"To Think in a Different Way": Naming, Relationality, and Indigenous Language Education Rights and Reclamation

• In Event: Multilingual Perspectives on Translanguaging

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to propose a relational paradigm for language education rights that reckons directly with settler colonialism and is grounded in Indigenous practices of mutuality and responsibility to generations past, present, and future. Theoretically, the paper centers Indigenous ways of knowing and being that inform understandings of language(s) and education, and of language rights and reclamation (Hermes & Kawai‘ae‘a, 2012; Lee, 2014; Leonard & DeKorne, 2017; McCarty et al., 2021; Nicholas, 2019). Methodologically, we utilize historical, ethnographic, and narrative forms of inquiry within a critical Indigenous research perspective that foregrounds the “five Rs”: relationality, reciprocity, responsibility/accountability, respect, and relevance (Brayboy et al., 2012; Smith, 2012). We focus on Native America, a sociolinguistic landscape encompassing 564 Indigenous nations and Native Hawaiians in which coloniality is the historical legacy and daily reality. Building on Indigenous ground-up experiences with language reclamation (Leonard & De Korne, 2017), we posit the anticolonial character of Indigenous language movements as foundational to a relational paradigm. Because of its ground-up, community-based character, a relational paradigm challenges arguments for nondistinct “un-named” Indigenous languages and “language without rights” (Wee, 2011). To explore a relational approach in practice, we use as data sources the cases of myaamia (Miami), Hopi, and Mohawk. The cases illuminate the role of distinct languages and reclamation movements in (re)building community, (re)claiming collective linguistic and epistemic memory, and fostering linguistic and educational self-determination. As noted by Oneida elder Gerald Hill (2019), the fact that Indigenous communities are sites of ongoing colonialism compels us “to think in a different way” about language rights and reclamation—carving out Indigenous-language-only space and embracing a power-conscious pedagogy that resists (re)invasion and erasure and asserts the importance of distinct named languages. Language names and naming are critical connectors to lands/waters, people, and territories. Un-naming has been a prime tactic of displacement through settler seizure of re-named/re-branded Indigenous homeplaces (wa Thiong’o, 2009). This “interrogation of consequential education research in pursuit of truth” argues for renewed attention to Indigenous understandings of language(s), relationality, and language-in-education rights, and to questions of who benefits and what is at stake in our understandings and representations of language (Meek, 2015). The significance of this work is to expand language and education rights discourse in scholarship and practice, and to support vital and growing Indigenous community-based language reclamation movements.

Authors

• Sheilah E. Nicholas, University of Arizona
  Presenting Author

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