Emplacement and Englanguagement: A Collaborative Autoethnographic Analysis toward White Allyship in ILI

• In Event: Indigenous Language Immersion and “Mainstream” Dual Language Bilingual Education Allyship: Learning From/With Each Other

Abstract

Objectives
We are three scholars of language education who found ourselves at the same 2024 AERA session, asking a similar question about Indigenous language immersion (ILI) receiving little attention in ‘mainstream’ discussions of dual language bilingual education (DLBE). In this paper, we critically reflect on our positionalities as a necessary first step to engaging in brokering (Anthony-Stevens, 2017) more conversation between ILI and DLBE scholarship.

Conceptual Framework
We take a decolonizing stance (Smith, 2013), specifically, Anthony-Stevens’s (2017) and Greenwood’s (2019) recommendations for more ethical collaboration or allyship between White researchers and Indigenous communities. Similar to how scholars use Indigenous and Western notions of emplacement (Di Giminiani, 2018), we propose the notion of enlanguagement to discuss how coloniality mediates opportunities to become proficient in particular languages/varieties and not others.

Methods and Data Sources
We use collaborative autoethnography (Chang et al., 2016) to clarify our positioning and to reflect on power imbalances with regards to ILI communities we work with (Parkes, 2016). Data sources consist of our synchronous and asynchronous conversations (April 2024-present) and our conversation notes, in which we recorded our reactions to each other’s writing.

Findings
We organized the themes that emerged into Past, Present, and Future Emplacements and Englanguagements.
Interrogating our ancestors’ and our own past emplacements, we discuss the (de)coloniality implications of how Author1 and Author3 grew up on colonized lands that form the U.S. while Author2 grew up on a French island that was uninhabited prior to settlement. We explore how our experiences and privileges of Whiteness diverge and illuminate subtle differentiations within monolithic categorizations of identity, such as Author3’s experiences as White and Shawnee. We then explore how coloniality mediated our enlanguagement experiences of both learning and loss in complex ways.
Our present emplacements also yielded interesting comparisons and contrasts. In this section, we explore the political nuances of the work we’ve already done in collaborating with Indigenous communities in light of Anthony-Stevens’s (2017) and Greenwood’s (2019) frameworks of allyship, such as Author2’s research and teaching with Alaska Native students (Author2).
In looking to the future, we use these frameworks to critically examine our hopes and plans for collaboration with Indigenous communities. For example, Author1 recently relocated to an institution proximate to Native communities, and hopes to support ILI programs that are enlanguaging local children and youth as part of heritage revitalization. Similarly, Author3 hopes to continue contributing to building her tribe’s ILI program and enlanguage her son with Shawnee.

Scholarly Significance
First, our paper meets the pressing need for ‘mainstream’ DLBE conversations to thoughtfully attend to ILI (Delavan et al., 2024). Second, our collaborative ethnographic approach to positionality analysis models for others how to push the boundaries of conventional practices by focusing on (a) past, present, and future positioning, as well as (b) geographies of emplacement and enlanguagement and their relationship to coloniality.

Authors

• Garrett Delavan, University of New Mexico

• Eve Ryan, University of Alaska - Fairbanks

• Jessica Somerville-Braun, Skidmore College

• Yann W Lussiez, University of New Mexico