The Bearer of This Letter: Language Ideologies, Literacy Practices, and the Fort Belknap Indian Community (review)

This book focuses on the historical development of ideologies of literacy among the Gros Ventre and Assiniboine of the Fort Belknap reservation. The work is carefully documented and its arguments are extremely well contextualized, making it valuable as a resource on both the history of these specific communities and on the history of American Indian language programs in general. While it will be particularly useful to students and scholars working on the language ideologies and the role of literacy in Native American communities, Morgan’s work also touches on a broad range of central research questions in contemporary linguistic anthropology. The story of these communities and their languages speaks to global discussions about the relationship between language and identity. It has specific relevance to our understanding of the particular relationship between linguistic authenticity and questions of indigenous identity.

The Gros Ventre and Assiniboine have shared a reservation in north central Montana and have been members of the same administrative community since 1888. Total membership of the two tribes is approximately 5,500. Despite their shared history, the Gros Ventre and Assiniboine are linguistically distinct. Gros Ventre is a member of the Algonquian language family while the Assiniboine speak Nakoda, a member of the Siouan language family. The history of the community’s shifting language ideologies and emergence from a history of linguistic repression into a contemporary linguistic revitalization movement, therefore, has many lessons to teach scholars and activists working in multilingual communities in which languages are threatened.

Morgan argues that English had already served as a limited communicative code within this multilingual community for decades before English language literacy emerged as a shaping force. It was really the reservation system and its associated culture of documentation, indicates Morgan, that tipped the balance toward greater use of English and, as a result, toward the emergence of a significant language ideology related to English. Morgan goes on to demonstrate how this documentary culture associated English language literacy with both institutionalized state dominance and opportunities for resistance. Along the way, she addresses the question of why an indigenous language literacy tradition failed to emerge at Fort Belknap, which she attributes to the regulatory power of English language documents, the federal government’s English-only policies, and influential language ideology “regarding the comparative usefulness of English and Indigenous languages” (p. 12). Morgan shows how English emerged as a spoken lingua franca between the Assiniboine and Gros Ventre during the New Deal and Indian Reorganization periods, driven by the need for greater bureaucratization brought about by those programs. This produced a temporary diglossia and spurred open meta-linguistic debates about the community’s linguistic divisions of labor. The meticulous historical background laid out by Morgan then helps to frame a discussion of the place of literacy in bilingual education and language revitalization since the 1960s. As has been the case in many indigenous communities, the development of native language literacy for these recent initiatives has been fraught with controversy related to standardization and to the degree of fit between literacy and indigenous knowledge.

Throughout, Morgan chronicles the particular ideological pressures faced by indigenous communities without prior literacy traditions that come in contact with the concomitant forces of colonialism, bureaucratization, imposed language shift, and literacy instruction. There is here a sophisticated account of how language ideologies carry over from one language to another and of the relationships between externally generated language ideologies (whether global or local) and internal ones. In one particularly rich example, she describes and illustrates the ways in which English language literacy shifted from representing imposed tribal bureaucracy before the Indian Reorganization Act to legitimately expressing the authority of the autonomous reorganized tribe after-ward.

Morgan makes her case relevant to current discussions of the relationship among modern citizenship, language use, and the institutionalization of language. She gives a fascinating account, for example, of a Fort Belknap tribal council meeting in...