Language Planning and Policy in Native America: History, Theory, Praxis
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Language Planning and Policy in Native America: History, Theory, Praxis
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Overview
Comprehensive in scope and rich in detail, this book explores language planning, language education, and language policy for diverse Native American peoples across time, space, and place. Based on long-term collaborative and ethnographic work with Native American communities and schools, the book examines the imposition of colonial language policies against the fluorescence of contemporary community-driven efforts to revitalize threatened mother tongues. Here, readers will meet those who are on the frontlines of Native American language revitalization every day. As their efforts show, even languages whose last native speaker is gone can be reclaimed through family-, community-, and school-based language planning. Offering a critical-theory view of language policy, and emphasizing Indigenous sovereignties and the perspectives of revitalizers themselves, the book shows how language regenesis is undertaken in social practice, the role of youth in language reclamation, the challenges posed by dominant language policies, and the prospects for Indigenous language and culture continuance current revitalization efforts hold.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781847698650 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Multilingual Matters Ltd. |
| Publication date: | 02/19/2013 |
| Series: | Bilingual Education & Bilingualism , #90 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 280 |
| File size: | 7 MB |
About the Author
Teresa L. McCarty is the George F. Kneller Chair in Education and Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Alice Wiley Snell Professor Emerita of Education Policy Studies at Arizona State University. An educational anthropologist and applied linguist, she has worked with Indigenous education programs throughout North America. Her books include A Place To Be Navajo–Rough Rock and the Struggle for Self-Determination in Indigenous Schooling (2002); Language, Literacy, and Power in Schooling (2005); 'To Remain an Indian'€: Lessons in Democracy from a Century of Native American Education (with K. T. Lomawaima, 2006), and Ethnography and Language Policy (Routledge, 2011).
Teresa L. McCarty is an educational anthropologist and applied linguist who lives and works in the homelands of the Gabrielino-Tongva, Tovaangar. At the University of California, Los Angeles, she is Distinguished Professor and G.F. Kneller Chair in Education and Anthropology, and Faculty in American Indian Studies. A member of the National Academy of Education and a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association and the International Centre for Language Revitalisation, she is the former editor of the American Educational Research Journal and the current coeditor of the Journal of American Indian Education. Her books include A Place To Be Navajo—Rough Rock and the Struggle for Self-Determination in Indigenous Schooling, “To Remain an Indian”—Lessons in Democracy from a Century of Native American Education (with K.T. Lomawaima), Language Planning and Policy in Native America, Indigenous Youth and Multilingualism (with L.T. Wyman and S.E. Nicholas), Indigenous Language Revitalization in the Americas (with S.M. Coronel-Molina), A World of Indigenous Languages: Politics, Pedagogies, and Prospects for Language Reclamation (with S.E. Nicholas and G. Wigglesworth), and Critical Youth Research in Education—Methodologies of Praxis and Care (with A.I. Ali). She is currently engaged in a multi-university, US-wide study of Indigenous-language immersion schooling funded by the Spencer Foundation.
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Language Planning and Policy in Native America
History, Theory, Praxis
By Teresa L. McCarty
Multilingual Matters
Copyright © 2013 Teresa L. McCartyAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84769-865-0
CHAPTER 1
Contextualizing Native American LPP: Legal–Political, Demographic and Sociolinguistic Foundations
The very persistence of viable languages speaks immensely to the vitality of Native life in the United States. Medicine, 2001: 52
I begin this chapter with this statement by Lakota anthropologist, educator and language activist Beatrice Medicine because she situates the dynamic cultural context for Native American language planning and policy so perceptively and well. Despite 'generations of pressure to change', Medicine argues, the 'nexus of sociolinguistic manifestations' within diverse Native communities persists – a sign, she adds, that Native cultures continue to thrive (Medicine, 2001: 51–52).
This chapter provides an overview of diverse Native American communities and the 'sociolinguistic nexus' at their heart. I begin with tribal sovereignty, a defining status of Native peoples that implicates critical questions of identity, authority and self-determination (Wilkins & Lomawaima, 2001: 4), including rights to language. This is followed by a demographic and socio-linguistic sketch of contemporary Native American communities and linguistic groups. Within this discussion, I introduce readers to the ways in which Native American languages have been described numerically, classified linguistically and 'staged' in terms of vitality and endangerment. I stress, however, that the numbers and classificatory schemas are, as multiple scholars have noted (including those who posit the numbers and classifications), imperfect representations of what constitutes 'speakerhood' that greatly simplify the complexity of language use and change 'on the ground'. That complexity is addressed in detail in subsequent chapters. Because enumeration and classification are common practices, both in the scholarly literature and in public discourse on language endangerment, it is important that we understand them and what they are attempting to do. The chapter concludes with illustrations of Native American language use in the public sphere, including education, arguably the most significant – if contested – domain for Native language use historically and today.
First Peoples, First Principles: Tribal Sovereignty
Understanding Native American language planning and policy (LPP) requires, first and foremost, understanding the unique legal and political status of Native peoples in the United States. As indicated in the Preface, the term Native American encompasses diverse American Indian, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian peoples. Although each of these peoples has encountered the US sociopolitical system in different ways, all are descendants 'from the populations which inhabited the country ... at the time of ... colonization ... and ... irrespective of their legal status, retain some or all of their own social, economic, cultural, and political institutions' – the internationally recognized definition of Indigenous peoples (International Labour Organisation, 1989, Article 1.1.b).
From a legal–political perspective, at the core of this collective identity is the principle of tribal sovereignty: the 'right of a people to self-government, self-determination, and self-education', including the right to linguistic and cultural expression according to local languages and norms (Lomawaima & McCarty, 2006: 10). Like the sovereignty of US states and the federal government, tribal sovereignty is not absolute; the political realities of tribal–federal–state relations, 'competing jurisdictions, local histories, circumscribed land bases, and overlapping citizenships', all constrain, but do not negate, the exercise of sovereignty (Wilkins & Lomawaima, 2001: 5).
Examples of tribes' sovereign powers include 'the right to determine their membership, administer justice through tribal courts, govern their citizens, and regulate the use of their land base' (Lomawaima & McCarty, 2006: 10). At the federal level, recognition of tribal sovereignty in the linguistic and educational realm includes the 1990/1992 Native American Languages Act and the 2006 Esther Martinez Native American Languages Preservation Act (both discussed in Chapter 3). At the state level, Indigenous linguistic and educational sovereignty is reflected in such policies as Hawai'i's constitutional recognition of Hawaiian as co-official with English (Wilson, 2013 [in press]); Montana's 1999/2005 Indian Education for All Act requiring public schools to implement programs that fulfill the state's constitutional commitment 'to the preservation of [American Indians'] cultural heritage' (Ngai & Koehn, 2010: 50–51); New Mexico's Indian Education Act, designed to increase the number of Native American teachers and school leaders and provide resources for Native language and culture instruction in the state's public schools (Jojola et al., 2010); Arizona's 2012 partnership between tribal governments and the state department of education to enable tribal control of Native-language teacher certification; and Alaska's 2012 Senate Bill 130, which establishes an Alaska Native Language Preservation and Advisory Council to assess the status of Alaska Native languages and make recommendations to the governor and state legislature on new or reorganized language education programs. At the tribal level, educational and linguistic sovereignty is expressed in tribal language policies, education codes and legislation such as the 2005 Navajo Sovereignty in Education Act (discussed in Chapter 4).
Tribal sovereignty predates the US Constitution and is therefore inherent (Wilkins & Lomawaima, 2001: 5). Tribal sovereignty is also recognized in the U.S. Constitution, which grants Congress the power to regulate commerce with foreign nations and tribes, and authorizes the President to negotiate treaties with foreign nations and Indian nations. From the first encounters between Native peoples and Europeans, the two groups operated on a government-to-government basis, with the US government acting toward Native peoples 'much as it would with foreign nations, using a mixture of diplomacy, treaties, and warfare' (Snipp, 2002: 2). (A similar government-to-government relationship exists between First Nations, Inuit and Metís peoples and Canada's federal, provincial and territorial governments.)
Between 1779 and 1871, the US government signed more than 400 treaties with American Indian tribes, of which 120 had education-related stipulations. Through those treaties, Native peoples relinquished certain rights and possessions – most critically, land – in exchange for certain federal guarantees such as education and health and other social services. The tribal–federal relationship was subsequently formalized in federal legislation, judicial decisions and the various agencies charged with overseeing 'Indian affairs', including the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) within the US Department of the Interior. This is the basis of the tribal–federal relationship; it is a legally and morally codified relationship of trust responsibility that is both voluntary and contractual, and entails the 'federal responsibility to protect or enhance tribal assets [including linguistic and cultural assets] through policy decisions and management actions' (Wilkins & Lomawaima, 2001: 65; emphasis in original). It is an obligation and a legal–political relationship unlike that of any other US ethnolinguistic group (Lomawaima, 2003).
Over the years, the federal government has repeatedly violated its trust responsibility, and tribal and federal powers have frequently been at odds. Further pitting the 'uneven ground' (Wilkins & Lomawaima, 2001) of tribal sovereignty is the fact that the sovereignty of some tribes is recognized by states but not by the federal government; some tribes (e.g. many in California) have been denied recognition as sovereigns by both states and the federal government and are thereby disenfranchised from trust-related government services. Native Hawaiians, whose internationally recognized sovereign kingdom was illegally overthrown by the US government in 1893 and who were not officially incorporated into the US political system until Hawaiian statehood in 1959, are still fighting for federal recognition of their sovereign status. Alaska Natives, who include American Indians and Aleut, Inupiat and Yup'ik peoples, also share a distinct experience vis-à-vis state and federal governments, and some ethnic groups indigenous to Alaska (e.g. Siberian Yup'ik and Aleut peoples) have members in present-day Russia. Nevertheless, all Native Americans share a distinct status as Indigenous peoples and a singular relationship with the US government in which culture, language, politics and legal status are inextricably linked (Lomawaima & McCarty, 2006: 7). As we will see in the chapters that follow, the tribal–federal relationship has shaped and continues to shape the possibilities for Native American language education in profound and far-reaching ways.
Peoples, Populations and Lands
No one can know for certain the numbers of Native peoples or language varieties present in the Western hemisphere when Christopher Columbus made landfall in the Bahamas on 12 October 1492. Population estimates for the part of the hemisphere that is now the coterminous United States and Canada range from a low of 900,000 proposed by the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber in 1939, to a high of 12.3 million proposed by the anthropologist Henry F. Dobyns in 1966 (Thornton, 1987: 26). In American Indian Holocaust and Survival, the anthropologist Russell Thornton places the pre-Columbian estimate in this geographic area conservatively at 7+ million (Thornton, 1987: 32).
Following the European invasion, European-introduced diseases and the seizure of Indigenous lands plunged Native populations – and languages – into drastic decline. In 2012, the US Census Bureau reported 5.2 million American Indian and Alaska Native people (1.7% of the total population), and 1.2 million people identified as Native Hawaiian and 'other Pacific Islanders' (0.4% of the total population; Hixson et al., 2012; Norris et al., 2012). Native Americans reside in every US state and territory, representing 565 federally recognized tribes and 617 reservations and Alaska Native villages (see Figure 1.1). There are also numerous Hawaiian Homelands or Homesteads, 'similar to American Indian reservations, with a 50% Native Hawaiian blood quantum requirement for leases' (Wilson, 2013 [in press]).
As Table 1.1 shows, the most populous American Indian nation is Cherokee, with more than 800,000 individuals identifying as Cherokee 'alone or in some combination' with one or more other tribal/ethnic groups. Navajo, with a population of more than 330,000, has the largest land base, with a reservation the size of Ireland spread across three southwestern states (see Figure 1.1). Most Native nations are smaller geographically and in terms of their membership (see Table 1.1). As elsewhere in the Americas, economic disparities are profound, with more than a quarter of American Indian and Alaska Native people living below the federal poverty line, a figure double that of the US population as a whole (Ogunwole, 2006: 12). Importantly for considerations of language and education, the median age of the Native American population (31.9) is significantly younger than that of the non-Hispanic White population (40.1) (US Census Bureau, 2007: 7).
While many Native American people live in rural villages and on reservation lands, the majority of the American Indian/Alaska Native population (67% to 92%, depending on how one 'counts') lives outside of these areas, and only about 48,000 individuals reporting Native Hawaiian ancestry reside within Hawaiian Homelands (Hixson et al., 2012: 19; Norris et al., 2012: 13).Moreover, there is often a great deal of transmigration of individuals and families back and forth between urban and rural/reservation areas. Tables 1.2 and 1.3 show the 2010 Census figures for the 12 US cities and counties, respectively, where the largest numbers of American Indian/ Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islanders reside. As these tables and Figure 1.1 illustrate, the largest proportion of the American Indian, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian population resides in western states, although states with the largest number of American Indians and Alaska Natives include California, Oklahoma, Arizona, Texas, New York, New Mexico, Washington, North Carolina, Florida and Michigan. Hawai'i is home to the largest number of Native Hawaiians and 'Other Pacific Islander' peoples (Hixson et al., 2012: 6; Norris et al., 2012: 6–7).
Native American Languages
Spoken languages
Counting languages is problematic, not only because the sources are suspect (see Krauss [1998] on census counts in particular), but also because the project of enumeration is an ideological one. As Moore et al. (2010: 2) point out, the numbering of languages privileges a conception of languages 'as neatly-bounded, abstract, autonomous grammatical systems', diverting attention 'from the speech-community dynamics of language contact and change' and obscuring the complex dynamics of 'actual language-in-use'. Enumeration also confounds issues of dialect difference: '[W]hen are two varieties so different that they should be considered separate languages, and when should they be considered dialects of the same language?', asks Grenoble (2011: 28; see also Bradley, 2011: 67). Yet the numbers are not entirely without worth; on a worldwide scale, they tell us 'that language endangerment is a major issue ..., and that it is not too late to do something about it' (Bradley, 2011: 68). Used carefully, then, the numbers provide one, admittedly incomplete, index of Native American linguistic endangerment and diversity.
Estimates of the number of languages indigenous to what is now the United States and Canada range from 300 to 600 (Krauss, 1998; McCarty & Watahomigie, 2004; Yamamoto, 2007). These figures reflect as many as 60 language families. Adding to this diversity are the pidgins and creoles that emerged prior to and following the European invasion, including trade languages such as Chinook Jargon in the Pacific Northwest, Hawaiian Creole English in Hawai'i, and Mobilian Jargon along the Gulf of Mexico. Throughout North America, longstanding Indigenous sign languages are also used, as are a multitude of Indigenous Englishes.
At the end of the 20th century, the linguist Michael Krauss (1998) estimated that 210 Native American languages were still being spoken in what is now the United States and Canada, including 175 in the United States alone (see also Goddard, 1996a, 1996b; Yamamoto, 2007; Zepeda & Hill, 1992). Recent estimates by the American Community Survey – a national demographic questionnaire associated with the US Census Bureau – report 169 Native American languages in the United States, excluding Hawaiian and languages spoken by peoples indigenous to Latin America and to American-affiliated Pacific Island territories (Siebens & Julian, 2011: 1). Table 1.4 provides an overview of major Native American language groups; Table 1.5shows the recent census counts for 'most commonly spoken' Native American languages.
As Table 1.5 shows, the 2010 US Census Bureau reported approximately 372,000 to 397,000 speakers of Native American languages, almost half of whom were speakers of Navajo. The census also reported that only 5.4% of those living within American Indian/Alaska Native tribal areas spoke a tribal language, and of these, most were elderly (Siebens & Julian, 2011: 3). According to the Census Bureau, 'Over 1 in 5 ... people aged 65 and over spoke [a Native American] language, ... while about 1 in 10 people aged 5 to 17 did so' (Siebens & Julian, 2011: 3). (These statistics, of course, do not tell us 'how much' or 'how well' the languages are spoken.) Figure 1.2 shows the location of reported speakers of Native American languages in the 2010 census. Alaska, Hawai'i and the southwestern United States reported the majority of Native-language speakers, with nine counties within the states of Alaska, Arizona and New Mexico reporting half of all American Indian/Alaska Native-language speakers (Siebens & Julian, 2011: 5).
While helpful in providing a sense of the locations of Native American speech communities, as we will see in subsequent chapters, the US Census data greatly underestimate what Medicine called 'the persistence of viable [Native American] languages' (2001: 52). The map in Figure 1.2, for example, does not reflect the presence of Native people in urban areas, where, as Tables 1.2 and 1.3 suggest, many speakers of Native American languages are likely to reside. Also excluded from these data are 'new speakers' – individuals who are learning and/or using their heritage language for a variety of everyday purposes, but who are not native speakers (O'Rourke & Walsh, 2012). Often these are members of small, diasporized Native nations that have been forcibly (and multiply) removed from traditional homelands. Grinwald and Bert (2011: 49–52) offer a list of the types of speakers who might be excluded from census data and other language surveys: 'rememberers', 'ghost speakers' who deny knowledge of a socially stigmatized heritage language but whose linguistic abilities might be reactivated under conducive circumstances, and 'neo-speakers' or new language learners. In Chapter 5, we will learn more of the perspectives and experiences of new speakers. Their presence throughout Native America, as well as that of speakers living outside of federally designated Native American lands, is denoted by the background shading of the map in Figure 1.2.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Dedication
Statement by Miami Tribe of Oklahoma Chief Thomas Gamble
Foreword by Richard E. Littlebear
Acknowledgements
Preface
1. Contextualizing Native American LPP: Legal-Political, Demographic, and Sociolinguistic Foundations
2. Conceptualizing Native American LPP: Critical Sociocultural Foundations
3. Native American Languages In and Out of the Safety Zone, 1492-2012
4.Indigenous Literacies, Bilingual Education, and Community Empowerment: The Case of Navajo
5. Language Regenesis in Practice
6. Language in the Lives of Indigenous Youth
7. Planning Language for the Seventh Generation
Appendix
References
Index