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Pedagogies of Language Sovereignty

Phillip H. Round

University of Iowa

As a teacher of Native American literature at a US university, I have become very familiar with the challenges posed by the necessity to offer that literature within a context that is true to the complex relations that exist between it and federal Indian policy, individual tribal communities’ cultural and social practices, and the history of its place in the broader canon of American literature. Those problems might at first seem to be insurmountable in the context of European university curricula. But, in reality, my US students are often very unfamiliar with their own nation’s history and are in need of a kind of remediation that is no more demanding than the work non-US teachers must put into their own pedagogical practices when they offer their students Native American literary texts.

As a response to this situation, I offer an approach to teaching Native American literatures in non-US settings that I call a “pedagogy of language sovereignty.” Simply put, this teaching method puts the struggle of Native nations to revive and maintain their languages front and center in the classroom. For our purposes, “language sovereignty” may be defined as an Indigenous community’s use of its traditional language as a tool “for stressing its cultural and historical uniqueness,” as well as their “cultural distinctness from nonindigenous governments” (Viatori and Ushigua 7). Having taught for a few semesters at universities in Portugal and Spain, I have some experience in translating the cultural contexts of “American” literary works for European students. When I have turned my attention to the doubly difficult task of contextualizing Native literature (a body of texts and orature traditions that many Native theorists resist calling “American” at all), I seized upon this formulation as a response to the question “How one would teach Native American Literature as World Literature?”

Ever since Goethe announced that “the era of world literature is at hand, and everyone must contribute to accelerating it,” there has been a corresponding commitment “to acknowledge and validate occluded regions of the non-Western world as unique literary and historical spaces that contribute to the whole” (Conversations 133). This recognition has, in turn, “necessitated an altogether different framework for theorizing concepts such as language, nation, and masterpieces” (“World Literature” 1). This is laudable goal, and I can see why thinking about Native literature in this way might be helpful. Still, I have some concerns about applying this perspective to Native literature. Like the term “World Music,” World Literature is not a fixed category. By applying it to Native texts, its lack of definitiveness could lead us into some pretty unsavory places—cultural appropriation, generalization, homogenization. Indeed, contemporary Native American critics like Jace Weaver have forcefully argued that “Native American literary output [is] separate and distinct from other national literatures’ and “proceeds from different assumptions and embodies different values from American literature” (15).

Therefore, in order to present what I think is a more Native nation-centered praxis as a ground for our foray into this world perspective, I propose a language sovereignty-oriented pedagogy that is decolonizing in a number of ways. For one thing, as Indigenous language educator Belinda Daniels of the Sturgeon Lake First Nations in Canada has recently observed, “In order for a nation to exist, the Nehiyawak [Sturgeon Lake First Nations], for example, require five elements: land, culture, governance, people and a language.”¹ In fact, a Native community’s pursuit of language revitalization, intertwines with the other four elements of cultural survival Daniels cites here—language embodies culture, enunciates governance, knits people together. My pedagogical ideas thus derive from the power of language to circulate through and constitute communities. In the classroom, this translates into a focus on the indigenous writer’s use of words in ways that speak to generational differences in their communities, address political shifts both within and without their tribes, and forge continuing links between their words and their homelands. Language is more than a medium of expression for these writers; it is a practice. It is a cultural technique that continually unites kinship groups across time, mobilizes time-honored ceremonial and storytelling practices in new ways to meet new political obstacles, and in many cases is viewed as an organic outgrowth of an indigenous homeland, grounding the speaker, writer, and listener in what the ethnographer Keith Basso has called “the wisdom of places.”²

Thus, the first step in teaching Native literature from a language sovereignty perspective is to present students with a linguistic map of the US. This one, produced by the linguist Ives Goddard of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, vividly illustrates the many different kinds of languages that are at work in Indian Country.

Before European contact with North America, more than 300 separate languages were being spoken in this part of the Western Hemisphere. As ethnolinguist, Marianne Mithun explains, these languages were “mutually unintelligible … and differ in fascinating ways not only from the better-known languages of Europe and Asia, but also among themselves” (1). Whereas European languages can be categorized into only three distinct “families” (Indo-European, Finno-Urgic, and Basque), there are about fifty Indian language families in North America, none written in alphabetic form.

Among this linguistic diversity, several factors stand out as perhaps influencing the way Native writers approach writing in English. Words, for example, are treated differently in the polysynthetic languages of North America. In Yupik, a language spoken in western Alaska, the word kaipiallrulliniuk is translated into the English phrase “the two of them were apparently really hungry” (Mithun 39). Some North American languages like Mohawk contains only nine consonants, while Tlingit, an Athabaskan language, contains forty-five. In addition to diction and phonological differences, Native languages exhibit (as perhaps do all languages) some relationship to their physical environment.³ If one looks at the Goddard map and locates the landscape in which Yupik is spoken, it makes sense that this language is filled with terms like caginraq (“skin or pelt of caribou taken just after the long winter hair has been shed in the spring”), a term whose specificity is born of generations of experience in Alaskan ecosystems (Mithun 37).

Map by Ives Goddard. “Native Languages and Language Families.” Compiled for Languages, vol. 17 of the Handbook of North American Indians (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1996).⁴

By examining this map, our students might also begin to imagine some other relationships that obtain between the land and language. Putting aside for a moment those many tribes that were removed from their homelands after the Indian Removal Act of 1830,⁵ they might look at how the languages of the Athabaskan Family are distributed across North America. The swirl of olive color that denotes Athabaskan—split as it is between the sub-arctic and the Great Basin of the US—suggests another important element of language, the fact that it also maps migrations and movements of peoples.

In order to ground these somewhat speculative observations in the real-world work of a Native poet, let’s examine a writer whose community still resides in part of its original homeland and whose language speaks of that land. Jeanette Armstrong is Okanagan. Okanagan is spoken in southern British Columbia in Canada and in north central Washington in the US (Mithun 492). It is a language known to its speakers as Nsilxin, and is perhaps spoken by 500 to 1000 speakers. Armstrong is of the “opinion that Okanagan, my original language, constitutes the most significant influence on my writing in English” (178). She also believes strongly that “the language spoken by the land which is interpreted by the Okanagan into words, carries parts of its ongoing reality” (178). “In this sense,” Armstrong writes, “all indigenous peoples’ languages are generated by a precise geography and arise from it” (178). In addition to the “landed” nature of indigenous languages that lie behind Native writer’s English literary works, Armstrong notes a profound difference in the way that nouns and images are understood and employed in Okanagan.

Using the example of the English word, dog, Armstrong explains, “when you say the Okanagan word for dog (kekwep), you don’t ‘see’ a dog image, you summon an experience of little furred life” (190). This is because the two syllables in the word suggest a combination of “a happening and a sprouting profusely (fur).” Armstrong thus observes that “speaking the Okanagan word for dog is an experience” (190). In Okanagan, the word is more a verb than a noun, and when Armstrong employs this understanding to her English language works, “[she] attempt[s] to construct a similar sense of movement and rhythm through sound patterns” (192). In the poem “Winds,” she demonstrates these practices:

The influence of the Okanagan language on Armstrong poetry does not stop with these morphological and syntactic elements. The way English is spoken on the Okanagan Reserve is considered a kind of dialect of the English language that, in its various forms, is known in Indian Country as “Rez English.” Like Armstrong’s poetic lines in English, “Okanagan Rez English has a structured quality semantically and syntactically closer to the way the Okanagan language is arranged,” and Armstrong argues that “Rez English from any part of the country, if examined, will display the sound and syntax pattern of the area.” Armstrong explains how this might work in the following sentences:

Trevor walked often to the spring to think and to be alone. Rez English would be more comfortable with a structure like this: Trevor’s always walking to the spring for thinking and being alone. The Rez style creates a semantic difference that allows for a fluid movement between past, present, and future. (193)

In both her Rez English usage and her ethnopoetic approximations of Okanagan verbal arts structures, Jeanette Armstrong feels her “writing in English is a continual battle against the rigidity in English” (194).

If we turn our attention to a very different landscape and language located on the southern border of the US, we find the Tohono O’odham Nation and the poetry of tribal member and linguist Ofelia Zepeda. Two of Zepeda’s poetry collections, Ocean Power (1995), and Jewed I Hoi (2005), are bilingual O’odham/English gatherings of verse. Many of Zepeda’s poems “originated in the O’odham language,” and when she offers an English counterpart, she cautions the reader that “they are not translations of the O’odham into English” (Jewed 7). As Zepeda explains in the Introduction to Jewed I Hoi, “Written O’Odham is a relatively new phenomenon,” and employs the orthography developed in the middle of the twentieth century by Albert Alvarez and Kenneth Hale.” Sanctioned by the O’odham Nation, “it is the writing system most commonly used for classroom teaching. Literacy in the O’Odham language is accessible only to young people in schools that offer O’odham language classes, and to adults who make the choice of becoming literate” (7-8). Thus Zepeda’s O’odham language poems stand in a unique relation to the verbal traditions that lie behind them. A case in point is her use of traditional songs to bring the rain to her desert homeland as a jumping off point for these two versions of “Cloud Song:”

Ce: daghim ‘o ‘ab wu: sañhim.

To:tahim ‘o ‘ab wu: sañhim.

Cuckuhim ‘o ‘ab him.

Wepeghim ‘o ‘abai him.

Greenly they emerge. In colors of blue they emerge.

Whitely they emerge.

In colors of black they are coming.

Reddening they are right here.

As in Armstrong’s verse, the O’odham language exerts a special morphological influence on its English counterpart. The repetitions of word ending auxiliaries common in O’odham must be abandoned in the English version to emphasize what is the “experiential” nature of nouns in the vernacular.⁶ Adverbial phrases shape the lines of the second version, adding a fifth where there is none in O’odham. It is a choice that sacrifices the medial caesura/half-line of the O’odham song, but one that Zepeda feels is necessary to capture the movement, what Armstrong called “the experiential” nature of traditional verbal art. Using just these two bilingual poets, an instructor could do a good job of making the students aware of the linguistic and aural elements so central to Native poetry.

If we consider Native American prose narrative, similar pedagogical opportunities apply. Take, for example, Black Eagle Child (1995) Ray A. Young Bear’s autobiographical novel that is largely written in verse-like short lines.⁷ Young Bear, a member of the Meskwaki and Sauk Nation of the Mississippi, describes the work as “a creative emulation,” one that he believes is both a continuation of traditional storytelling, “word collecting,” and vision and healing practices, as well as a “divergence,” and a necessary transformation pressed on him by the “dynamic trends” of twentieth-century language use (both vernacular and English) by the “bilingual/bicultural worlds [he] lives in” (254). Like Zepeda and Armstrong, Young Bear is wary of relying on mere translation to ground the aesthetic of indigenous literature. That is because, for Young Bear, “the poetic forms I have adopted and adapted (from English, a second language) have little significance in the tribal realm” (253). The tribal writer’s work, in Young Bear’s mind, is a profoundly ambivalent one. In it, the artist must steer a precarious course between speaking that which is never to be spoken to outsiders and yet collating the story worlds of his community into something viable for the situation in which the People of the Red Earth (Meskwaki) find themselves today.

Moreover, Young Bear views the hegemonic nature of the English language as at the heart of many of his community’s social problems, which he fictionalizes in the novel. In order to subvert this kind of English language usage, Young Bear allows his narrator to satirize the acronym-laden language of the US government and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Speaking of his fellow tribal members as “separated from each other by infinite miles,” the novel’s protagonist comments,

We sought and expected a grain of civility

In our people, regardless of who they were.

And while we all recognized the lineage abbreviations

Got out of hand, we all resided in the same

Hellhole. Provided no one made waves—be it

And EBNO, and EBNAR (Enrolled But Not A Resident),

BRYPU (Blood Related Yet Paternally Unclaimed),

UBENOB (Unrelated By Either Name Or Blood),

EBMIW (Enrolled But Mother Is White),

And so forth—a sense of decency and harmony

Was possible . . . (98)

By far, however, Young Bear’s most common approach to battling the linguistic hegemony of outsiders is his code switching from Meskwaki to English. Early in the novel, as the protagonist, Edgar Bearchild, and his closest friend, Ted Facepaint, speed around the tribal community with two other Indian friends from different nations, they toggle back and forth between Meskwaki and English:

Ted Turned on the single headlight and wipers

And pretended to strain for a look.

‘A sa mi win a ni. That’s too much.’

‘I know,’ I said, breaking into English

For the benefit of the Ontarios.

I was going to translate what I had just said,

But Ted sensed my plans and cut me off.

‘E ye bi me a tti mow a nit e bi ke me ko

A ski ki wa sqwe se a wi ta bi ma ta.

Before you say anything, the girl you

Are sitting with is quite young.’

‘Ohhn, ke te na? Oh, is that so?’

‘And she also desires you.’

‘Ke ne tti ma a bebe tte tti.

You are such a liar.’

Ted and Edgar’s bilingual banter exemplifies the kind of linguistic play that Keith Basso defined as “code switching” in Native verbal performances: “language alternations . . . [that] may be strategically employed as an instrument of metacommunication . . . an indirect form of social commentary” (Portraits 8-9).

Another significant element of Young Bear’s approach to writing out the Meskwaki vernacular lies in his use of the Great Lakes Syllabary, an alphabetic shorthand for writing Native languages that emerged in the Great Lakes during the nineteenth-century and is known to the Meskwaki as “Pa-pe-pi-po.” Such syllabaries, like the more famous one invented by the Cherokee tribal member, Sequoyah in the 1820s, embody deeply felt cultural practices that went far beyond mere translation. In fact, “encoding spoken [vernacular] into written form involves, not only a set of letters, but a set of spelling conventions also; and these last can best be described as an ordered set of context restricted rewrite rules” (Walker 404).

The Laguna Pueblo writer Leslie Silko also provides an excellent source of teaching hybrid literary materials that highlight linguistic sovereignty. In the most recent edition of Storyteller (1975; 2007), for example, Silko explains why the original version of the book was formatted along a horizontal, rather than vertical axis:

The shape of Storyteller was unusual because I wanted to give plenty of space to the poems I’d written on paper turned sideways for increased width. I experimented with using space on the page, with indentations and various line spacings to convey time and distance and the feeling of the story as it was told aloud. (xxvi)

In the poem, “Cottonwood,” for example, Silko not only covers the entire wideformat page, but also employs non-standard stanza forms that similarly “convey time and distance:”

The poem branches like a cottonwood tree, projecting from a canyon wall, as they do in Pueblo country, and as is pictured in one of the photographs included in the collection. But “Cottonwood” isn’t just a “poem.” It is also a traditional story, and the formatting Silko uses in the rest of this passage suggests another important language sovereignty gesture that is centered on the way that Silko seeks to bring her community’s and family’s stories into the reader’s present through spatial and diacritical techniques that foreground intersubjectivity, language loss, and language recovery. In “Cottonwood,” this technique appears in the above passage through Silko’s use of parenthetical commentary on the actual identity of the human being who meets the woman “in the sandy wash of the big canyon.”

where she came to wait for him.

‘You will know,’

He said,

‘you will know by the colors—

cottonwood leaves

more colors of the sun

than the sun himself.’

(But you see, he was the Sun,

He was only pretending to be a human being.)

Silko employs such gestures towards intersubjectivity throughout the book.⁸ In an early story from the collection, Silko retells her Aunt Susie’s tale of a little girl whose death yields an unexpected proliferation of butterflies in Pueblo country. Early in the story, the little girl asks her mother to make her a corn-meal porridge called yashtoah, and Silko takes this opportunity to enhance the intersubjective context of her work:

one day she said

‘Mother, I would like to have

Some yashtoah to eat.’

‘Yashtoah’ is the hardened crust on corn meal mush

that curls up.

The very name ‘yashtoah’ means

it’s sort of curled-up, you know, dried,

just as mush dries on top.

She said

‘I would like to have some yashtoah,’

And her mother said

‘My dear little girl,

I can’t make you any yashtoah

Because we haven’t any wood . . .’

Here, the speaker’s aside (printed in italic type) gestures toward language loss in the listener and glosses difficult words from “time immemorial” so that the story might still have power in the reader’s present. Importantly, this technique and others in the text do not mean that Silko feels that Laguna language fluency is necessary to the production of Laguna stories. Rather, they demonstrate the way she and other Native writers who lack fluency in their vernacular language still can access its paralinguistic and aural qualities through the use of an ethnopoetic formatting approach to English that attempts to mimic traditional practice.⁹ Among the more standard short stories included in Storyteller, on the other hand, Silko employs two column justified text to bring even more attention to the difference between stories that originated in Laguna and those she has written in English for an English language audience.

In each of these examples, the use of linguistic contexts for the poets’ and storytellers’ choices not only enhance the students’ understanding of each individual text, but also the larger context in which all Native American literature finds itself—part of an ongoing and long-standing effort to express in print and alphabetic type the various verbal arts traditions of the more than 500 nations that reside in the US today. Yet these are just a few examples. Even for writers who did not grow up as bilingual speakers, there remains a constant awareness of the vernacular language performative traditions that still exist in many communities. Just because a writer writes in English and is not fluent in her own nation’s language, that does not mean he or she is not writing Native literature. As the Acoma Pueblo poet Simon Ortiz has observed in his Foreword to American Indian Literary Nationalism,

English has been a knotty problem for us . . . [yet] it has become the most common language for many of us because of constant use and habit, since it is the language of the prominent culture and society around us and we are constantly faced with it . . . we can make use of English[,] but we must determine for ourselves how English is to be a part of our lives, socially, culturally, politically . . . While English—and many other colonial languages—may be the ‘enemy’s language,’ it can be helpful and useful to us just like any other languages we have the opportunity to learn . . . Although we have to make sure we do not compromise ourselves by inadvertently speaking-writing what we don’t want to mean (because English carries a lot of Western social cultural baggage), English language writing can work to our advantage when we write with a sense of Indigenous consciousness. (xiii-xiv)

Once again, the linguistic perspective on Native literature offers our students in non-US settings the chance to think about the relationship between colonialism and language when they read an English language Native text. They also have the opportunity, not nearly as common for US students, to think about language autonomy in their own countries. Speakers of Basque and Gallego in Spain, for example, bring to these Native American works their own visceral experience of the politics of language use. The same can be said for Roma readers of these books, of readers in Taiwan who are familiar with the marginalization of that island’s Indigenous peoples and their languages.

The good news for teachers of this literature world-wide is that the Internet has closed the distance between our classrooms and the spoken-word performances of Indian Country. Our classes can tap into recorded versions of Ofelia Zepeda’s work, and provide students the opportunity to stream the Diné Nation’s Navajo Radio (KTNN), or show them how to access the California Language Archive, which houses hundreds of ethnographic recordings of North American Native languages. Instructors may also wish to work with other Native poets and prose writers whose writing is directly influenced by their vernacular language—Luci Tapahanso (Diné), Margaret Noodin (Ojibwe), Delphine Red Shirt (Lakota), to name a few. By offering our students the concrete history of language sovereignty issues in the Tohono O’odham, Lakota, Ojibwe, and Laguna nations, they will be better equipped to see how language itself is often one of the main subjects of a story or poem. By offering them concepts like paralinguistics and ethnopoetics, code-switching and lexical shifting, we make more accessible those elements of Native American literature that our students themselves have experienced first hand in their study of foreign languages, and/or their understanding of the language politics that obtain in their own communities today.

Works Cited

Armstrong, Jeanette. “Land Speaking.” Speaking for the Generations. Ed. Simon Ortiz. University of Arizona Press, 1998. 175-194.

Basso, Keith. Portraits of “The Whiteman.” Cambridge University Press, 1979.

———. “Wisdom Sits in Places.” America. W.W. Norton, 1998.

Daniels, Belinda. “Belinda Daniels.” CBC News Interactives. https://www.cbc.ca/news2/interactives/i-am-indigenous-2017/daniels.html

Everett, Caleb. “Evidence for Direct Geographic Influences on Linguistic Sounds: The Case of Ejectives.” PLoS ONE 8.6 (2013) https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0065275

Goddard, Ives. “Native Languages and Language Families.” Languages, Vol. 17 Handbook of North American Indians. Smithsonian Institution, 1996.

Goethe, Johann. Conversations with Eckermann. Trans. John Oxenford. North Point Press, 1984.

Hymes, Dell. “In Vain I Tried to Tell You.” Essays in Native American Ethnopoetics. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981.

Mithun, Marianne. The Languages of Native North America. Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Sapir, Edward. “How languages influence each other.” Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech. Harcourt, 1921. 192-206.

Sarris, Greg. Keeping Slug Woman Alive. University of California Press, 1993.

Silko, Leslie. Storyteller. Arcade Publishing, 1989.

———. Storyteller. Penguin, 2012.

Viatori, Maximilian and Gloria Ushigua, “Speaking Sovereignty: Indigenous Languages and Self-Determination.” Wicazo Sa Review 22.2 (Fall 2007): 7-21.

Walker, Willard. “The Winnebago Syllabary and the Generative Model.” Anthropological Linguistics 16.8 (1974): 393-414.

Warrior, Robert, Jace Weaver, and Craig Womack, eds. American Indian Literary Nationalism. University of New Mexico Press, 2006.

“World Literature.” Obo. Literary and Critical Theory. 17 (November 2019). https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780190221911/obo-9780190221911-0025.xml

Young Bear, Ray A. Black Eagle Child: The Facepaint Narratives. University of Iowa Press, 1991.

Zepeda, Ofelia. A Papago Grammar. University of Arizona Press, 1983.

———. Ocean Power. University of Arizona Press, 1995.

———. Jewed ‘I-Hoi/Earth Movements. Kore Press, 1997.

¹ “Belinda Daniels.” CBC News Interactives. https://www.cbc.ca/news2/interactives/i-am-indigenous-2017/daniels.html

² See his classic study of Western Apache place names and stories, Wisdom Sits in Places (1996).

³ Early 20^th century linguists like Edward Sapir focuses on geography and “linguistic border lands” (200), but recent scholarship suggests that the specific elements of an environment might actually play a role in language formation. See Everett for research that shows how higher elevations have effected phonetics in some languages.

⁴ “Native Languages and Language Families.” In Languages, Vol. 17 of the Handbook of North American Indians (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1996).

⁵ The southeastern tribes that were removed to present-day Oklahoma include the Choctaw, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Seminole, Muskogee (Creek). They were joined by tribal members from the Northeast nations of the Shawnee, Ottawa, Pottawatomi, Sauk and Meskwaki (Fox), Lenape, Kickapoo, Miami, and the Senecas.

⁶ For a brief description of O’odham syntax and grammar, see Zepeda’s Papago Grammar.

⁷ The Library of Congress Subject Headings under which this book is catalogued in libraries call it a “biography” and “ethnography.”

⁸ Greg Sarris has argued that much indigenous verbal art is in fact directed towards underscoring its own “orality and interpersonal and intercultural discourse” (41). Thus Silko’s use of diacritics in this passage is intended to remind the reader of the collaborative nature of storytelling and the interpersonal and intercultural elements of the story that are embodied in the storyteller’s gloss on her subject.

⁹ The work of Dell Hymes is foundational to this kind of interpretation. Hymes defines “ethnopoetics” as “discourse organized in lines,” but this concept of the poetic line is culturally determined by deeper structures than mere breath or pauses. Hymes promoted the idea that indigenous verbal arts relied on “initial [linguistic] elements and associated discourse features” (341). These, in turn, can be inferred even in ethnographic transcriptions that did not originally recognize them. Hymes’ work influenced a generation of Native poets like Leslie Silko, who attempted to write in English what they perceived to be the sense of line in their own verbal arts traditions.