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Language, Community, and Context - Ep 51
267 Plays3 years ago
Today’s podcast features Dr. Jenny Davis, a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation and an Associate Professor of Anthropology and American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbaana-Champaign. She is the director of the American Indian Studies Program and the 2019-2023 Chancellor's Fellow of Indigenous Research & Ethics. We get in depth on language revitalization, including the importance of context, resources for people interested in language revitalization, the challenge of evaluating results, and how the way we frame discussions of language revitalizations matters. Finally, we talk about how language intersects first with gender and sexuality and also with NAGPRA and repatriation.
Links
- Talking Indian: Identity and Language Revitalization in the Chickasaw Renaissance
- Queer Excursions: Retheorizing Binaries in Language, Gender, and Sexuality
- Museums, Representation, and Intersectionality – Heritage Voices Episode 24
- Meek, Barbra A. 2011. "Failing American Indian languages". American Indian Culture and Research Journal. 35 (2): 43-60.
- Failing American Indian Languages
- Collaborative Language (CoLANG) Institute
Guest Contact
- loksi@illinois.edu
- @ChickashaJenny
Contact
- Jessica
- Jessica@livingheritageanthropology.org
- @livingheritageA
- @LivingHeritageResearchCouncil
Affiliates
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Sponsor Announcement
00:00:00
Speaker
We're excited to announce that our very own podcasting platform, Zencaster, has become a new sponsor to the show. Check out the podcast discount link in our show notes and stay tuned for why we love using Zen for the podcast. You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
Episode Introduction by Jessica Equinto
00:00:21
Speaker
Welcome to Heritage Voices, episode 51. I'm Jessica Equinto and I'll be your host today. And today we are talking about language, community, and context. Before we begin, I'd like to honor and acknowledge that the lands I'm recording on today are part of the Nooch or Yew People's Treaty Lands, the D'Dayta in the ancestral Puebloan homeland.
00:00:39
Speaker
Today we have Dr.
Guest Introduction: Dr. Jenny Davis
00:00:41
Speaker
Jenny Davis on the show. Dr. Jenny L. Davis is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation and an Associate Professor of Anthropology and American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where she is the Director of the American Indian Studies Program and the 2019-2023 Chancellor's Fellow of Indigenous Research and Ethics.
00:01:02
Speaker
After earning undergraduate degrees in the humanities from Oklahoma State University, she obtained an M.A. and Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Colorado Boulder. She was a Henry Rowe Cloud Fellow in American Indian Studies at Yale University and a Lyman T. Johnson Postdoctoral Fellow in linguistics at the University of Kentucky. Her research focuses on contemporary indigenous language revitalization,
00:01:28
Speaker
Indigenous gender and sexuality and collaborative methods, ethics and repatriation in Indigenous research. So welcome to the show, Dr. Davis. Thank you. Thank you for the invitation to join me. Yeah, of course. I'm so excited to have you as I was as I was saying before we got on the air. I have a very long list of topics that I'd love to talk with you about. So I'm sure we won't get to all of it, but
00:01:54
Speaker
Lots of good stuff in there, no matter what we get to. So I'm excited. So to start us off. I'm looking forward to it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What got you interested in this type of work?
Dr. Davis's Academic Journey
00:02:05
Speaker
I started out in undergrad thinking about teaching, actually teaching language and literature and the humanities specifically. So I was focusing on English and Spanish and I ended up getting degrees in English and Spanish. I have always loved language and literature and all of the intersections
00:02:23
Speaker
between them and through some of my coursework in the undergrad in actually English and Spanish, I was able to take some linguistics courses, learn a little bit more about the ways that linguistics and anthropology and some other fields
00:02:37
Speaker
think about language in addition to the way it feels with English, right? Like, think about language. And was also starting to think about my community and look around and see what was available for us and for other Native communities. So I decided to kind of move into linguistics and move into professional masters.
00:02:59
Speaker
on language documentation in the description and through that also a PhD and that allowed me to start working with my tribe and with other folks who are interested in language and language revitalization.
00:03:12
Speaker
and thinking about what language means in our communities, what are the kind of historical and ongoing factors that have impacted our languages and our communities and our speakers. And so it looks like it's kind of scattered on paper, but it actually was a pretty direct line through always, you know, being interested about language and not just kind of language on paper, but the people who use and produce and find joy in language as well.
00:03:40
Speaker
Yeah, so I mean, was that something that you were interested in before college? Was language something that factored into your life when you were young?
Childhood Influence on Linguistics Passion
00:03:49
Speaker
Something that you found exciting? Yeah, I think so. I learned Spanish growing up in part for my mom and in part in school. And so I always loved language. I loved things like poetry and the creative uses of language. I had some really phenomenal teachers in high school who were, you know,
00:04:08
Speaker
teaching English, but also teaching broader humanities classes. And so I always really love, I think, language and what it does and how people play with it and how powerful it can be. I love to read. I still am a huge nerd. I love to read and
00:04:29
Speaker
I don't know, it's participating in a world building that happens through language and through literature and so it was always a passion of mine. I still love that and I still have the days when that's the kind of things that I'm getting to delve into. So yeah, I would say probably there were some indicators early on.
00:04:47
Speaker
that that would be a thing. Yeah. I mean, I remember taking Spanish in high school and I think it was kind of one of the first times where you could really see that like a different culture was more than just the obvious outside differences in a culture. When you'd ask a question and you know, everyone would get annoyed because the teacher's like, well, they just don't say that. Or that's not a, you know, like that's just not how that works in this language. It's like, well, what do you mean? I'm going to just not work. How do they not have a word for this?
PhD Research on Language Documentation
00:05:16
Speaker
Yeah, so I think language is a really interesting, you know.
00:05:22
Speaker
about differences and similarities across communities and languages. And it's a different way to think through and get exposed to things that you might not otherwise. Or I think also when we start to think about our own languages, right? There are things that we kind of suddenly pay attention to when we're thinking about the language that we might take for granted otherwise. And I love this one. All right. So you go to university and then you get your master's and then you get your PhD and then what?
00:05:50
Speaker
Well, my PhD, because my dissertation project was the basis for my first book, and it was working with my tribe. And so, you know, I left Oklahoma to go to grad school for both my master's and my PhD in Colorado, but my dissertation research let me come back home. And so I got to do an internship with the tribe early on, and then later I did a year of field work
00:06:16
Speaker
where I was with my grandfather and got to participate in those things, you know, improve that work and gain those skills. I also kind of figured out that if it was possible, I wanted to, I loved the teaching aspect that I was interested in even as an undergrad. And so I pursued going into higher education in the sense of becoming a professor. So I had a postdoc and then I became an assistant professor here at the University of
00:06:44
Speaker
Illinois seven years ago now, I suppose. And so now I spend a lot of my time teaching and developing courses and then also still doing my research and figuring out ways to bridge
00:06:58
Speaker
the communities I work with and the ethics and the responsibilities there with the students that I teach and the things that are happening online. First, can you tell me more about your PhD project and then the book that came out of it? Your book is Talking Indian Identity and Language Revitalization in the Chickasaw Renaissance. Could you tell us more about... Well, your first book, I should say. Could you tell us more about that project that led to this book?
Community-Specific Language Revitalization
00:07:28
Speaker
Yeah, that came out of, again, kind of working with my community and then also, you know, the things that I was observing and the training that I was getting, and of course, I was taking in linguistics and anthropology in grad school. And so, you know, by the time I was in grad school in the, you know, mid-2000s, so from 2005 until 2013, and a lot of the training that I got and the conversations that I got were either thinking about languages
00:07:56
Speaker
kind of the data of languages and examples from languages where you obviously couldn't see the communities because they were from languages all over the world. And even the discussions of language or violations that I was seeing were focused on, you know, communities that were very different from my community. So, you know, there are really incredible examples of language or violations if we look at Hawaii and if we look at some other communities. But I was noticing that, you know, there were things going on in my community that
00:08:25
Speaker
were different and that weren't being discussed somewhere and so I was interested in starting to think about what are the specifics in my community and not just thinking about language itself in the sense of kind of what what we were recording or writing down but also you know why is this how did we get here in the sense of you know
00:08:46
Speaker
has very few native first language speakers left. At the point when I started my research and working with the community around this topic, I think we have probably between 75 and 100 right now, I think, or when it comes to, so let's just start speaking as children, I think we're at
00:09:07
Speaker
25 or so fewer. And so thinking about the specifics of our community and what was possible or not possible and how that was different from other communities to thinking about the context and the people thinking about the kind of how and why that would make what we're doing possible or even just impacted decisions that were being made that might not be visible to other people who work on the ground. But that also might be really helpful to people
00:09:35
Speaker
who were either an hour down the road or a thousand miles away that, you know, had some similarities. And so thinking about the context really strongly drawing from sister linguistics and linguistic anthropology to think about language and how and why it was working.
00:09:53
Speaker
So that was that was kind of focused. It led me to think about, you know, our speakers and those efforts. It led me really, I was interested really broadly in what was going on. So I think that the chapter that people are most interested by, or in, is a chapter that thinks about the role of teacher in some language revitalization. And that's just from seeing right well,
00:10:17
Speaker
That's what we wear most often, right, jeans and t-shirts back home. And so I'm thinking about, like, what are the roles things like bumper stickers and t-shirts play in some of these movements in our communities? And how does that help us think about language in different ways? So that's, that's where I'm at. A lot of it was kind of responding to what I was seeing or what I was being taught and noticing the differences between the realities for Native back home and what I was reading about in kind
00:10:47
Speaker
So with your PhD and your book, was there recommendations that came out of it that either were able to be applied or that in an ideal world would have been applied in your community?
Insights from Community Language Programs
00:11:02
Speaker
Was there any sort of like
00:11:04
Speaker
changes that happened as a result of this work? Well, you know, I think probably it was the other direction. So one of the things is that I was kind of observing what the community was doing, what our language program was doing, and I learned a lot from them. And in fact, those are things that people were doing on the ground that I talked about in the book where I was able to present to other communities that have been helpful. But, you know, because these are the things that the people in the language program and that our speakers are doing kind of
00:11:34
Speaker
day in and day out and dedicate their lives to it. I don't know that there's anything that I taught them, but they definitely taught me the whole time and I think offered us some opportunities. Yeah, I mean, I think there were a lot of conversations. It was a very, I don't know, easy going kind of thing, but I definitely wasn't there to make suggestions in the sense of having more experience in this than they did. It was me.
00:12:02
Speaker
observing on the ground, what they were doing and why, and really being mindful to ask questions about kind of what was going on and making sure that I understood and knew I was looking at. I think that there are aspects that I've written about that, again, were already things that the community and the language program were doing, but that maybe have increased and just continued in importance
00:12:31
Speaker
through some of the conversations. So, things like the thinking about the use of technology with the app. There's an Apple app and there are all sorts of there's now a little bit of stuff programmed to try and entirely revamped and other scenarios where these are things that I was thinking about and asking them about because they were the ones doing it.
00:12:52
Speaker
and presenting about, and those things have continued. And so if anything, you know, if I was contributing to anything, it's just kind of asking questions and participating in a conversation that continues through the questions that I asked, you know, shape it and shape it that way. But they're definitely the experts in how to do this, in general, and especially in our community.
00:13:12
Speaker
Yeah. So, okay. We're already going to be at a break here in a second. It always goes so fast. But after the break, I'd love to talk more about, you know, you mentioned just there that it has been, you know, what you learned from your community has been something that, you know, you've been able to take and that other communities have found useful. And I know, you know, this is one of the
00:13:39
Speaker
the reasons why I was so excited to get you on this show because we've had people asking for more on language preservation. One person in particular who works for a tribe and their tribe was hoping to do more
00:13:54
Speaker
with language preservation. So you know who you are. And sorry, it took me so long, but finally we're having this conversation.
Tailoring Language Revitalization Efforts
00:14:03
Speaker
Yeah. So just when we get back, I'd love to hear more about, you know, what you learned from these elders that, you know, other communities have found helpful in trying to do their own language revitalization programs. So on that note, we will be back here in a moment.
00:14:22
Speaker
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Speaker
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00:15:43
Speaker
And we are back. So I just asked you a very long question, but basically what other communities have found helpful when you've been working on language revitalization, you know, based on your experience with your, your PhD.
00:16:01
Speaker
Sure. I think that some of the things that are helpful is, I mean, in some cases, just knowing that other people are doing the same thing and have the same efforts, right? So you're not alone in it. It's often, you know, working in a community can, it can feel like a slightly isolated effort. So knowing other people have been and are trying to do the same thing in itself can just be helpful.
00:16:24
Speaker
I think one of the biggest takeaways from communities is often that whatever they decide doesn't have to look like what the community down the road or the community they've heard from looks like. So you can really tailor things to match the resources that you have and the goals and the needs
00:16:44
Speaker
of your specific community and that's what's going to make the best program. There are fads in learning and language revitalization and whether it's immersion schools or certain types of instruction and that might be a good fit for you, but it may not. Just because it's not the whatever everybody else is doing, I think the more tailored it is and flexible the project is, the better off it's going to be. In fact,
00:17:14
Speaker
One of my favorite things that I have both read and I think as a philosophy that's really helpful is a piece by another native linguistic anthropologist who works on language revitalization. It's really challenging that idea of success or failure. It's a piece by Barbara Meek.
00:17:30
Speaker
And it's that, you know, you want to be kind of always adjusting and evaluating and seeing how you can approach things, but it's not the case of like that you are succeeding or failing in the sense this is this is a long time effort or long term effort. They're going to be things that work and things that don't work. And sometimes you can't see the results of what you're doing in the outcome for five, 10, 15 years. And so just letting it be something that is flexible and really you can tailor it to your communities.
00:18:00
Speaker
is going to be the best approach. And I think it's good in terms of having a program or efforts that really are suited to your community and then also help counter some of the difficulties you run into in trying to think of evaluating the sense of like, okay, have we fixed language endangerment in
00:18:19
Speaker
Well, that doesn't happen, right? So trying to get out of that mindset. I think people speak really strongly to the importance of emotion and connection between people, between places, people in places and the language and their memories or kind of the stories of their community. And so anything you do that celebrates that and recognizes it is going to be
00:18:44
Speaker
an important piece of it, it's going to let people approach it in a way that I think is ultimately more meaningful. And that's often a direct counter to the ways that languages may be taught in school, right? So approaching language learning as kind of a second language approach, that doesn't always resonate with people in the ways that thinking about why they want to learn the language and learning
00:19:10
Speaker
how to tell a story that they might have heard their grandmother use, right? Or a song that they heard as kids or have always wanted to learn. So again, I think it's kind of shaking off what the models that we might have around language learning and really figuring out what works for folks and what they're hoping to get out of language. That overall is part of helping to
00:19:33
Speaker
change and counter how the language is valued.
Ideological Shifts in Indigenous Language Valuation
00:19:36
Speaker
The U.S. government for centuries and especially for very robustly over the last 100 years has really worked to devalue Native American indigenous languages. It has worked to
00:19:50
Speaker
sever us from access to those languages. It has worked to shame people who spoke those languages. And so it's actually a pretty radical act just to say this language is valuable. Our language is beautiful, right? We value people who are
00:20:07
Speaker
our speakers, we value people who are learning the language or using the language. And so, again, those are more ideological shifts, but they're actually pretty radical if we think about the longer context of how we got to these moments of where our languages are now.
00:20:23
Speaker
It's a way also of, I think, including and valuing the elders and other individuals in our community who have the language and who have held on to the language for communities that still have the language spoken in ways that bring them in and really center and value them. And I think that's an important piece of the project.
00:20:44
Speaker
and it's related to taking a kind of community and family approach. What I've noticed is that people tend to stick with the language if it's connected to either previous generations or future generations. So a lot of people are learning the language because
00:20:59
Speaker
Again, it's connected to their parents or their grandparents or people that memories they had as a kid, but also people are often motivated because they want the next generation. Either it's their own relatives, their children, their nieces and nephews, or other family members, or people who are teachers and instructors of youth, that that's often a motivation.
00:21:25
Speaker
the language as an important piece of community and connection can be a stronger motivator, I think, than some of the other reasons why folks might learn a language. You know, if you are
00:21:39
Speaker
being told to learn a language because it's going to help you become a rich international business person, they are probably not encouraging you to learn one of our languages. And so the motivation is going to be different. I don't know that learning our languages, you know, it can be a career, right? It can be a job for folks, but I don't know that it makes anyone a millionaire. So the motivation is different and that we need to recognize that, but it opens up a lot of other approaches.
00:22:06
Speaker
And I mentioned, you know, thinking about other ways of structuring language and learning and language use. So I know communities that have involved multiple generations, so they have maybe a family that includes two to three generations learning together, that that's often a really robust
00:22:25
Speaker
way that people have reported back saying, you know, I really did learn a lot out of
Generational Impact of Language Exposure
00:22:29
Speaker
it. And it means that they aren't learning the language in a class and then going home and not using the language. So it allows that kind of continuity to happen. And then one of the things I think that was just an interesting thing that came out of the fact that my the research that went into my book spanned across
00:22:49
Speaker
Gosh, I mean more than 10 years is noticing the kind of long-term impacts of things that I think we wouldn't necessarily think of as having major impact. So things that were kind of passive language use, so like signs that people had up in their buildings or around town that over, you know,
00:23:09
Speaker
You see it once or twice, it's around, you don't think that much of it. But over time, it actually transformed people's experiences so that, you know, after a while, people had been seeing the language and reading the language now for five, 10 years, and kind of everybody had seen the language, whereas before, almost no one had, right? It wasn't available to people. And it was happening in a really passive way. They weren't going somewhere to read something in the language, they just happened to be at our tribal hospital.
00:23:38
Speaker
or they just happen to go to like the rec center or see it on somebody's t-shirt. And so those kinds of passive language absorption and language learning are pretty impactful over the long run. And they just kind of shift what people's experiences with the language are. And I'm often struck by the fact that
00:23:56
Speaker
One of the, you know, context that I looked at was the Tucson Nation has a kids' language club, which is really popular. And it has little ones, I think, gosh, I don't know how young they are, five or maybe a little younger, all the way up to kind of teens. And they're learning the language, doing fun activities on the weekends. But one of the things that happened over that kind of 10-year span was that little ones that were five when I started doing,
00:24:21
Speaker
thinking about this and doing research are now 15, right? And so then it was an ability to see that there's a generation, a new generation that has actually grown up with these kind of language programs in place and have grown up kind of always seeing the language around and reading it and interacting with it in that way.
00:24:42
Speaker
And that's a radical change from my generation and definitely generations older than me. So the impact is sometimes probably kind of frustratingly might take longer or come in places where you aren't expecting it to, but that it may be just as impactful as thinking about setting up a class that people are meeting in and everybody dedicating their time. And so I think that's one of the things that has been,
00:25:12
Speaker
the more surprising impacts, I think, are those kind of slow burn kind of results and slow change that you don't see until 5, 10, 15 years later. Are there any projects that you've worked on since then that you've been particularly excited about or would want to share with this audience, I guess?
00:25:33
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I guess it just depends on the types of projects. So one of the things that I am very excited to get to do is I teach every other summer at what's called the Collaborative Language Institute. And it started when I was a grad student and the goal is to train
00:25:49
Speaker
Academics, if they're interested in this type of work, but especially community members and how to do the language documentation and revitalization and language policy and change ourselves. And it's a really cool project. It's an international program. So we get folks from throughout the U.S., we get folks from Canada.
00:26:08
Speaker
And then we also get people really from kind of around the world. And I often teach a course on language activism. I co-teach it with a member of the Kisi or Busi community, Kennedy Bosire. It's a really cool opportunity to see these kinds of skill sets and this type of work that often you had to go somewhere else. Like if you're me, you have to go to another state and pay a lot of money to learn those skill sets and instead see them
00:26:37
Speaker
operating in a way and being offered in a way that's accessible to community members and accessible to people to then bring back to our communities, right, to not have to leave the community to do to be able to also have conversations across lots of different contexts in order to understand what's possible and how you might want to approach things. So that's in terms of projects, it's one that I really love. And there are similar programs in Canada and I think increasingly different parts
00:27:05
Speaker
of the world but I think that's something that I'm always really excited about like how do I take things that I gained through a formal education process and redistribute them and think about right like who has access to things. I've gotten to do some work
00:27:22
Speaker
to a current project I'm working on is one that is trying to get information about all of the language revitalization programs in the country for now and put all of that information together in one place and to actually put it, visualize it in a map
00:27:39
Speaker
so that when we're interested in who else is doing this work, where are they doing this work, is there a community whose language is related to mine and what are they doing? So really trying to take this information that's not available, that's often hard to get and hard to locate and pull it all together in one place to create some resources and connect everybody who's doing this work so that we aren't reinventing the wheel every time so that communities aren't
00:28:09
Speaker
Well, one, feeling isolated is a thing that comes up quite often. And that the, you know, if communities have resources, or they have gone through processes, that that kind of information is available to anyone else who's doing this. It happens, I think the model that I think of is because back home in Oklahoma, we have so many tribes, and there's often a lot of conversation and cooperation across Native communities in ways that I think are really helpful, you can call up
00:28:35
Speaker
you know, a community next door or one a couple hours away and say, oh, I know you guys have had a, you know, a preschool immersion program. What did that look like? Or hey, we need to have some flashcards, but you know, we don't want it. We don't have enough money to put into it. Can we have the art that you used? Right. So lots of kind of collaborative approaches. So the mapping project we're doing right now is really the, the goal is to
00:29:00
Speaker
really highlight and recognize all of these community level initiatives to shift the narrative that says that these are efforts that are coming out of academic spaces when really they're coming out of communities who have been and are doing this work in really profound ways and that also like house kind of that information altogether so that people don't have to spend their time that they would be spending teaching language or doing language documentation or whatever they want to be doing in their communities
00:29:29
Speaker
searching for it, right, to do a little bit of that legwork for folks. So those are my two projects I suppose I'd highlight for now. Yeah, that's amazing.
Mapping Language Revitalization Programs
00:29:40
Speaker
Because that's also nice because that's resources for people that they can take what you're talking about and
00:29:45
Speaker
apply it. My next question, I think I want to ask about the way people talk about language and language revitalization, the way people talk about it. Is there ways that you would like it to be reframed? Or if there's things that when people talk about language revitalization that you wish that they would
00:30:07
Speaker
think about it in a slightly different way. There are a couple of different things that come to mind. One is that I think it's something that I hinted at in the last question towards the end.
Reframing Narratives in Language Revitalization
00:30:18
Speaker
There's a tendency within media or academic circles to credit and really center and highlight the
00:30:28
Speaker
the white linguist or the outside person who came in and saved a language or convinced a community to do whatever. I think that's a really tired narrative and it's never really representing what's going on. In terms of how people are talking about language revitalization, being mindful of who's doing the work and where it's coming from and centering the communities themselves, there are a number of discussions that come out of
00:30:56
Speaker
communities themselves when we think about different communities and what it means. One of them is that people often use terms like language death or extinction. And that actually is a really, it's coming out of like a biological, ecological framework, but it's not a great one for communities or languages
00:31:15
Speaker
in general, for various reasons. I don't know how well it works. I mean, it's complicated even in ecological terms, but there are communities that have been declared dead, where their languages are dead, more extinct, that in fact have been able to revitalize them, and so that have been able to raise new speakers and
00:31:35
Speaker
You know, create robust language programs and language communities and so the better framing that people have a couple of different ideas but one of them that I think is the standard now is to think about languages as dormant and that can reawaken that allows for a possibility for these things to be reclaimed that allows people to
00:31:55
Speaker
reconnect with language and not have it be undead, not have it be zombie-ish, right? So I'm thinking of Wesley Leonard, who's a Miami scholar, has done a lot of work on this. And because Miami is a language that was dormant and is now spoken again. So of course, this is quite personal to have someone tell you your language is dead, right? I think thinking about the language we use is important.
00:32:20
Speaker
I am quite passionate about the ways that people are framing, always assuming an intonative people into culture. So there's a scholar, Jeannie O'Brien, who's done great work thinking about the framing of last Indians and the fact that the last of the Mohicans and the last of the
00:32:38
Speaker
It's always the last, right? And people are kind of always counting down and assuming we're going to disappear and die. And they have been what her work shows so well as they have been since the 16th, 1700s, right? This is a thing that happens. And that's why it's part of why non-native people always seem to be a little surprised to find out we're still alive.
00:32:58
Speaker
they're like, oh, they're still Indians. Oh, you know. And so those kinds of narratives. And what I found is that that narrative extends to thinking about languages. So there's a lot of media coverage about last speakers and counting down how many speakers are left in ways that I think, one, never talk about why we're in this situation, right? This is never a conversation about
00:33:23
Speaker
boarding schools. It's never a conversation about, you know, not recognition tribal sovereignty. And it's also, you know, it counts down in ways that assume there wouldn't be people who are partial speakers or multilingual or the really complicated and exciting ways that language actually works in our communities. So that anytime it's a kind of counting down or
00:33:46
Speaker
or talking about natives or our cultures as disappearing any second, I think is something to be wary of and mindful about the work it does. It's one thing when we have conversations in our own communities about the situation or what we need to prioritize and why. And I think that's another thing when you have a kind of a broad media coming out of the settler colonial context where they're having those conversations, right?
00:34:15
Speaker
So those are some of the ones that come to mind kind of automatically thinking about why is this thing circulating and what kind of story is it telling about it. And I guess, you know, that discussion about the last speaker's part, one of the things that's so notable to me
00:34:31
Speaker
is that language revitalization programs have been going on in various native and indigenous communities for decades now, right? Sometimes 50 years if we're looking at Hawaii, and yet there isn't the same interest in storytelling about that. There's no, there's not the same stories about the new speakers and the languages that have, and communities, right, that are really shifting
00:34:57
Speaker
what that situation looks like. And so I think there's a preference for a particular story about natives and about natives through our languages that we don't see the reverse and inverse of. Yeah, absolutely. And on that note, we are already at our second break. Okay. So we will be right back.
Intersection of Language, Gender, and Sexuality
00:35:20
Speaker
Hello, it's Jim Eagle. Please join us for the Bay Area American Indian Two-Spirit Society's 11th annual Two-Spirit Powel In-Person, or online this year at the San Francisco Fort Mason Center on Saturday, February 12th, 2022. Gore Dance at noon and Grand Entry begins at 1 p.m. There will be over 60 vendors selling all types of indigenous products and crafts. Powel dancers from all over the U.S. will be competing in contests all day long. We'll also be having several delicious fried bread taco vendors. For more information, go to baits.org. That's B-A-A-I-T-S.org. COVID protocols will be in effect. See you there.
00:35:53
Speaker
Okay, we are back from our break and we've been talking a lot about language revitalization, but a lot of your work ties into language and other topics. During the segment, I want to make sure we get to language and gender and sexuality and NAGPRA and your ethics works, but let's start with the book.
00:36:16
Speaker
Um, so your, your second book is called queer excursions, re-theorizing binaries and language, gender, and sexuality. Um, so I'm really interested, you know, again, we've talked over the two segments about language revitalization, but I'm curious to hear how you apply linguistic anthropology to these other topics. So can you tell our guests more about the second book?
00:36:45
Speaker
Sure. So that book, it's an edited volume that I co-edited with colleagues from grad school, Waltzman and Joshua Raklaw, and it is thinking about, I think, assumptions of binaries and how do we approach language and setting them that way, particularly binaries of gender and sexuality rights. We have things like
00:37:06
Speaker
male or female or heterosexual or homosexual or cisgender or trans. Lots of things that are set up as kind of two oppositional, non-overlapping categories and only two categories. And so that book came out in 2014 and was really each chapter in it.
00:37:24
Speaker
is thinking about that from a different approach, thinking about in a different context. So there are chapters from various communities and contexts around the world and really, I guess, challenging us to not just throw binaries out, right? There are reasons why for communities in different moments they might be valuable or important, but also to recognize that they are often kind of ideological or theoretical constructs, right, that are happening
00:37:52
Speaker
sometimes they're grammatical, any number of things. So it's really thinking about them and that approach and how we can approach studying gender and sexuality and keeping them in mind and not kind of blindly either reinforcing them or throwing them away.
00:38:07
Speaker
And my chapter in that is part of a longer standing project that I have. I'm thinking about language, gender, and sexuality, particularly in Native American and indigenous contexts in the US. That stems and is connected to my research with Two-Spirit activism and Two-Spirit communities. For any listeners who aren't familiar, Two-Spirit is a complicated term and teasing it apart could be its own, well,
00:38:34
Speaker
Many podcasts so more than anything to spirit as a it's kind of an umbrella term in the sense that it's obviously an English term that's used to refer and to and recognize that there are a lot of identities and practices within native communities that don't fit.
00:38:52
Speaker
neatly into the idea coming out of white Western European and Christian models that say that gender is binary, it's only male or female, and it's based on a notion of biological sex, or the assumption that everybody is heterosexual, or various things like that. So it's often the two-spirit community is often kind of
00:39:15
Speaker
quickly and identified as kind of LGBTQ natives that doesn't get to nearly the most interesting or complex parts of it. But one of the pieces of that is thinking about like where language plays into it and why if you are studying language revitalization or linguistics and language inner sexuality that language revitalization is often assumed to be a totally separate
00:39:41
Speaker
topic of research or interest, language, gender, and sexuality. Now it's a really interesting component for me as a Two-Spirit and queer Native woman because I was at these Two-Spirit gatherings and events and seeing Indigenous languages used all the time and thinking, you know, why is it that these are presumed to be separate topics and things that you wouldn't discuss together?
00:40:06
Speaker
and wouldn't be relevant to discussions of language revitalization. And that's also helped me really start to think about why are we not talking more robustly about things like kinship and gender and relationality in some of the language revitalization conversations.
00:40:25
Speaker
How do we make sure that language revitalization is inclusive to all of our community members and that's not reinforcing these kind of colonial ideas or causing people to not be a part of our communities in general and in language efforts?
00:40:41
Speaker
more specifically. And of course, one of the coolest things about, well, there are so many cool things about our languages, but there are words in our languages and ways of expressing and describing people that are far beyond those
00:40:57
Speaker
binaries that we keep seeing reproduced, right? So you have languages like Chickasaw that doesn't have a grammatical gender and so you don't have pronouns that are for he, she, right? You don't have things like in Spanish or French where each noun would be marked for being masculine or feminine or in some languages
00:41:16
Speaker
uh neuter and so really taking a moment to think about too how our languages can guide us through that process of of reconnecting and really cherishing the the ways our communities approached gender and sexuality and kinship relationality to each other and to ourselves as a thing to study so that's how i i tend to think about that the cool thing about
00:41:40
Speaker
two-spirit gatherings and thinking about it through the lens of that community and that realm of activism is that it's inherently multi-tribal, not pan-tribal, there's an important distinction, right? Multi-tribal space. So what we see are how indigenous languages
00:41:56
Speaker
how do people use indigenous languages in a multi-tribal space? And what I've seen is very parallel to like a powwow society, or if you're on a campus, the native student organizations, or even like an urban Indian center where you have norms of language use that are also probably pretty similar to context where you'd have lots of tribes in a small area, right? Where people learn how to say hello and thank you, and those types of words in other people's languages.
00:42:24
Speaker
And that language use is not claiming that identity for yourself, right? If I say thank you to somebody back home or hello in say Cherokee, I'm not claiming to be Cherokee through using the language. I'm in fact acknowledging that they are Cherokee by using it. And so I think it's a great way too for us to
00:42:42
Speaker
Think about a context that has been under discussed or not discussed in a field like linguistic anthropology as it relates because of it relates to gender and sexuality, but use it as a lens to turn back and say, okay, what else are we not seeing? And that includes multi-tribal spaces. It includes how are indigenous languages being used and revitalized in urban context, right? Because that doesn't look exactly the same as rural Oklahoma.
00:43:07
Speaker
And so I love to see where all of the things are actually threaded together, even though they've often been assumed to be separate. Early on, it seemed like they were two wildly separate projects. But the longer I sit with it and think about it and think with other people about them, the more I see that they're really strongly woven together. And that's a pretty exciting area for me to continue to see those kinds of connections.
00:43:33
Speaker
Yeah. Okay. Well, this very, obviously very easily could have been its own podcast episode. And I know that there's a couple of you listening who are going to be very sad at me right now because
00:43:49
Speaker
You know who you are and I want to make sure we get to some other stuff. But yeah, if you're interested in learning more about these topics, obviously Dr. Davis has articles in this book and different resources. And then also check out the museum
00:44:05
Speaker
representation and intersectionality episode of Heritage Voices. That's episode 24, which also talks about some of these same issues. So sorry guys, obviously I could really keep talking about this for a lot longer, but I do want to make sure we get to talking about your work that looks
NAGPRA and Repatriation Efforts
00:44:26
Speaker
at both language
00:44:28
Speaker
NAGPRA, repatriation, those topics. So yeah, so let's move on to that area of your work now. So yeah, currently I am pretty heavily involved in the NAGPRA work at my university. And in some ways it's new and in some ways it's connected to things that I had been interested in before.
00:44:51
Speaker
So I am at a university and like a lot of universities we have some room to work. There's a lot of work that needs to happen around ensuring that any of the ancestors that are on my campus or other types of objects and collections that need to go home to communities are going home to communities and that no matter what we're working collaboratively with tribes. So I started working on that effort
00:45:15
Speaker
on my campus in 2000 and I guess it was 2017 and so we now have on campus a campus-wide NAGPRA office and we have a full-time NAGPRA officer who's doing really fantastic work and so it's really that happened in January of last year so we're we're working on getting those efforts off the ground we're working on figuring out as a campus
00:45:38
Speaker
not just how do we comply with this law and the specifics of the law, but how do we really rework how we're doing things on campus so that research that involves Native people and Indigenous people is done collaboratively with those communities, right, and with those individuals. And so that takes up quite a bit of my time currently. And it's obviously, it's important work. It's work that just
00:46:04
Speaker
came about because I was on a campus and it needed to happen, right? And it's not the kind of work that I think you can walk away from in good conscience. So it's a thing I've taken up. It's required training in NAGPRA and other types of things. But it's also been a way of thinking about the kinds of areas where I was already interested in these topics or the places where indigenous and collaborative approaches that I got through thinking about how to do this with language.
00:46:33
Speaker
are relevant to any other type of process with indigenous research and especially with things like magpra and repatriation. Early on it was clear both for my community and others that there are lots of language material. I would assume that like even as much as 75% or more of the kind of linguistic and cultural documentation materials
00:46:55
Speaker
some of it's as old as 200 years ago and some of it was collected five years ago, right, is not available to our communities and so they sit on the, it sits on the shelves of, you know, professors' offices or in libraries or in archives and our communities don't know where it is and they don't have access to it and sometimes even if they know where it is they're not allowed to access it.
00:47:19
Speaker
And so that was already something I was interested in. How do we find out where these things are? How do we make it so that the communities themselves have access to it? And so they have it. It plays an important role in language revitalization, but it's also just a kind of inherently ethical and right thing to do to let the communities and the families and the people from whom these important pieces of community have been taken from right to get them back and to allow people to have access.
00:47:45
Speaker
And so that transfers really directly to those processes of repatriation. Under NAGPRA thinking about museum collections or archaeological collections, right? How do we make sure people know where things are located and that they're being housed and treated respectfully and that they get back?
00:48:02
Speaker
and that nothing's being done with them that the communities haven't agreed to. And so that's connected. I think my background in language and linguistic anthropology also helps me really keep in mind that the idea that
00:48:18
Speaker
something like the documentation of a song or a story is inherently different than an object or even an ancestor that's being housed. If it's our songs, our stories, our languages, those are really important to us and we often have
00:48:34
Speaker
In many communities, we have an obligation or an expectation to care for them. They were taken under the same circumstances, often through the same methods and by the same people. An individual that's considered one of the founders of linguistic anthropology, and in fact, in North America, Boaz, was responsible for taking Native American remains while he was collecting language and cultural documentation.
00:49:02
Speaker
He collected them without permission from communities and then used the selling of those remains to fund his research. And so I think kind of breaking down the assumption that linguistic and cultural materials are inherently different than something like a museum or archaeological collection or ancestors, often as a reason not to repatriate them or not because they don't fall under NAGPRA, is a way to apply and a place to make an intervention from
00:49:30
Speaker
ways of doing things rather than a kind of Western institutional approach or US institutional approach. So thinking about
00:49:40
Speaker
what the connections are and like what would an alternative strategy be that actually assumes that anything that's come from a community should be you know you should work in collaboration with communities to repatriate and to allow access to and and these are exciting areas that I think happen sometimes in subfields or particular institutions but they're not always brought together in conversation and so the the fact that I am doing the NAGPRA work now allows me to sit back and think about it in a
00:50:09
Speaker
a slightly broader context. Because, of course, in our communities, they're all connected in the sense that the responsibilities to objects, to beings, to ancestors are connected to language practices. They are connected to spiritual and ceremonial practices. And a lot of times, that linguistic and cultural documentation was of our ceremonies and of our important, the piece of cultural patrimony in our communities.
00:50:37
Speaker
So they are connected. It's taken a slightly different approach, I guess, because of the importance of recognizing and really prioritizing, making sure that our ancestors get home. And so it's not to say that linguistic materials are less important, but there can be some, if it's necessary to prioritize, to really think about those distinctions and make sure that
00:51:05
Speaker
that we're trying to do everything as broadly and holistically as possible while still prioritizing the things that are of utmost urgency to our communities like getting ancestors home. Yeah, I hadn't quite thought about it in exactly that way before, so that's really interesting. We have just a few minutes left, so I just wanted to see if there was anything that you still feel like you'd like to share with our audience.
Holistic Approach to Academic Work
00:51:35
Speaker
anything that you didn't get to yet. You know, but before we started recording, one of the things we were talking about was the variety of approaches and topics and projects, I guess, that I've worked on, but I think is pretty typical of Native people in academic spaces and maybe even other underrepresented
00:51:58
Speaker
faculty and staff and students and I suppose in just thinking about all of the topics that we've talked about that that in many ways kind of represents a different approach to
00:52:11
Speaker
to academic work and maybe to research in general, to assume connections and that each project may look separate or be different. But then as you work in it and as you have conversations, you can see the connections between them. And so that keeping things easily delineated between academic discipline or topic is actually a pretty generative and exciting approach to things.
00:52:38
Speaker
at least from my perspective and maybe as if there are people who are considering what to study or how to approach the things that they're interested in, that that can be a way to hold all of the things that are important to them rather than having to feel like they have to choose between them. Right. Well, and even between your academic work and your creative work, you know, like that there's a lot to play with there as well.
00:53:02
Speaker
Yeah, I think anything that allows us to be our whole selves and to bring all the things that we experience and are interested in is only going to make each aspect of our work and our life better. And so, in part, it may involve resisting that insistence from whatever corners that it comes from, right, that you make choices or that you only do one thing or that you have to choose between research and community or
00:53:27
Speaker
academic work and creative work, that isn't necessarily the case. So to hold on to anything that allows you to keep all of those things at play and as part of your life. Love it. Well, all right. Thank you so much for coming on today. I personally really learned a huge amount and I hope that everyone listening did as well. Well, thanks again for the opportunity to have this chat and conversation. It's been great talking with you.
00:53:57
Speaker
Thanks for listening to the Heritage Voices podcast. You can find show notes at www.archaeologypodcastnetwork.com forward slash Heritage Voices. Please subscribe to the show on iTunes, Stitcher, or the Google Music Store. Also, if you like the show, please share with your friends or write us a review. If you have any questions, comments, or show suggestions, please reach out to me
00:54:27
Speaker
at jessica at livingheritageanthropology.org or you can find me on facebook through living heritage anthropology or on twitter at livingheritagea. As always thank you to Lyle Blanquia and Jason Nez for their collaboration on our
00:54:55
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV Traveling America, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, and the Archaeology Podcast Network, and was edited by Chris Webster. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.
00:55:18
Speaker
Thanks again for listening to this episode and for supporting the Archaeology Podcast Network. If you want these shows to keep going, consider becoming a member for just $7.99 US dollars a month. That's cheaper than a venti quad eggnog latte. Go to arkpodnet.com slash members for more info.