy experiences taught them much about power but little about creativity and hope. At the same time, their parents were learning a similar lesson as they struggled to work within new political and economic systems that relied on a surfeit of documents written exclusively in English. These documents proclaimed who was entitled to what, controlled individual movements, and determined economic futures. During the twentieth century, however, the children and grandchildren of these families began to reimagine the literacy practices that had been forced on them. This book is about that transformation. The irony of writing a book about writing has not escaped me. In the pages ahead I criticize some practices I have bene Àted from as a student and engage in as a teacher. It is my hope, however, that the book will bring forward the voices of individuals from the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation who struggled with the imposition of both written and spoken English and who devised novel ways of using reading and writing, including maintaining the Indigenous languages that early educators sought to eradicate. These practices have ultimately helped the community preserve a distinctive identity within the U.S. populace, and this process of reinterpretation is worth documenting. Any book is a collaborative process, and this one is even more so. I want to offer my Àrst and enduring thanks to the xi preface Assiniboine and Gros Ventre communities at Fort Belknap, who made this study not only possible but worth doing. I particularly appreciate all the teachers, administrators, and students at Fort Belknap College who made me so welcome during the academic year I spent there. I also owe a debt of gratitude to Selena Ditmar who, in addition to being a wonderful Nakoda speaker, is one of the most talented teachers I know. She has given me gifts that go beyond words, and I share the feeling of many of her students that we have been blessed with the opportunity to learn from her wisdom. Lois Shortman frequently hosted me during my return visits to northern Montana, and I will always remember her warm hospitality and infectious humor. The original research for the book was made possible through summer funding from the Philips Fund of the American Philosophical Society and the Skomp Fund from the Department of Anthropology at Indiana University. My year at Fort Belknap and subsequent visits were supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, for which Dr. Douglas Parks and Dr. Raymond DeMallie, both from Indiana University, were principal investigators . I owe a special thanks to these individuals for allowing me both to become involved in the language project that they initiated and to document an experience of which they have been an...