Indigenous Topics

Place names can lead us on fascinating journeys into other cultures. They convey a people's relationship to the land, their sense of place. For indigenous peoples, place names can also be central to the revival of endangered languages. This book takes readers on an exciting voyage into the history, language, and culture of the Nooksack Tribe of Washington State and southern British Columbia. Allan Richardson and Brent Galloway trace the richness and strength of the Nooksack people's connection to the land by documenting more than 150 places named by elders and mentioned in key historical texts. Descriptions of Nooksack history and naming patterns--combined with maps, photographs, and detailed linguistic analyses--give life to a nearly extinct language and illuminate the intertwined relationship of place, culture, language, and identity.

For many communities around the world, the revitalization or at least the preservation of an "First Nation" language is a pressing concern. Understanding the issue involves far more than compiling simple usage statistics or documenting the grammar of a tongue--it requires examining the social practices and philosophies that affect "First Nation" language survival. In presenting the case of Kaska, an endangered language in an Athabascan community in the Yukon, Barbra Meek asserts that language revitalization requires more than just linguistic rehabilitation; it demands a social transformation. The process must mend rips and tears in the social fabric of the language community reulting from an enduring colonial history focused on termination. These "disjunctures" include government policies conflicting with community goals, widely varying teaching methods and generational viewpoints, and even clashing ideologies within the language community. This book provides a detailed investigation of language revitalization based on more than two years of active participation in local language renewal efforts. Each chapter focuses on a different dimension, such as spelling and expertise, conversation and social status, family practices, and bureaucratic involvement in local language choices. Each situation illustrates the balance between the desire for linguistic continuity and the reality of disruption. We Are Our Language reveals the subtle ways in which different conceptions and practices--historical, material, and interactional--can variably affect the state of an "First Nation" language, and it offers a critical step toward redefining success and achieving revitalization.

"Collected in this book are the personal life histories of four female St'at'imc elders: Beverley Frank, Gertrude Ned, Laura Thevarge, and Rose Agnes Whitley. These elders are among the last remaining fluent speakers of St'at'imcets, a severely imperilled Northern Interior Salish language, also known as Lillooet and spoken in the southwest interior of British Columbia. Their stories are presented in the original St'at'imcets as well as in English translation. A morpheme-by-morpheme gloss is provided for the purposes of linguistic analysis." "These texts are among the longest oral narratives of the Salish language to be grammatically analyzed. They are also of a rare type, in that they consist of personal memories rather than of myths or legends: They provide first-hand accounts of what it was like to be a female child growing up in the 1930s and '40s both within St'at'imc communities and in residential schools. Important historical information is woven into the stories - about events in the Lillooet area, the traditional St'at'imc way of life, and the consequences of contact with Western culture."