Decoupling Linguistic & Cultural Continuity in Native American Language Revitalization

I imagine that most readers of this blog would agree that one of the most main reasons to learn a new language is to expand one’s cultural horizons. Here at UC Davis, we expect students to participate in language classes as part of their academic training not only so that they will be able to communicate (in a coarse-grained instrumentalist sense) with people who happen to speak a different language, but also because of the insights into another culture that can be gained by engaging in the study of a new language. In my own work with California’s Native American communities, a similar close connection between language and culture is commonly offered as a primary reason for developing language revitalization programs. Many indigenous languages that once flourished in the region are today spoken by only a handful of elderly people; others have no fluent first-language speakers remaining at all and can only be learned through archival documentation. Many groups are actively engaged in efforts to re-introduce ancestral languages into at least some domains of contemporary life. It is not uncommon at events organized to support these activities to hear sentiments along the lines of “if we lose our language, we lose our culture.” This is one of the background assumptions that I have when offering technical assistance to revitalization efforts, and I often foreground it in classes here at UC Davis when teaching students about why issues surrounding language endangerment matter.

In her recent book Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir (Heyday Books, 2013), Deborah Miranda problematizes this line of thinking. Miranda is a poet, professor of English at Washington and Lee University in Virginia, and member of the Ohlone Costanoan Esselen Nation based in Monterey County. Esselen-speaking people, like other indigenous groups of central and southern California, were hit hard from the earliest days of colonization, first with the establishment of Catholic missions beginning in the late 18th century and later by the California gold rush. The language has not had any fluent first-language speakers since the early 20th century.

Miranda’s discussion of the language-culture nexus, like the rest of her book, is frank and courageous. In the introduction to the book Miranda writes, “I have spent a lifetime being told that I’m not a ‘real Indian’ – in large part because I do not have the language of our ancestors and much of our culture was literally razed to the ground.” She acknowledges that “[r]eclaiming our languages is a sacred and beautiful act,” and Bad Indians includes an Esselen language poem Teheyapami Achiska (‘Giving Honor’) that she was able to write by virtue of her own painstaking efforts to learn her ancestral tongue. Nonetheless, she maintains that “it is deceptive to pin our survival on language” and that the loss of language “does not decimate the culture.” Miranda here addresses head-on the essentializing discourse – propagated both within and outside of contemporary Native American communities – that language is so inexorably intertwined with culture that linguistic continuity is equated with cultural continuity. Miranda argues that at the end of the day what matters with for cultural continuity is not language per se, but rather in the continuance of stories and in “our retelling of the past, our imagining of the future, and the long, long task of inventing an identity every single second of our lives.”

Miranda’s sentiments resonate with me as I prepare to teach the course NAS 107 in the Spring 2016 quarter. Created by Martha Macri, my esteemed predecessor in the NAS Department, NAS 107 gives students the opportunity to spend a quarter engaging with a Native American language of their choosing. Many of the students who enroll in the class identify as Native American and study one of their ancestral languages. The question on my mind these days is how to discuss the relevance of language to connecting with one’s heritage culture (surely the reason that most students enroll in the class) without reproducing a discourse that alienates students by rendering that culture inaccessible to them. There are so many barriers to learning Native American languages – an overwhelming absence of pedagogically-oriented materials and trained teachers being just one of them – that making language proficiency a prerequisite for cultural understanding is tantamount to ensuring that most people will be unable to actually achieve that understanding within their lifetimes. I don’t at this point have any easy answers to this question, but suspect that some of you might have encountered similar issues in your own classes, whether as instructors or as students. I’d be interested in hearing your perspectives on these issues. 

About the Author: 

Justin Spence is an Assistant Professor at UC Davis in the Native American Studies Department. His research focuses on three main areas of interest: Native American languages (especially Hupa and the other Pacific Coast Athabaskan languages), language documentation, and historical linguistics.