Locating "Heritage" in Indigenous Heritage Language Education and Advancing Reclamation and Justice

• In Event: 60.035 - Beyond "Resource or Right": Critical Heritage Language Education and Social Justice

Abstract

Objectives/Purpose: This paper articulates a framework for critical heritage language education (CHLE) theory and praxis within contemporary Native American contexts. Characterized by the mirrored realities of immense cultural and linguistic diversity and massive threats to that diversity, Native America poses a singular and urgent case for a CHLE approach. A growing body of scholarship emphasizes the dynamic, multisited, heteroglossic language practices within Native American communities – practices that are often “misrecognized” (Kroskrity, 2011) or dismissed as linguistic failure (Meek, 2011), particularly among youth. With its focus on minoritized community sustainability, linguistic and educational sovereignty, and social justice, a CHLE analytic approach offers the opportunity to explore what “heritage” means in these communities, and how CHLE might support traditional and evolving linguistic and cultural practices (Paris, 2012).

Theoretical Framework: We begin with the notion of Native American languages as heritage mother tongues, which we posit as a unique case that does not fit conventional frameworks for heritage language education (McCarty, 2008). Our analysis then builds on recent scholarship on American Indian languages in “unexpected places” (Webster & Peterson, 2011), work on Indigenous youth’s “critical language awareness” (Lee, 2014; Nicholas, 2014; Tulloch, 2014), and Deloria’s (2004) critique of expectations as manifestations of “colonial and imperial relations of power and domination” (p. 11). Applying this framework to three ethnographic cases, we seek to uncover “heritage” in hegemonically unexpected places, and the ways in which this knowledge might inform community-driven language education goals.

Methods/Mode of Inquiry: Our methodology is ethnographic and comparative, examining three “telling” cases: Hopi, Navajo, and a multilingual urban community school. With its focus on participants’ perspectives and the contextualization of cultural and educational phenomena, an ethnographic perspective is well suited to ferret out complex community-based language practices and ideologies as they interact with those of the school. Our research stance is collaborative and relational, intended to support the self-identified aspirations of the Indigenous communities with whom we work (Brayboy et al., 2012).

Data Sources/Evidence: Data for each case includes multiyear ethnographic observations of language use inside and outside of school; in-depth interviews with parents, elders, teachers, school administrators, and youth; and documents (school mission statements, lesson plans, public meeting reports).

Findings/Conclusions: Findings reveal both community-specific and shared notions of “heritage” across community-school contexts. Youth’s heritage-language affinities are developed and expressed through “traditional” (“expected”) cultural practices (ceremony) as well as new, hybrid, and “unexpected” practices (“Miss Native America” contests) – findings that direct attention to signifying language practices embedded in lived experience (Gilmore, 2011).

Significance: This research contributes new insights to the still-understudied areas of Indigenous youth language practices and Indigenous HL education. It also contributes to scholarship on “language as cultural practice” (Nicholas, 2014) and “culturally sustaining pedagogy” (Paris & Alim, 2014; McCarty & Lee, 2014). Equally important, it provides new evidence of the “unexpected” multilingual strengths of Indigenous children and youth. These findings call for new education practices and policies that “re-recognize” heritage in Indigenous communities, marking Indigenous ways of knowing and being, and using this as a foundation for CHLE.

Authors

• Sheilah E. Nicholas, The University of Arizona

• Teresa L. McCarty, University of California - Los Angeles