Language Lives in Unexpected Places

The Center for Humanities & Information at Penn State University invites you to join us for the two-day webinar “Language Lives in Unexpected Places,” a discussion of Indigenous language revitalization, information systems, and communicative technologies.

NOVEMBER 17 & NOVEMBER 18, 2020 2:30 - 4:30 PM EST

Popular depictions of Indigenous languages rarely place them in the Information Age, but attention to Indigenous languages in what Dakota Sioux historian Philip Deloria might call “unexpected places” (2004; see also Webster and Peterson 2011) challenge representational expectations of where and how Indigenous languages are meaningfully deployed. Across the Americas, Indigenous languages are finding emergent vitalities in both institutional and grassroots contexts. How are languages—and people—transformed by their contemporary engagements with new media and informational technologies? How are Indigenous users transforming media and communication technologies and practices? Contemporary engagements with Indigenous media, performance, activism, and scholarship demonstrate ways in which what is old may be made new again, or what is new can be made old and invested with the authority of the past for future action. The speakers in this webinar traverse the unexpected, regenerative, and sometimes contradictory, linguistic and media practices of Indigenous-language speakers across the America, who work to decolonize and Indigenize various spaces and media, both old and new.

Erin Debenport (UCLA) – “Business as Usual: The Twin Futures of Indigenous Language Media”

This paper explores how Indigenous language media practices reflect ideas about crisis and futurity. Pivoting from a planned summer language project at Ysleta del Sur Pueblo, Texas, I draw on examples from this community’s transition from a program relying on minimal digital tools to one dependent on media technologies. Although learners and teachers of Southern Tiwa already use online platforms to communicate with other program participants, these technologies are now being used in the creation and analysis of new texts. These strategies reflect an existing “regenerative” orientation to technologies of language circulation at the Pueblo while also invoking notions of crisis, arguably, an existing trait of most language revitalization movements. Tribal members are adopting novel ways of doing language work during the Covid-era while also contextualizing these efforts as part of a long history of responding to crises: colonization, relocation, discrimination, and deprivation.   

I compare this production of new texts using existing media to an example of using technology to limit access to Indigenous language data: the language website Ethnologue’s decision to move to a subscription model. I draw on online reactions and my correspondence with the company during the Covid pandemic. Unlike the Pueblo example, which sees regenerative potential within a series of ongoing community crises, or “memorializing” discourses used to galvanize preservation efforts by invoking the crisis of linguistic loss, Ethnologue’s responses attempt to foreclose the possibility of seeing media as anything other than acontextual technologies, neither tools to address, nor remnants of, past or current crises.

Chris Bloechl (University of Chicago) “Formulations of Locality and Modernity in Mediatized Yucatec Maya”

On the Yucatán Peninsula, Yucatec Maya media producers often appeal pointedly to custom and antiquity, even as they emphasize the relative novelty of their undertakings. In this paper, I examine this dynamic in the domains of language and identity, and beyond the domain of tradition as such. My analysis focuses on Yucatec Maya rap music and radionovelas that are oriented simultaneously to authenticity and the contemporary moment. These creative works ostensibly transmit Maya language and culture directly before wide audiences, but the transmission is by no means straightforward. Their production proceeds crucially through a reflexive remaking of local models of personhood, language, and cultural practice. Long-held conceptualizations linking Maya-ness to an ancient past are affordances as well as impediments to producers of popular Maya media. And the categories maaya ‘Maya’ and máasewal ‘Indian, indigenous’ have taken on new meanings as they have been used to articulate ethnolinguistic affiliation within national and international orders of identity. The changes indicate Yucatec Maya speakers’ orientations to Spanish language, novel genres, and politics of language and identity. Popular media offer not simply avenues for the public expression of what it means to be Maya today, but means for its performative articulation and remaking. Further, they provide Maya speakers with spaces for reflecting on the mediatization of Maya-ness itself.

Qui’chi Patlan (UT Austin) – “‘Yachak’ or ‘Brujo’? Branding a Shamanic Drum and Chant in Otavalo’s Pirate Economy”

The marketplace of Otavalo, Ecuador is famous for its numerous eclectic and often bargain-priced products and services. Equally famous are the Runa or Kichwa speaking producers and businessfolk who make and sell them. From bootleg Kichwanized DVDs (Floyd 2008) to locally made stereotypical ‘Plains Indian’ headdresses adorned with turkey feathers, Otavalo’s tourism infrastructure thrives on a kind of piracy—acts of copying, reproducing, and selling of ideas (Larkins 2008; Sundaram 2010). Otavalan piratical practices, especially in the tourism industry, are not ‘illegal’ or ‘immoral’ as they would be within an Intellectual Property purview. They are instead locally lauded, authorized, and regulated by Runas in ways they value and produce knowledge. Using ethnographic and interview data, this study finds that direct experiential knowledge with American Indians and First Nations people can be used to brand someone’s shamanic services for tourists. When this first-hand knowledge is not accessible, many Otavalan artisans defer to the use of mass mediated images and videos on Youtube, Facebook, and Google to create designs for Otavalo’s tourism market. The data in this workshop are instances of shamans or Yachaks using stories about a chant and its accompanied drum to bolster their credibility as legitimate brokers. I juxtapose their narratives with some narrated by potential competitors. In tandem, these stories and their competing claims shed insight to a salient concern in Otavalo: If the knowledge to reproduce a lucrative product or service is not readily accessible to local competitors, what do these same competitors say about what and who is potentially outselling them? By exploring their uptake, suspicion, or rejection of the branding practices of this shamanic business, I hope this analysis might better our understanding of the generative force of piracy in constructing one’s social and ideological relationship to power, knowledge, and Indigeneity more broadly.

Georgia Ennis (Penn State) – “Reweaving Worlds: More-than-Language Reclamation in the Western Amazon”

On the Western edges of the Ecuadorian Amazon, Kichwa (Quichua) people have turned to what some might see as an “unexpected” remedy to confront ongoing shift towards Spanish language and settler lifeways—live performances and the production of various forms of media, including community cinema, radio, television, and music. This talk explores several ways linguists and other scholars might miss the forest for the trees in language endangerment and revitalization: by seeing language as an abstract system separated from communicative contexts, by failing to account for the oppression of speakers and signers of endangered languages, or by ignoring the perspectives of Indigenous scholars and community members. Tracking the production of a fiber called pita (Aechmea magdalenae) across multiple settings and broadcasts reveals how Kichwa performers and media activists seek to reclaim and revalorize language, not as an abstract system, but as an integral aspect of culture and communication.

Anthony Webster (UT Austin)

Anthony Webster is a professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin with interests in linguistic anthropology, ethnopoetics, translation, discursive discrimination, and the history of anthropology. He is the author of several books including Explorations in Navajo Poetry and Poetics (2009) and The Sounds of Navajo Poetry: A Humanities of Speaking (2018). Webster also co-edited with Leighton C. Peterson the special issue “American Indian Languages in Unexpected Places” (2011) for American Indian Culture and Research Journal.

Karl Swinehart (University of Louisville) – “Text, Toponyms, and Transformation: Aymara in La Paz’s Linguistic Landscape”

This paper examines the Aymara language’s visible presence in the linguistic landscape of the El Alto / La Paz metropolitan region of Bolivia. Aymara language signage has become increasingly present within the metropolitan area of La Paz / El Alto, perhaps most notably in the city’s celebrated “teleférico” public transit system. Lauded as “the most spectacular public transit system on the planet,” the cable car system extends across the mountainous La Paz / El Alto metropolitan region connecting previously distant areas, transforming residents’ relationship to urban social space. Aymara names within the teleférico system include already existing toponyms, calques of Spanish, but also descriptions of urban space without correspondence to Spanish toponyms. The relative size, placement, and distribution of bilingual text in teleferico stations and transit system maps varies across contexts. More than just preserving heritage, this language policy intervention of bilingual signage throughout the city extends Aymara toponyms beyond areas of Indigenous confinement.

Joseph Marks (University of Arizona) – “(Re)contextualizing and Transforming Indigenous Motifs for Healing During Times of Sorrow”

This presentation looks at four formal Tlingit speeches made during a ḵu.éex’, memorial (Dauenhauer 1990). The speeches were done to remove grief from a mourning clan and this is done by using clan history and cultural imagery in similes and metaphors. Attention to these speeches reveals the importance of socialization into culturally-specific poetics and linguistic practices, which produce the contextually-dependent meanings of the speeches (Bauman and Briggs 1990). By looking at these high level and culturally complex speeches, one sees how important culturalization of various motifs are during childhood. How these motifs are brought up during a ḵu.éex’ remains crucial and then they are used in unique ways to remove grief of the mourning clan. The aim of showing this process of healing is to show that these complex speech-making processes persist today but are often done in the English language, with the end goal of healing trauma. These speeches are often done in non-traditional Tlingit settings, such as schools, community events, business meetings, and the like, further recontextualizing and transforming Tlingit linguistic practices in contemporary spaces.

Morgan Siewert (UT Austin) – “The Grammar of Stories: Reimagining Intellectual Authority and Lexicography in the Production of a Community-Generated Nishnaabemwin Word List”

The humanities of speaking (Epps, Webster, Woodbury 2017) is a Boasian model of documentary linguistics that centers culturally embedded, text-based language corpora and employs discourse-centered methods in order to locate philological insights within verbal artistry and poetics. The humanities of speaking approach prioritizes community involvement and perspectives so communities can utilize language documentation and revitalization methods to research their heritage languages on their own terms. Based on recent dissertation fieldwork in northern Ontario, I discuss a site where community revitalization efforts corroborate what the humanities of speaking outlines as the future of an ethical linguistics. I argue that storywork (Archibald 2008) functions as an emergent text-based method of philological and lexicographic theorizing by elders in an ongoing Nishnaabemwin (Odawa) dictionary project to maintain and revitalize spoken forms. These elders employ philological narrative as an analytic framework in a way that challenges an institutional authoritative word (Bakhtin 1981) and through which new methodological possibilities in language documentation emerge. They disrupt Western analytic authority through experiential metalinguistic discourse, thereby complicating lexicographic models that rely on isolated morphemes and words excised from their narrative contexts that elders say are vital to understanding what Samuels (2004) describes as the “feelingful iconicity” of Nishnaabemwin. I explore how centering storytelling narratives presents an Anishinaabe formulation of lexicography wherein philology is inseparable from Nishnaabemwin maintenance; they are theorizing how a dictionary can better serve learners and speakers through narratives that contain the histories of words in order to influence their futures.

Jenny Davis (U Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)

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. Her research focuses on contemporary Indigenous language revitalization; Indigenous gender and sexuality; and collaborative methods, ethics, and repatriation in Indigenous research. She is the author of Talking Indian, for which she received the 2019 Beatrice Medicine Award from the Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures. Her book of poetry, Trickster Academy, is forthcoming from the University of Arizona Press.