Defying Maliseet language death: Emergent vitalities of language, culture, & identity in Eastern Canada (review)

Despite the fact that the Maliseet language spoken by a small number of people at Tobique First Nation in New Brunswick, Canada, is teetering on the precipice of death and extinction, Bernard C. Perley’s case for the language’s potential to have emergent ‘alternative vitalities’ offers hope. Given P’s account of the language’s current obsolescence, this optimism might seem remarkable to many readers. Indeed, according to P, the form of language death that best characterizes Maliseet is death by suicide, specifically assisted suicide, since the great majority of community members do not feel the need to engage with revitalization efforts. The attitude that ‘you don’t need to speak Maliseet in order to be Maliseet’ is prevalent. P’s optimism is rooted in his innovative and positive conception of language vitality, the current sociopolitical climate in Canada, and his understanding of language’s relationship to contemporary aboriginality.

P’s account of the Maliseet language situation and revitalization efforts at Tobique First Nation is based on ethnographic field research conducted during the 1990s. Approximately 1,500 Maliseet, or Walastoquiyik ‘People of the Good River’, by no means a homogeneous people, lived on the reservation at the time. The stakes for P in this research were high. Some community members and language advocates are skeptical, even antagonistic, to anthropologists, so P (a linguistic anthropologist) had to prove himself as a scholar. Beyond this, the author also had to prove himself as a native, for P is a member of Tobique First Nation.

P is reflexive about the complexities of his ‘insider/outsider status’ as both anthropologist and native. His multifaceted identity presented numerous dilemmas: in a number of incidents his stance could determine whether or not ‘the anthropologist could return home’. The text is peppered with personal anecdotes that are often humorous and sometimes poignant. Consistently, P uses these to provide critical analyses and insights regarding their significance and broader implications to the Maliseet case and understandings of processes of language endangerment, death, and potential for revitalization.

Maliseet, P notes, has been steadily declining as a vital tool for communication since the 1950s and 1960s. As in most cases of language endangerment, numerous social, political, and economic factors—including, among others, residential schools, land base contraction, pressure to assimilate, intermarriage, shift in values and lifestyle, schools, media, and television—have conspired to pressure community members to abandon the language. However, what really threatens to tip Maliseet over the precipice plummeting toward death and extinction, according to P, is a generalized indifference on the part of community members. P reports that there appears to be little effort or interest on the part of most people to engage in revitalization efforts. During his research, he witnessed few contexts in which language transmission occurred between an elder and a youth in community life. P asserts that people and their relationship to language are the critical variables in assessments of language vitality. His focus is on people, and peoples’ engagement, or lack thereof, with Maliseet. Rather than emphasizing language-as-object in the discussion of language endangerment and death, P seeks to direct attention to community members’ relationships to language.

There are, in fact, three institutions involved in language maintenance and revitalization efforts, each with its respective ideologies, advocates, programs, and constituents. These, and the ways they work together as well as against each other, are the focus of Ch. 3, ‘Programming language maintenance’. P presents profiles of each of the ‘language agents’ and ways their work is both motivated and constrained by institutional ideologies and constituent needs. ‘Sue’, the Maliseet language instructor at the Mah-Sos community school, is employed by the community. The school children enrolled in Maliseet classes, and to a lesser extent members of the Tobique community, are her main constituents. ‘Dan’ works for the provincial government and oversees native language and culture programming in provincial schools. ‘Barb’ is...