American Indian Culture and Research Journal

All but one of the articles in this issue was originally presented at a panel at the 108th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association (Philadelphia, 2009). We would especially like to thank the contributors for working so hard to revise their articles for publication, and it is with no small amount of gratitude that we thank them for making our jobs much easier. We would also like to thank those in attendance in Philadelphia for a number of engaging and thought-provoking questions. We would also like to thank Paul Kroskrity for his guidance and insightful comments on all versions of these articles. The article by Philip Deloria was written specifically for this special issue. We thank him for his willingness to engage with these articles. Finally, we would like to thank Pamela Grieman at the American Indian Culture and Research Journal for her encouragement and support for putting this special issue together.

This introduction introduces this special issue of American Indian Culture and Research Journal, which brings together a set of essays that integrate two seemingly disparate intellectual trends in the humanities and social sciences. On the one hand, there is the work of Philip Deloria on American Indians in “unexpected places.” On the other hand, there is the work of linguistic anthropology. Deloria’s writings have been integral to the growing corpus of critical approaches to the study of Native peoples, including the ways in which representational practices of the past continue to resonate, and the ways in which (de)colonization of indigenous histories and structural (in)equities are intertwined. We say seemingly disparate because this line of scholarship, including Deloria’s work, is concerned with the naturalization of inequalities, the ways in which expectations about Native Americans peoples have led to a denial of coevalness. However, there is also a tradition in linguistic anthropology—from Boas through Hymes—that has sought to understand the ways in which linguistic inequalities are naturalized and circulated. In this introduction we trace out the contours of that history of linguistic anthropology as it has engaged with issues concerning the structural and physical violence of linguistic inequalities, racism, and colonialism. Our intervention is to place linguistic anthropology in a meaningful dialogue with contemporary Indigenous Studies.

This article critically examines the mediating role of scholarly expectations and the unexpected in the management—and transcendence—of failure/success as these concepts relate to language revitalization. Deloria remarks that, “expectations tend to assume a status quo defined around failure, the result of some innate limitation on the part of Indian people. Success is written off as an anomaly, a bizarre little episode that calls up a chuckle” (2004, 231). As a series of episodes, this article begins with a popular misconception regarding American Indian Englishes, the perception of dysfluency read as the failure of American Indians to acquire English. Portrayed across a range of media, these representations of mythical speech encourage an expectation with consequences, at least for young First Nations students who dare to produce a nonstandard utterance for a teacher of standard training. The next episode depicts indigenous languages as shifting toward nonexistence. A commonly recurring institutional line, the discourse of elders often reinforces this conception with the emerging expectation being one of language death rather than a more complicated scenario of language change and linguistic diversity. Again younger generations are depicted as failing to acquire a language, in this case their ancestral tongue. These expectations coalesce in the third episode, the (eventual) failure of language revitalization. Given the “inability” of younger generations of Indians to acquire any language fluently, how could language revitalization ever succeed? Chuckling, one might say, dene yéh dene zaagi laat’ā.

This paper uses Philip Deloria’s Indians in Unexpected Places as a lens by which to understand the expectations and reviews of Navajo author Blackhorse Mitchell’s Miracle Hill. Written in Navajo English, the book, from an introduction by T. D. Allen to a number of reviews of the book in the popular press, consistently misrecognized the language of Mitchell’s book as dysfluent or a failure and thus dismissed the creative aspects of Mitchell’s use of language. This paper focuses in on the reviews of the book as well as Mitchell’s own discussions of what he was attempting to do in the poem “The Drifting Lonely Seed” included in the book. Rather than understand Mitchell’s work as dysfluent, it can be understood as a critique of Western educational regimes that silenced or ignored Native voices. It is argued that it is through such stigmatized linguistic codes that an affective bond—an intimacy of grammar—can be forged between language users and their languages. While non-Navajos may devalue Navajo English or trivialize it, some Navajos see its use as creating an intimate sociality between Mitchell and themselves. Finally, it is argued that understanding the dominant outside expectations of American Indian languages (including Englishes) and what forms those languages can take may suggest something of the ways astonishing inequalities have been naturalized. The recognition of American Indian Englishes as languages worth taking seriously, as “beautiful Englishes” and intimate grammars, would be one useful starting point in destabilizing such inequalities.

After initial instruction in written and spoken Tiwa, young adult participants in the summer language program at San Antonio Pueblo began authoring their own pedagogical materials as a learning activity. Charged with writing pedagogical dialogues to aid in language learning, the students created “the first Native soap opera,” as the students described it, which they named As the Rez Turns. In this paper, I analyze the processes of entextualization surrounding the creation of this text, its generic features, and its content, which provides a glimpse into the contemporary lived experience of community members in this community that emphasizes strict control of textual circulation and limiting access to local knowledge. I utilize Philip Deloria’s (2004) analysis of Native Americans’ engagement with popular cultural forms, and linguistic anthropological work on intertextuality and genre to analyze this example of representation, outlining the extra- and intracommunity generic and ideological “expectations” conditioning the creation of this dialogue to show how the students utilize associated “anomalies” as discursive resources to construct veiled political commentaries and assert the right to author indigenous language materials. By including stylistic and thematic elements outside of and in dialogue with the standard forms of pedagogical language dialogues and contemporary soap operas among other genres, the final text is an example of the ways that indigenous people continue to “creat[e] modernity in dialogue with others” (Deloria 2004:238). Pueblo language ideologies privileging indirection are honored in the creation of this covert political commentary supposedly created as a neutral language learning tool. Thus, As the Rez Turns is an example of a comedy of manners, highlighting membership issues, gender, and indigenous identity in this community.

Popular cultures are key sites for Philip Deloria has called the “production of expectations,” and as a major form of popular culture, film has figured prominently in the circulation and reproduction of expectations about Native American peoples since the early twentieth century. This paper explores the ideologies and practices involved in the process of Navajo directors making films in the Navajo language, engaging in- and out-group language ideologies, social choices, and the political economy of indigenous media. Building upon Faye Ginsburg’s notion of “screen memories,” this work illustrates how the (mis)use of Navajo communicative practices can be (de)legitimizing for audiences and integral to the creation of indigenous screen memories, and— when appropriately deployed—how the use of Navajo creates social intimacy through the representation of shared sociality and linguistic realities. The filmic site of production—during casting, rehearsals, shooting, and editing—is where cultural producers often have a heightened awareness of representational and linguistic practices. Furthermore, for some contemporary Navajo filmmakers, there is a compulsion to create films in Navajo, both challenging and augmenting the linguistic competencies of a multitude of participants. Film is a nexus for linguistic vitality as filmmakers negotiate their cultural productions with an eye toward authenticity, global expectations, and “keeping it real” for themselves, their Navajo speaking audiences, and for historical accuracy.

While American Indian language reclamation efforts are often motivated by a desire to learn and embrace traditional culture, they generally occur within multicultural populations where community members speak the dominant group’s language(s), practice its ways, and use contemporary technologies. For this and related reasons, some mixture of the “traditional” and the “modern” is a natural trend and outcome of such efforts. However, indigenous communities are nonetheless confronted with ideologies that their cultures cannot or should not change, especially with respect to language structure and usage patterns. This paper deconstructs this paradox through a case study of Miami language reclamation. An Algonquian language termed “extinct” in the 1960s, Miami started to be learned from written documentation and successfully reincorporated into daily usage in the early 1990s, and now has many second-language speakers who use the language on a regular basis and in a variety of domains. However, the presence and legitimacy of this Miami speech get challenged not just because wider society recognizes only a limited set of language practices––usually framed around a perceived past––as Indian, but also because many still claim that Miami is extinct and hence must not be spoken at all, let alone in modern contexts. I show how Miami people confront these ideologies not only by speaking myaamia, but also by extending the language into new patterns of usage that are guided by the contemporary lives and needs of its speakers, all of whom are English-dominant and live within “mainstream” society around the United States, but also strongly identify as Miami. I argue that these outcomes exemplify a legitimate and expected series of practices that reflect how the Miami are a contemporary, multicultural, and increasingly multilingual people.

In this discussion of a set of studies that fits the trope of "Indian Languages in Unexpected Places," I explore the obvious necessity of developing a relevant notion of linguistic "leakage" following a famous image from the writings of the linguistic anthropologist Edward Sapir. Though in its original use, the concept applied more to the order of linguistic form, my recontextualized application here explores it as a sensitizing image that can assist in developing a relevant notion of leakage both to the practices of speakers involving both their linguistic repertoires and their repertoires of identity. In order to appreciate the interplay of structure and agency in representations of Native American language use, I suggest the utility of recognizing the potency of concepts like DuBois (1903) "double consciousness" but also emphasize the need to interrogate "expectation" as the result of massive social inequality. Seeing expectations of Native failure, deficiency, and inadequacy as tied to the historical use of oppressive "force" in a Gramscian sense, and the more recent product of hegemonic institutions like BIA and boarding schools as well as the mass media allows us to understand the political economic basis for linguistic domination. The impact of dominant language ideologies of "contempt" for minority languages, of ideologies that condemn linguistic hybridity and denigrate multilingual adaptations is also explored through a discussion of case studies.

This commentary reflects on the articles included in this special issue of American Indian Culture and Research Journal which develop the theme of “American Indian languages in unexpected places” inspired by Indians in Unexpected Places. The articles develop two related concerns: first, American Indian linguistic practices have been consistently imagined by non-Indians in ways that function to the detriment of Indian desires for justice, recognition, and power. And second, American Indian people have lived lives though complex linguistic engagements which stand in contradistinction to those non-Indian imaginings. In conclusion, looking back at the goals of Indians in Unexpected Places, “expectation,” “anomaly,” and “unexpectedness” aimed to create a kind of tool, a working vocabulary that could move research further into the complicated dynamics of culture and power. The papers in this volume accomplish that goal.