Lessons from Fort Apache: Beyond Language Endangerment and Maintenance

Lessons from Fort Apache is an ethnography of Indigenous language dynamics on the Fort Apache reservation in Arizona with North American and global implications concerning language endangerment. Moving beyond a narrow focus on linguistic documentation, M. Eleanor Nevins examines how the linguistics and cultural identities of Indigenous populations are attributed with meaning against other sociocultural concerns and interests. While affirming the value of language documentation and maintenance, Nevins also provides a much-needed appraisal of the potential conflicts in authority claims and language practices between community members and the educators and scholars who research their linguistic heritage.

Nevins argues that the debates surrounding the revitalization of Indigenous languages need broadening to include larger questions of social mediation, shifting cultural identities, and the politics intrinsic to the relationship between Indigenous community members and university-accredited experts such as language researchers and educators. This engaging ethnography examines these questions and investigates the language dynamics of the Fort Apache Reservation, including the unintended challenges that standardized textual models sometimes pose to local interests. Nevins reveals the community's historical and contemporary concerns for language documentation, maintenance, and revitalization.

Lessons from Fort Apache demonstrates the need for language maintenance programs and for flexibility in finding politically sustainable forms of collaboration and exchange between researchers, teachers, and those community members who base their claims to an Indigenous language in alternate terms.

M. Eleanor Nevins is an associate professor of anthropology at Middlebury College, Vermont. She is the editor of World-Making Stories: Maidu Language and Community Renewal on a Shared California Landscape (Nebraska, 2017).

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Lessons from Fort Apache: Beyond Language Endangerment and Maintenance

Lessons from Fort Apache is an ethnography of Indigenous language dynamics on the Fort Apache reservation in Arizona with North American and global implications concerning language endangerment. Moving beyond a narrow focus on linguistic documentation, M. Eleanor Nevins examines how the linguistics and cultural identities of Indigenous populations are attributed with meaning against other sociocultural concerns and interests. While affirming the value of language documentation and maintenance, Nevins also provides a much-needed appraisal of the potential conflicts in authority claims and language practices between community members and the educators and scholars who research their linguistic heritage.

Nevins argues that the debates surrounding the revitalization of Indigenous languages need broadening to include larger questions of social mediation, shifting cultural identities, and the politics intrinsic to the relationship between Indigenous community members and university-accredited experts such as language researchers and educators. This engaging ethnography examines these questions and investigates the language dynamics of the Fort Apache Reservation, including the unintended challenges that standardized textual models sometimes pose to local interests. Nevins reveals the community's historical and contemporary concerns for language documentation, maintenance, and revitalization.

Lessons from Fort Apache demonstrates the need for language maintenance programs and for flexibility in finding politically sustainable forms of collaboration and exchange between researchers, teachers, and those community members who base their claims to an Indigenous language in alternate terms.

M. Eleanor Nevins is an associate professor of anthropology at Middlebury College, Vermont. She is the editor of World-Making Stories: Maidu Language and Community Renewal on a Shared California Landscape (Nebraska, 2017).

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Lessons from Fort Apache: Beyond Language Endangerment and Maintenance

Lessons from Fort Apache: Beyond Language Endangerment and Maintenance

Lessons from Fort Apache: Beyond Language Endangerment and Maintenance

Lessons from Fort Apache: Beyond Language Endangerment and Maintenance

Overview

Lessons from Fort Apache is an ethnography of Indigenous language dynamics on the Fort Apache reservation in Arizona with North American and global implications concerning language endangerment. Moving beyond a narrow focus on linguistic documentation, M. Eleanor Nevins examines how the linguistics and cultural identities of Indigenous populations are attributed with meaning against other sociocultural concerns and interests. While affirming the value of language documentation and maintenance, Nevins also provides a much-needed appraisal of the potential conflicts in authority claims and language practices between community members and the educators and scholars who research their linguistic heritage.

Nevins argues that the debates surrounding the revitalization of Indigenous languages need broadening to include larger questions of social mediation, shifting cultural identities, and the politics intrinsic to the relationship between Indigenous community members and university-accredited experts such as language researchers and educators. This engaging ethnography examines these questions and investigates the language dynamics of the Fort Apache Reservation, including the unintended challenges that standardized textual models sometimes pose to local interests. Nevins reveals the community's historical and contemporary concerns for language documentation, maintenance, and revitalization.

Lessons from Fort Apache demonstrates the need for language maintenance programs and for flexibility in finding politically sustainable forms of collaboration and exchange between researchers, teachers, and those community members who base their claims to an Indigenous language in alternate terms.

M. Eleanor Nevins is an associate professor of anthropology at Middlebury College, Vermont. She is the editor of World-Making Stories: Maidu Language and Community Renewal on a Shared California Landscape (Nebraska, 2017).

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781496231468
Publisher: Nebraska
Publication date: 01/01/2024
Edition description: New Edition
Pages: 282
Product dimensions: 7.00(w) x 10.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

M. Eleanor Nevins is an associate professor of anthropology at Middlebury College, Vermont. She is the editor of World-Making Stories: Maidu Language and Community Renewal on a Shared California Landscape (Nebraska, 2017).

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments viii

1. Introduction 1

2. Indigenous Languages and the Mediation of Communities 12

3. Learning to Listen: Coming to Terms with Conflicting Meanings of Language Loss 47

4. They Live in Lonesome Dove: English in Indigenous Places 79

5. Stories in the Moment of Encounter: Documentation Boundary Work 113

6. What No Coyote Story Means: The Borderland Genre of Traditional Storytelling 152

7. “Some ‘No No’ and Some ‘Yes’”: Silence, Agency, and Traditionalist Words 186

8. Sustainability: Possible Socialities of Documentation and Maintenance 215

Appendix A: Lawrence Mithlo 229

Appendix B: Eva Lupe on Her Early Life 237

Index 250

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“In Lessons from Fort Apache, Eleanor Nevins provides an eye-opening map of the ideologically complex, often densely tangled contact zone that language maintenance projects inevitably inhabit and charts in eloquent, persuasive terms a politically symmetrical path toward language sustainability.”
Richard Bauman, Indiana University, Bloomington

“In Lessons from Fort Apache, Nevins provides vividly instructive portrayals of the ideological struggles of language revitalization efforts.  She teaches us to attain new understandings of the hidden complexity of these important intra- and intercultural projects.”
Paul V. Kroskrity, University of California, Los Angeles

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