Native American Language Ideologies: Beliefs, Practices, and Struggles in Indian Country

13. Which Way Is the Kiowa Way? Orthography Choices, Ideologies, and Language Renewal

chapter 13 Which Way Is the Kiowa Way? Orthography Choices, Ideologies, and Language Renewal amber a. neely and gus palmer, jr. Ideological representations of community and self are central to orthography development for Native American language revitalization and education , but this has not always been the case. The purpose of orthography development for Native American languages has shifted through time. After first contact it was seen as a matter of importance for translating texts in order to spread Christianity. Increasingly, assimilation became part of the colonial agenda, particularly for Protestant missionaries and government agents. From the mid-twentieth century on, the focus has been increasingly on documentation and finally on use of writing for teaching and revitalizing indigenous languages. This trajectory has not been a smooth one but has been pushed and pulled by attitudes toward indigenous languages both without and within. Attitudes and policies about Native American languages are enmeshed within larger public spheres, which can be seen as Foucauldian discourses , or public arenas through which different agents with particular goalspromoteideologiesthatcompeteforauthority.∞ Theseideologiescan be seen as sets of ideas that work together as a whole about who should make decisions, how decisions should be enforced, and so forth. Ideologies can be professed or unconscious yet exhibited in people’s actions, or they may be worked into part of a social infrastructure as practices, traditions, or laws. Kroskrity explores this function of language ideologies that ‘‘mediate between social structures and forms of talk’’ (2000b:21), linking social experience and language forms. A general definition of language ideologies is ‘‘representations, whether explicit or implicit, that 272 neely and palmer construe the intersection of language and human beings in the world’’ (Woolard 1998:3). These intersections fall within a number of different domains and take place within various discourses; as Christina Eire (1998:173) remarks, these discourses are not completely separate from each other but can be interwoven in different ways. The discourse on politics within American society has in the past interacted with the discourse on pedagogy to the extent that an ideology about what and how Native American children should learn resulted for many in boarding school experiences that even today affect how these children as adults view their languages (see Crawford 1997; Linn et al. 2003). Although policies finally exist to support the teaching and promotion of Native American languages in schools and communities, many ideologies discussed here are holdovers from that period, including language purism and linguistic social Darwinism, such as that illustrated by the English-Only movement. In this chapter we address these issues in a larger context and then in a more specific case study. We first take a moment to examine discourses and language ideologies surrounding the role of orthography standardization in language revitalization efforts. Thereafter we build upon this background in examining the situation of Kiowa, a Native American language of Oklahoma. Multiple Kiowa orthographies exist, and new ones are continuously being created, a state we call heterographia, a term coined by Sean O’Neill.≤ In using this term we extend Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1987:263) concept of heteroglossia, defined as a multitude of voices from different contexts to writing. Heterographia represents a situation in which one language is approached via multiple writing systems. There are multiple systems taught, while others are created in situations where students are encouraged to spell out sounds in whatever personal system seems best to them. We delineate key factors contributing to the continuing heterographic state of the Kiowa language, including historical and linguistic circumstances as well as language ideologies grounded within various discourses. We then examine the constraints this state poses for language renewal efforts in the community. By weighing these factors, we present a framework for considering whether or not orthographic standardization is the best action for groups in similar circumstances, taking careful note of possible repercussions and various sociopolitical factors that could affect language renewal in the community.≥ which way is the kiowa way? 273 Orthography in Language Renewal: The Practical and the Problematic The usefulness of writing in language revitalization is not a straightforward assumption, as the proliferation of literature on the topic demonstrates (Baraby 2003; Bennett et al. 1999; Biava 1990; Bielenburg 1999; Dauenhauer and Dauenhauer 1998; Hinton 2001c). Writing a language reflects concerns from discourses on politics as well as pedagogy, and there are important ideological and practical considerations to this issue. Some emphasize the impracticality of completely...