UC Santa Barbara

Indigenous languages have immense cultural and social value, providing unique lenses to view reality and a means to bind together national identities. Unfortunately, these same benefits became a liability when Indigenous nations were conquered by settler societies, who have a vested interest in suppressing the national distinction and sovereignty of those they subjugated. Integration into settler societies and the global economy have added structural suppression of Indigenous languages to their deliberate erasure. Where Indigenous nations could formerly conduct all aspects of daily life in their languages, their economic and social livelihoods are now utterly entangled in national societies and transnational economies where their languages hold virtually no practical value. The result of these dynamics has been a precipitous decline in Indigenous languages. Nevertheless, Indigenous peoples across the world have successfully compelled settler governments to support language revitalization efforts, seemingly against the settler state's countersovereign interests. Nowhere has this process been more successful than in Aotearoa New Zealand, where the Indigenous Māori language enjoys official status and enormous financial and discursive support from the settler government. This thesis seeks to identify the factors that enabled the Māori to secure settler state support for language revitalization, and whether the lessons of Aotearoa New Zealand can be effectively and appropriately applied by Chumash communities in California. Though aimed specifically at serving the Chumash peoples, the comparisons made in this study should prove helpful in helping Indigenous peoples anywhere measure the costs, benefits, and viability of pressuring settler governments for support. Drawing on the insights of scholars of Indigenous studies, settler colonial studies, and norm entrepreneurship, as well as interviews with Chumash co-researchers, this thesis finds that the concessions won by the Māori owe a great deal to Māori political protest, electoral influence, autonomous educational initiatives, and unique norms stemming from the Treaty of Waitangi and Māori's relationship with the British Crown. Favorable norms provided a crucial fulcrum, but Māori victories ultimately depended upon leveraging these norms with credible threats to the statebuilding interests of the settler state. Chumash peoples lack the numbers and normative instruments that gave the Māori their victories, but I conclude that pro-Indigenous norm entrepreneurship, autonomous educational initiatives, and political protest could still successfully win concessions. I also warn that engaging with the settler state carries risks of repression and cooptation. If statebuilding interests are threatened without the requisite popular, electoral, or normative power to force concessions, then the state may further repress Indigenous languages, returning them to a “safety zone” where they cannot threaten national unity. If Indigenous communities align themselves too closely with settler state interests to cultivate support for revitalization, however, they might find themselves drawn into a form of neoliberal multiculturalism or politics of recognition, where the settler state’s cultural concessions "domesticate" the Indigenous challenge, trading limited concessions for legitimacy and stability. I draw on Chumash co-researchers to argue that any concessions not based on the principles of accessibility, relationality, and community control will be insufficient to revitalize Indigenous languages. I further argue that the settler state must bolster Indigenous institutional, material, and political power if Indigenous communities are to survive and thrive. Generations of state-led land theft and socio-political repression pushed Indigenous languages into marginality, so it will take generations of state-enabled Indigenous socio-political and economic empowerment to restore value to Indigenous languages. This aid combined with strengthened local identity and community institutions will be crucial to revitalizing languages that provide little global interconnectivity, which constitutes a serious structural limitation to language vitality in a globalized world.