Hear Our Languages, Hear Our Voices: - Recherche en IA spécialisée au MIT

Hear Our Languages, Hear Our Voices:
Storywork as Theory and Praxis in
Indigenous-Language Reclamation

Teresa L. McCarty, Sheilah E. Nicholas, Kari A. B. Chew,
Natalie G. Diaz, Wesley Y. Leonard & Louellyn White

Abstrait: Storywork provides an epistemic, pedagogical, and methodological lens through which to exam-
ine Indigenous language reclamation in practice. We theorize the meaning of language reclamation in di-
verse Indigenous communities based on firsthand narratives of Chickasaw, Mojave, Miami, Hopi, Mo-
hawk, Navajo, and Native Hawaiian language reclamation. Language reclamation is not about preserving
the abstract entity “language,” but is rather about voice, which encapsulates personal and communal agen-
cy and the expression of Indigenous identities, belonging, and responsibility to self and community. Story-
work–firsthand narratives through which language reclamation is simultaneously described and practiced–
shows that language reclamation simultaneously refuses the dispossession of Indigenous ways of knowing
and re-fuses past, présent, and future generations in projects of cultural continuance. Centering Indigenous
experiences sheds light on Indigenous community concerns and offers larger lessons on the role of language
in well-being, sustainable diversity, and social justice.

Dans 2007, following twenty-two years of Indigenous

activism, the United Nations General Assembly ap-
proved the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous
Peoples (undrip). Among its provisions is the right
of Indigenous peoples “to revitalize, utiliser, develop and
transmit to future generations their histories, lan-
guages, oral traditions, philosophies, writing systems
and literatures.”1 This right goes unchallenged for
speakers of dominant languages, but is systemati-
cally violated for speakers of Indigenous languages
throughout the world. Of approximately seven thou-
sand known spoken languages, 50 à 90 percent are
predicted to fall silent by century’s end. Two-thirds
of those would be Indigenous languages.2 In these
contexts, languages are not replaced but rather dis-

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placed through policies designed to eradi-
cate linguistically encoded knowledges and
cultural identifications with those associat-
ed with dominant-class ideologies. The re-
sult of state-sponsored linguicide–which
novelist and postcolonial theorist Ngũgĩ wa
Thiong’o has called “the linguistic equiv-
alent of genocide”3–is worldwide Indige-
nous-language endangerment.

We take as foundational premises the in-
herent human right to learn, utiliser, and trans-
mit a language of heritage and birth and the
fact that linguistic diversity is an enabling
resource for individuals and society. Howev-
er, more than universalist notions of linguis-
tic rights and the quantification of Indige-
nous-language endangerment, we valorize
an enduring tradition of Indigenous per-
sistence in which linguistic diversity is the
most reliable guide toward the future for In-
digenous peoples. As Mary Hermes and Kei-
ki Kawai‘ae‘a write, diverse Indigenous lan-
guages have persisted over many centuries,
sometimes going “underground” during the
most oppressive times; thus, it is ahistori-
cal to speak of reclamation as “new.”4 We
foreground the possibilities inherent in a vi-
tal Indigenous-language reclamation move-
ment, which represents the forward-look-
ing legacy of the survivors of assimilation
programs. Centering Indigenous experi-
ences sheds light on Indigenous communi-
ty concerns and offers broader lessons on
the role of language in individual and com-
munal well-being, sustainable diversity, et
social justice for all oppressed peoples.

We develop three themes in this essay.
D'abord, we privilege what Stó:lō scholar Jo-ann
Archibald calls storywork: experiential nar-
ratives that constitute epistemic, theoreti-
cal, pedagogical, and methodological lens-
es through which we can both study and
practice language reclamation.5 As meth-
od, storywork provides data in the form of
firsthand accounts6 through which to gain
insight into the meaning of language recla-
mation in diverse Indigenous communities.

Lumbee scholar Bryan Brayboy asserts the
role of storytelling in theory building: “Lo-
cating theory as something absent from sto-
ries is problematic. . . . Stories serve as the
basis for how our communities work.”7
And Paul Kroskrity notes, Native storytell-
ing contains “an action-oriented emphasis
on using . . . narratives for moral instruc-
tion, healing, and developing culturally rel-
evant tribal and social identities.”8

Deuxième, we distinguish between language
and voice. Language, bilingual education
scholar Richard Ruiz writes, “is general,
abstract, and exists even when it is sup-
pressed”; in contrast, “when voice is sup-
pressed, it is not heard–it does not exist.”9
Like Ruiz, we equate voice with agency; comme
the storywork that follows illuminates, ce
is not simply an intellectualized experience
of identity (it is not about language in a gen-
eral or abstract sense), but an embodied ex-
perience of personal belonging and respon-
sibility. From this perspective we explore
the ways in which language reclamation is
part of larger Indigenous projects of resil-
ience, rediscovery, sovereignty, et la justice.
Troisième, we argue that language reclama-
tion is not about returning to an imagined
“pure” form of an ancestral language. Dans-
stead we highlight the dynamic, multisit-
éd, heteroglossic, and multivocal character
of Indigenous-language reclamation,10 et-
derscoring that the “success” of these ef-
forts must be locally defined but also ex-
ternally shared–a movement toward mo-
bilizing strategic new global alliances and
protocols of collaboration.11

We first present five narrative accounts
of language renewal: Chickasaw, Mojave,
Miami, Hopi, and Mohawk. The narratives
represent “story work in action”;12 in tell-
ing individual and communal journeys, chaque
author demonstrates the significance of
stories as empirically grounded cultural re-
sources for recovering and sustaining Indig-
enous knowledges and identities.13 We con-
clude with a final narrative that speaks to our

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147 (2) Spring 2018McCarty, Nicholas, Chew, Diaz, Leonard & Blanc

anchoring themes and the meaning of story-
work for Indigenous language reclamation.

Chikashshanompa’ is a Muskogean language

spoken by less than fifty people, most of whom
reside within the Chickasaw Nation in south-
central Oklahoma. As Kari Chew relates, Chick-
asaw people consider Chikashshanompa’ a gift
“with which to speak to each other, the land, le
plants, the animals, and the Creator.”14 Though
centuries of colonization have disrupted the con-
tinuity of intergenerational language transmis-
sion, the Chickasaw Nation is actively undertak-
ing a multipronged language reclamation effort.
The story of language loss and reclama-
tion in my family begins in 1837, when the
U.S. government forced my great-great-
great-grandparents from their Southeast-
ern homelands to present-day Oklahoma.
Their children, who attended English-lan-
guage boarding schools, were the last gen-
eration in my family to learn Chikashsha-
nompa’ as a first language. I was raised in
Les anges, where my grandparents re-
located after leaving the Chickasaw Na-
tion. Though it was important to my fami-
ly to visit and maintain a connection “back
home,” the language was not spoken or
talked about among my relatives.

I did not know my language as a child, mais
I believe it has always been within me–a
gift from my ancestors and Creator–wait-
ing to be resurfaced. In my young adulthood,
during a college internship with my tribe,
I had my first opportunity to take a Chi-
kashshanompa’ class. It did not take long for
the language–my language–to captivate
my soul. One phrase I learned was, “Chi-
kashsha saya,” “I am Chickasaw.” Though I
had said these words many times in English,
they never fully conveyed my sense of who
J'étais: saying them in Chikashshanompa’, je
had finally found my voice. The experience
inspired me to continue learning the lan-
guage and to use my education to support
other Chickasaw people in their pursuit of
language reclamation.

Throughout my work, I have built rela-
tionships with Chickasaw people deeply
committed to learning and teaching Chi-
kash shanompa’. One was Elder fluent
speaker Jerry. While I knew Jerry as a pa-
tient and dedicated language teacher, il
had not always been that way. For many
années, Jerry was skeptical of younger gen-
erations’ interest in Chikashshanompa’
because he believed that the language was
destined to perish with his generation. Il
asked those who approached him wanting
to learn, “If I teach you, who are you go-
ing to speak to? There’s nobody else that
speaks it and I’m not going to live forever.”
In time, persistent language learners con-
vinced Jerry to teach them. Despite his ini-
tial reluctance, Jerry came to embrace lan-
guage work as his life’s calling. The young-
er people he taught were eager to learn and
began to speak the language well. Seeing
their dedication and progress made Jerry
reconsider his perception of Chikashsha-
nompa’ as a “dying” language. He posed
his question again: “If I weren’t here any-
plus, who’s going to carry [Chikashsha-
nompa’] sur?” But this time he had an an-
swer: the younger generations of commit-
ted language learners “would carry it on.”
Coming from a family that did not “car-
ry” the language, I was thankful that Jerry
wanted to give Chikashshanompa’ to learn-
ers of my generation. Not only did Jerry
teach me Chikashshanompa’, he taught me
about what language reclamation means:
speaking the language proudly, et, most
important, sharing it with others.

One of the ways Jerry envisioned sharing
the language with future generations was
through children’s books. Inspired by Jer-
ry, a small group of language learners and I
created stories in Chikashshanompa’ with
beginning and youth language learners in
esprit. I couldn’t wait to show Jerry our
travail. About two weeks before I planned
to see him, cependant, I received news that
Jerry had passed.

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As I mourned the loss of a dear teach-
er, I thought also of the hope that Jerry
held for the language. When I asked Jerry
about what he thought would happen to
the language during my lifetime, he said
he foresaw a new generation of speakers.
“Right now is just the beginning [of our
language reclamation story],” he remind-
ed me. “There’s a lot more.” While I nev-
er had the chance to share our stories with
Jerry, I know he would be proud to see lan-
guage learners sharing in his vision to give
the language to emerging generations of
Chika shsha nompa’ speakers.

Pipa Aha Macav, The People With the Riv-

er Running Through Their Body and the Land
(the Mojave), trace their origins to Spirit Moun-
tain near present-day Needles, California. Mo-
jave is a Yuman language spoken by peoples in-
digenous to the southern California, Nevada,
and Arizona desert. At Fort Mojave, there are
approximately twenty tribal elders who learned
Mojave as a first language. Natalie Diaz is one
of a small group of young adults, parents, et
youth who embarked on a journey to learn the
Mojave language from the elders and to create a
repository of language resources for future gen-
erations.

In Decolonising the Mind, Ngũgĩ wa Thi-
ong’o writes,“the most important area of
domination was the mental universe of the
colonized.. . .To control a people’s culture
is to control their tools of self-definition in
relationship to others.”15

Language negotiates the way I know my-
self–what I believe I am capable of, how I
know myself in relationship to others, what
I can offer others, what I deserve from oth-
ers in return. Language is where I am con-
structed as either possible or impossible.

To lose a language is to lose many things
other than vocabulary. To lose a language
is also to lose the body, the bodies of our
ancestors and of our futures. What I mean
est: Language is more than an extension of
the body; it is the body, made of the body’s

energy and electricity, developed to carry
the body’s memories, desires, needs, et
imagination.

When a word is silenced, what happens
to the bodies who spoke it? What happens
to the bodies once carried in those erased
words?

When a verbal expression of love is
crushed quiet, how long can the physical
gesture of love continue in such oppres-
sive silence? How can the gesture answer
if nobody calls out for it verbally?

In Mojave, the word kavanaam, which car-
ries within it a very physical and caring ges-
ture, was lost. We didn’t know it was lost,
since we’d never felt it, never had it offered
to us or acted out upon us. This is a small
story of how we returned to kavanaam–
first the word, and eventually the gesture.
In a language class, an adult learner told
our Elder teacher, who was her aunt, “I
want to tell my son ‘I love you.’” Many of us
had already heard the teacher’s reply: “Mo-
javes don’t have a phrase for ‘I love you.’”
We were given this data by White linguists
who had studied our language, and found it
scribbled in their numerous notes. Studying
a language differs greatly and dangerously
from feeling a language. Luckily, the learner
did not accept a White linguist’s detached
“knowing” of a language built in a Mojave
body and meant to be delivered onto anoth-
er Mojave body. The learner further shared
that she’d never heard her father or moth-
er say they loved her. She didn’t want her
experience to be her son’s inheritance. Elle
needed to tell him she loved him, in his Mo-
jave language.

“What do you really want to say?” the

teacher asked.

Emotional beyond words, the learner
answered in gesture, reaching her hands
out as if her son were in front of her, alors
returning her hands back to her own body,
pressing them to her chest.

“Okay,” the Elder teacher said, “We have

many ways to say this.”

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147 (2) Spring 2018McCarty, Nicholas, Chew, Diaz, Leonard & Blanc

And we learned those ways, none of
which translated to “I love you.” Our ways
were too urgent to fit within three small
English words.

This is how we found kavanaam. Plus tard
that evening, the learner stopped by my
mother’s house, still wanting to process
the emotional moment from class. Elle
shared another story about the last time she
and her sister saw her father; he was being
wheeled into the emergency room. Her sis-
ter said again and again, “I love you, Dad.”
He didn’t reply. He didn’t say, “I love you
too.” Instead he reached out and pressed her
arm repeatedly, squeezing his large hand
around her forearm, wrist, and palm.

After a moment, my mother responded,
“He told your sister he loved her, just not
with words.”

My mother recounted how her mother,
grandmother, and aunts pressed her and
her siblings’ legs, shoulders, and arms, comme
babies in cradleboards and into their teens.
My aunt pressed my great-grandmother’s
body well past her hundredth birthday.
This pressing was a gesture of care, of ten-
derness, a conversation between two Mo-
jave bodies, a way of saying that was more
powerful than words.

The next morning, when I visited my El-
der teachers and told them this story, ils
remembered: kavanaam, to press the body.
“I haven’t heard it in a long time,” my teach-
er said.

Mojaves didn’t say the English phrase
“I love you,” but not because we did not
feel tenderness. “I love you” meant little
to us–how could we have trusted the En-
glish-language expression of love when its
speakers had been so unloving to us, notre
human bodies, and the bodies of our earth
and water?

When we lost our languages, we lost many
ways of expression. We did not speak the
word kavanaam and shortly thereafter we
ceased to gesture or enact it. We were al-
tered–our bodies were changed because the

ways we knew to care for one another’s bod-
ies were changed. We couldn’t say the ten-
derness, and soon we began to believe our
bodies did not deserve such tendernesses.
American violence inflicted on Indige-
nous bodies, throughout history and to-
day, doesn’t define our capacity for ten-
derness. We found kavanaam where it had
been waiting, in our bodies. We took back
a part of our culture that held the Mojave
way of perceiving ourselves and our rela-
tionship to the world. Oui, America has giv-
en us violence, and still we deserve tender-
ness–moreover, we are as capable of deliv-
ering it to one another as we are of receiving
it from one another.

To reclaim a language is many things,
one of which is to regain the verbal and
gestured language of tenderness and the
autonomy to love ourselves.

myaamia–Miami–is a major dialect of

Miami-Illinois, an Algonquian language spo-
ken by peoples indigenous to the Great Lakes re-
gion. Multiple forced relocations, first into what
is now Kansas and later into Oklahoma (alors
called “Indian Territory”), left in their wake
diaspora, language loss, and massive popula-
tion decline. Miami people today reside in forty-
seven U.S. states, with approximately five thou-
sand citizens enrolled in the Miami Tribe of Okla-
homa and an estimated ten thousand more who
may claim Miami or Illinois as a heritage lan-
guage. This is the context for myaamiaki eemam-
wiciki (Miami Awakening), a personal and com-
munity-based language and cultural reclamation
processus, described below by Wesley Leonard.

In his final State of the Nation address
to the citizens of the Miami Tribe of Okla-
homa in 2007, my grandfather, akima
waapimaankwa (Chief Floyd E. Leonard,
1925–2008), called for tribal elders “to
teach those who are rising up to become
the elders of tomorrow” and recognized
the “many middle-age and young people
who are working hard to gain knowledge of
[Miami] culture, language and traditions.”

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He acknowledged how a series of histori-
cal ruptures created a situation in which
contemporary Miamis often must actively
seek tribal cultural knowledge and learn our
langue, myaamia, as a second language.
These ruptures include the forced removal
of part of the Miami community from trib-
al homelands in Indiana, U.S.-run boarding
schools in which Native American children
were not allowed to speak their tribal lan-
guages, and the nearly complete silence of
myaamia to the point where linguistic sci-
ence erroneously labeled it “extinct.”16 In
fact, we have been successful in bringing
our language back into the community–a
process that ironically began by applying
tools of linguistic science to analyze archi-
val documentation of myaamia.

By acknowledging both this history and
the contemporary response, my grandfa-
ther referenced a core idea of my tribe and
of other Native American groups, which is
that the past informs the present and the
present looks to the future (c'est, today’s
tribal youth will become elders). Appropri-
ately, within the archival documentation of
myaamia was our language’s grammatical
particle kati, which marks that something
will occur. This gives us the grammar to talk
about the future, including learning, speak-
ing, transmitting, and expanding myaamia
in a way that aligns with changing Miami
community needs and values.

My experience with wider society’s view
of Native Americans and our many lan-
guages is that while nobody forgets the
existence of the past (however inaccurate
their accounts of it may be), the present
and future are comparatively overlooked.
While complex forces underlie this phe-
nomenon, many of them can be captured
by one word: colonization. By extension,
our response must be decolonization. À-
day’s Miami people are engaged in decol-
onization as we reclaim our language, pas
only by learning and speaking it, mais aussi
by identifying beliefs and practices that

perpetuate colonial values and voicing al-
ternatives to them, which I will now do.

Much of my work focuses on educat-
ing about how colonialism relegates Na-
tive Amer ican languages and peoples to
the past and thus doubly silences Native
languages, first through policies that co-
erce communities to replace their languag-
es, and then through relegating those lan-
guages to “disappearing” or “extinct” sta-
tus even when they are still spoken. (Le
latter sometimes still occurs with myaamia,
even though myaamiaataawiaanki noonki
kaahkiihkwe–“we speak Miami today”–
and myaamiaataawiaanki kati.) Sadly, tel
erasure is frequently reinforced in academia
despite its contemporary calls for inclusion,
diversity, responsibility to communities, et
broad inquiries into the arts and sciences.

In linguistics, my field of training, erasure
can occur when linguists fervently docu-
ment “the last speakers” of Indigenous lan-
guages and frame this work around preser-
vation of the past rather than reclamation,
which looks to the future. Though many
linguists put significant effort into facilitat-
ing community language goals, this work
tends to be marginalized within academia
as superfluous or unnecessary in compari-
son with “pure” scientific work. Still worse
is when community goals get removed from
the discipline’s focus under the claim that
“linguistics is the scientific study of lan-
guage,” a phrase that demonstrates a fail-
ure to recognize that Indigenous peoples’
engagement with science may offer episte-
mologies that can expand the scope of sci-
entific inquiry. Par exemple, one myaamia
language teacher defines language as “how
a community connects to each other and
how they express . . . themselves and their
culture to each other.” By this definition,
“community” becomes a vital part of lan-
guage, et, following my grandfather’s call,
helping today’s young people become the
elders of tomorrow becomes a central part
of linguistic inquiry.

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147 (2) Spring 2018McCarty, Nicholas, Chew, Diaz, Leonard & Blanc

Hopiit, the Hopi people, a kin-based matrilin-

eal society, are the westernmost Puebloans, concernant-
siding in their aboriginal lands in what is now
northeast Arizona. Contemporary Hopi village
life continues to revolve around a rich secular and
ceremonial calendar, which is the mainstay of
this cultural community. Nevertheless, the Hopi
language is rapidly losing ground to English. Ici
Sheilah Nicholas relates her personal journey to
recover Hopi, her language of birth.

“Um tsayniiqe paas Hopiningwu.” (“When
you were a child, you were fully Hopi.”) My
mother directed these words to me as she
observed me struggle to carry on a Hopi
conversation as an adult. I recall turning to
English and defensively yet feebly respond-
ing, “I’m still Hopi.” My mother’s words
struck deeply and produced an acute lin-
guistic insecurity. This brief linguistic ex-
change opened the floodgate to a critical
consciousness about the intimate bond be-
tween language, culture, and identity and
the profoundly affective nature of language.
When my mother reiterated a similar
comment on another occasion, I countered
with my memory that it was she who ad-
vised me to “put away” my Hopi so I could
do well in school; yet she was now subject-
ing me to comments I interpreted as ques-
tioning my Hopi identity. My defensive re-
tort was disrespectful, but she acknowl-
edged that she should have advised, “Pay
um uuHopilavayiy enangni” (“Along with
[learning to use English], continue with
your Hopi language”).

It would be many years before I would un-
derstand that I had misinterpreted her criti-
cal comments, which I perceived at the time
as an assault on my cultural identity–how
could a mother do this? Aujourd'hui, I acknowl-
edge she was rightfully perplexed about my
struggle to speak Hopi; it was my first lan-
guage and I spoke it with ease as a child. My
reinterpretation of her statement–“When
you were a child, you were a fluent speaker
of Hopi”–expressed her astonishment at
my loss of fluency. Although initially pain-

ful, my mother’s words became the catalyst
for my personal language reclamation jour-
ney–to assert that I have remained Hopi
and to reclaim the ability to “describe the
Hopi world, not only the physical in the
sense of touch, sight, and hearing, mais aussi
mentally, intellectually, because the words
conjure up . . . images that are not necessar-
ily borne out by reality.”17 These images al-
low us to visualize and conceptualize the
ontological perspectives of the Hopi world
held by our ancestors transported through
time and language.

My journey was inspired by two ques-
tion: What happened to my Hopi? Pourrait
I claim a Hopi identity if I could no lon-
ger speak or think in Hopi? Mentors at the
American Indian Language Development
Institute propelled me forward in my jour-
ney of language reclamation. Akira Yama-
moto, in response to my first question, im-
parted hope, explaining that Hopi acquired
in childhood still resided in the deep recess-
es of my mind and body; I only needed to
“pull it up and out.” Emory Sekaquaptewa,
also my clan uncle, provided the vehicle for
my reculturalization: literacy instruction.
While this journey has been an immense
undertaking, the outcomes include recla-
mation of cultural identity and belonging,
return and reconnection, responsibility and
reciprocity, self-empowerment and self-de-
termination, persistence–the right to re-
main Hopi–and agency and voice. For the
most part, this was a solitary journey to rec-
tify my “responsibility” to my children by
ensuring that a strong cultural and linguis-
tic foundation is there for them when they
are ready to seek it out. This responsibility
extends to the grandchildren I hope to have.
A useful analogy for this pursuit is the emer-
gency instructions on a passenger aircraft–
you need to place the oxygen mask on your-
self before assisting others. I cannot hope
to foster Hopi reculturalization in my chil-
dren and grandchildren if I have not taken
the first steps myself.

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This journey brings a profound under-
standing of the Hopi expression “Hak so’on-
qa nimangwu” (“One always returns home”),
referring to the journey to elderhood and
onward toward spiritual eternity. Many in-
dividuals in my parents’ and grandparents’
generation who guided me to this milestone
have passed on; now it is my generation to
which the younger generations will look for
guidance. My journey led me back home to
undertake the responsibilities of Hopilavay-
naa’aya (attending to the Hopi language),
and now of becoming family matriarch. Je fais
not view these processes as separate. Both
my ongoing work with community lan-
guage practitioners and preparation for as-
suming the role of matriarch led me to rees-
tablish connections in our Hopi world and
refurbish my mother’s house in our mater-
nal village, thus preparing a cultural place
for our family to return to when they begin
their journey homeward. In the Hopi per-
spective, this trajectory of reclamation is
embedded in the Hopi word itumalmakiwa,
“my lifework.”

Kanien’ke:ha–Mohawk, a Dutch barbari-

zation of an Algonquian term–is a Northern
Iroquoian language spoken by peoples indige-
nous to what is now upstate New York, south-
ern Quebec, and eastern Ontario. As Louellyn
White relates, the Indigenous self-referential
term is Kanien’keha:ka, People of the Place of
the Flint. The Akwesasne Freedom School about
which she writes grew out of activist efforts de-
termined to prepare Kanien’keha:ka children in
the ways of their culture. The school remains one
of the leading Indigenous language immersion-
revitalization programs today.

“You’re Onkwehon:we18 just like me!” said
my three-year-old son to his daycare teach-
er. She’s a Kanien’keha:ka substitute teach-
er from the community of Kahnawà:ke. Il
continued to tell her about “bad pipelines”
and how they were going to “poison the
water and hurt all the Onkwehon:we.” I
didn’t think he paid much attention to my

rants about the controversial oil pipeline
under construction near the Standing Rock
Sioux reservation19 until he made his own
“black snake”20 by taping together empty
paper towel rolls to resemble the pipeline
and loudly sang out in English and Lakota,
“WATER IS LIFE . . . MNI WICONI!»

It was a proud moment knowing my
son was connecting to our language, Ka-
nien’ke:ha, and understanding our rela-
tionships and responsibilities to the nat-
ural world. I had been consciously trying
to use our heritage language at home as
much as I could, which was in part a push-
back against the French he was learning at
daycare (I had migrated back to the North-
east after many years away and landed in
French-speaking Quebec). I figured if he
was going to learn French, I had better
teach him what I could of Kanien’ke:ha
aussi. So at bedtime I tell him about Creation
and the story of Skywoman. He’s trying to
make sense of himself when he says things
like: “I came from the Sky” and makes up
songs about “Onkwehon:we dogs” or
“Onk wehon:we trucks” and Son kwiatisu
(Creator). Donc, in this way, my own jour-
ney in language and identity reclamation
is reflected through my son’s journey. Like
most Kanien’keha:ka, I don’t know how to
speak or understand much of our language,
but I’m making a conscious effort to pass
on what I can in hopes my son will grow up
with a stronger sense of self and cultural
identity as Onkwehon:we than I did. Notre
journey of language reclamation goes be-
yond the mechanisms of language as com-
munication and honors the ways that lan-
guage encapsulates culture and identity.

I grew up in the homeland of the Ka-
nien’keha:ka in the Mohawk Valley of cen-
tral New York. Born to a mother of Euro-
pean descent and a Kanien’keha:ha father
with roots in the community of Akwesas-
ne,21 my upbringing lacked a strong cul-
tural and linguistic connection to my In-
digenous heritage. My father wasn’t a flu-

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ent speaker of our language but he always
made sure I knew my family in Akwesasne
and I try to do the same for my son. My
parents split before I was born, so growing
up as the only Native in a dirt-poor house-
hold full of non- Native half-siblings wasn’t
easy. The burdens of poverty, abuse, et
dysfunction compounded those of being
mixed and were often difficult to bear;
there was never enough of this, always too
much of that. Over the years those burdens
were made lighter and my connection to
my identity stronger due in part to the re-
search I conducted with the Akwesasne
Freedom School,22 a pre-K through ninth-
grade school with a Mohawk-immersion
curriculum, long before my son was born.
Accurate estimates of Kanien’ke:ha flu-
ent speakers are hard to come by. Some
claim that out of seven Kanien’keha:ka
communities within the geopolitical bor-
ders of the United States and Canada, con-
stituting a population of about twenty-five
thousand, 10 percent are fluent speakers.23
Even though the language is currently spo-
ken by all generations in some communi-
liens, it remains vulnerable. Ainsi, I became
an advocate for Indigenous language recla-
mation through my work, which also led me
back home to my community and helped
strengthen my family connections and sense
of belonging.

During my research on the intersections
of language and identity within the Akwe-
sasne Freedom School community, J'étais
on a parallel path of learning my heritage
language and culture, building communi-
ty, and developing a stronger sense of my
own identity. As this process unfolded, je
struggled with the existential questions of
life’s meaning. I attempted to shift my fo-
cus from my personal struggles with iden-
tity to one of a higher purpose of under-
standing from a Kanien’keha:ka perspec-
tive. I still struggle with the uneasy feelings
that accompany the balancing act of grow-
ing up without a strong cultural founda-

tion, but through my ongoing work with
language and cultural reclamation I have
found my way home and feel closer to
where I belong.

It’s my responsibility as Onkwehon:nous
to pass on cultural values to my son so he
grows up with a strong sense of who he is,
where he comes from, and where he’s go-
ing. I have the same difficulties as any par-
ent, but I know he’s embodying what it
means to be Onkwehone:we when he asks
for the story of Skywoman at bedtime and
he’s learning about his responsibility to
care for the earth when he sings lullabies
to the spiders he finds hiding in our house
and talks about Standing Rock. After I told
him that the pipeline might be rerouted
away from Standing Rock, he said, “Yay, je
get to drink more water! Mais, are they going
to build it near the elephants, the bugs, et
the animals? They need water too.”

We come to our final question: How can

storywork help build a theory of language
reclamation in practice? Stories and story-
telling are central to “explaining and the-
ory-building,” Ananda Marin and Megan
Bang maintain.24 Theories through stories
“are roadmaps for our communities and re-
minders of our individual responsibilities
to the survival of our communities,” Bryan
Brayboy emphasizes.25 The stories shared
here possess explanatory power; when we
“hear our languages, hear our voices,” we
gain insight into what language reclama-
tion means in diverse Indigenous commu-
nities and for individual community mem-
bers. Storywork provides both a theory and
a guide for praxis.

It is clear from this storywork that lan-
guage reclamation is about much more than
matters purely linguistic; as Wesley Leon-
ard notes for myaamia, language reclama-
tion is not about preserving the past, mais
rather using accumulated wisdom to in-
form present action and future planning.
Language reclamation is soulful work; comme

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Kari Chew relates her initial encounters
in a Chikashshanompa’ language class,
“It did not take long for the language–my
language–to captivate my soul.” Language
reclamation is also embodied work, as re-
flected in Natalie Diaz’s account of finding
kavanaam, amour, “where it had been waiting
for us,” in Mojave gestures of tenderness
et soins. On the surface level we “know”
we are Chickasaw, Mojave, myaamia, Hopi,
Kanien’keha:ka, mais, as the stories show,
feeling that identity is deeply experiential.
This speaks to a common metaphor in lan-
guage reclamation research and practice:
“We are our language.”26

Language reclamation is both individu-
al and communal–a personal yet commu-
nity-oriented responsibility, Sheilah Nich-
olas relates. “I was on a parallel path of . . .
building community and a stronger sense
of my own identity,” Louellyn White re-
flects. “Though I had said ‘I am Chickasaw’
many times in English,” Chew stresses,
saying those words in Chikashshanompa’,
“I felt I had finally found my voice.” Lan-
guage reclamation is thus a journey of be-
longing, of restoring hope for cultural con-
tinuance by connecting youth and parents
with the knowledge and wisdom of elders.
Enfin, language reclamation is decoloniz-
ing; it both refuses the dispossession of In-
digenous ways of knowing and being,27
and re-fuses and reconnects, pointing “a
way home.”

We close with a story from Teresa McCarty,
a non-Indigenous scholar-educator and “allied
other”28 in this work.

What I share here grows out of teach-
ings learned in the context of collaborative
work over many years with Indigenous ed-
ucators, communautés, and schools. One of
those teachers was a Navajo Elder, Doro-
thy Secody, whom I met early in my work
on a bilingual-bicultural curriculum devel-
opment project at the Diné (Navajo) Rough
Rock Demonstration School. “If a child

learns only English,” Mrs. Secody said in
Diné, “you have lost your child.”

Those words have stayed with me over
the years. Indigenous-language reclama-
tion is multifaceted; there are many path-
ways, as we see in the stories shared here
and in accounts of language reclamation
throughout the world. At the heart of these
efforts is an intense desire and commit-
ment not to “lose” the next generation–
or the next, or the next–and to strength-
en intergenerational connections through
the ancestral language.

More than thirty years after Mrs. Secody
spoke those words, a colleague and I were
visiting an Indigenous Hawaiian-language
immersion school, one of many Hawai-
ian schools dedicated to Indigenous-lan-
guage reclamation. On the day of our vis-
it, a nine-month-old child had just been en-
rolled in the infant and toddler program. Comme
the teacher cradled the sleeping child in her
arms, she explained that the infant-toddler
program prepares children for the Pūnana
Leo or “language nest” preschool. Once
children reach preschool, “it only takes a
few months for them to become fluent” in
Hawaiian, she said. The infant-toddler pro-
gram is “like yeast,” we were told, provid-
ing the initial leavening for this rapid lan-
guage development.

And so, as we listened and were guid-
ed through the school, I couldn’t help but
think back to the words of Dorothy Secody
those many years ago. I wondered, what
language and education trajectory awaits
this young child, just launched on her first
day of school?

If she is like other students we met at
this school, she will go on to complete her
entire pre-K–12 education there. The stu-
dents in her classes will be peers she has
known since infancy. “They are like fam-
ily,” a teacher told us as she looked out on
her ninth-grade class. In her pre-K–12 ed-
ucation, I imagine this child will come to
appreciate, in a profound way, a lesson we

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heard repeatedly expressed by older stu-
bosses: “One of the most important things
we value is our genealogy.”

As the young child helps tend the gar-
dens that produce food for the school, elle
will learn not only ethnobotany and the
scientific language for traditional plants,
but reciprocity; responsibility; belonging-
ness; a sense of place; and respect for the
atterrir, les gens, and the language. Those
lessons were brought home to us by a se-
nior when we asked about her postgrad-
uation plans. “I want to start a Hawaiian
photography business,” she told us. What
motivated that career choice, we asked?
Without hesitation, she replied: “I’m just
trying to give back to my community and
revitalize our language.”

To rephrase Dorothy Secody’s point, avec
which I began: If a child learns her ancestral

langue, you have strengthened the links
to countless generations–those who have
passed, those present, and those to come.

Nearly twenty years ago Sam No‘eau

Warner, a Hawaiian-language scholar,
educator, and activist, reminded us that
language issues are “always people issues
. . . inextricably bound to the people from
whom the language and culture evolved.”
Language reclamation is not about saving a
disembodied thing called language, he in-
sisted. Plutôt, it is about voice, community
bâtiment, wellness, equality, self-empow-
erment, and hope. We leave readers with
this broader lesson of language reclama-
tion–a lesson, Warner emphasized, que
contains within it the seeds of transforma-
tion and “social justice for all.”29

author biographies

teresa l. mccarty is the G. F. Kneller Chair in Education and Anthropology and Faculty
in American Indian Studies at the University of California, Les anges. She is the author of
Language Planning and Policy in Native America: Histoire, Theory, Praxis (2013) and A Place to Be Nava-
jo: Rough Rock and the Struggle for Self-Determination in Indigenous Schooling (2002) and editor of In-
digenous Language Revitalization in the Americas (with Serafín M. Coronel-Molina, 2016).
sheilah e. nicholas is Associate Professor of Teaching, Apprentissage & Sociocultural Stud-
ies and Faculty in American Indian Studies at the University of Arizona College of Educa-
tion. She is the editor of Indigenous Youth and Multilingualism: Language Identity, Ideology, and Prac-
tice in Dynamic Cultural Worlds (with Leisy T. Wyman and Teresa L. McCarty, 2014), and her
research has appeared in Review of Research in Education and International Multilingual Research Jour-
nal, among other publications.
kari a. b. chew is a Project Coordinator at the Indigenous Teacher Education Project at
the University of Arizona College of Education. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Ar-
izona College of Education. Her research has appeared in The American Indian Quarterly and In-
ternational Journal of Multicultural Education, among other publications.
natalie g. diaz is Assistant Professor of English at Arizona State University. Her work has
been featured in Poetry, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other pub-
lications. She is the author of the poetry collection When My Brother Was an Aztec (2013).
wesley y. leonard is Assistant Professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the Uni-
versity of California, Riverside. His research on language reclamation has appeared in Ameri-
can Indian Culture and Research Journal, Gender & Language, and Language Documentation and Conserva-
tion, among other publications.
louellyn white is Associate Professor of First Peoples Studies in the School of Communi-
ty and Public Affairs at Concordia University Montreal. She is the author of Free to be Mohawk:
Indigenous Education at the Akwesasne Freedom School (2015), and her work has appeared in American
Indian Culture and Research Journal and Journal of Native American Education, among other publications.

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endnotes
1 United Nations General Assembly, Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (New York: Unit-

ed Nations, 2007).

2 Teresa L. McCarty, Tove Skutnabb-Kangas, and Ole Henrik Magga, “Education for Speakers
of Endangered Languages,” in The Handbook of Educational Linguistics, éd. Bernard Spolsky and
Francis Hult (Malden, Mass.: Puits noir, 2008), 297–312.

3 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Something Torn and New: An African Renaissance (New York: BasicCivitas Books,

2009), 17.

4 Mary Hermes and Keiki Kawai‘ae‘a, “Revitalizing Indigenous Languages through Indigenous
Immersion Education,” Journal of Immersion and Content-Based Language Education 2 (2) (2014):
303–322.

5 Jo-ann Archibald, Indigenous Storywork: Educating the Heart, Esprit, Body, and Spirit (Vancouver and

Toronto: ubc Press, 2008).

6 Hermes and Kawai‘ae‘a, “Revitalizing Indigenous Languages through Indigenous Immersion

Education.”

7 Bryan McKinley Jones Brayboy, “Toward a Tribal Critical Race Theory in Education,” The Ur-

ban Review 37 (5) (Décembre 2005): 425–446.

8 Paul Kroskrity, Telling Stories in the Face of Danger: Language Renewal in Native American Communities

(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2011), 3–20.

9 Richard Ruiz, “The Empowerment of Language-Minority Students,” in Empowerment through
Multicultural Education, éd. Christine E. Sleeter (Albany: State University of New York Press,
1991), 217–227.

10 Anthony K. Webster and Leighton C. Peterson, “Introduction: American Indian Languages in

Unexpected Places,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 35 (2) (2011): 1–18.

11 Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, 2nd ed. (Londres:

Zed Books, 2012).

12 Archibald, Indigenous Storywork.
13 Pausauraq Jana Harcharek and Cathy Tagnak Rexford, “Remembering Their Words, Evoking
Kinuniivut: The Development of the Iñupiaq Learning Framework,” Journal of American Indi-
an Education 54 (2) (2015): 9–28.

14 Kari Ann Burris Chew, Chikashshanompa’ Ilanompohóli Bíyyi’ka’chi [We Will Always Speak the Chick-
asaw Language]: Considering the Vitality and Efficacy of Chickasaw Language Reclamation (Ph.D. diss.,
University of Arizona, 2017), 13.

15 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (Portsmouth,

N.H.: Heinemann, 1986).

16 Wesley Y. Leonard, “When Is an ‘Extinct’ Language Not Extinct? Miami, a Formerly Sleep-
ing Language,” in Sustaining Linguistic Diversity: Endangered and Minority Languages and Language
Varieties, éd. Kendall A. King, Natalie Schilling-Estes, Lyn Fogle, Jia Jackie Lou, and Barbara
Soukup (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2008), 23–33.

17 Emory Sekaquaptewa, personal communication to Sheilah E. Nicholas, Septembre 9, 2004.
18 Onkwehon:we is a Kanien’ke:ha concept meaning “the original people.”
19 Since Spring 2016, thousands of people have gathered near the Standing Rock Sioux reservation
opposing the Dakota Access Pipeline Company oil pipeline (see http://www.sacredstonecamp
.org).

20 Many Lakota believe the pipeline represents the “black snake” foretold in their prophecies. Voir
Jeff Brady, “For Many Dakota Access Pipeline Protesters, The Fight is Personal,” npr, Novem-

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147 (2) Spring 2018McCarty, Nicholas, Chew, Diaz, Leonard & Blanc

ber 26, 2016, https://www.npr.org/2016/11/21/502918072/for-many-dakota-access-pipeline
-protesters-the-fight-is-personal.

21 Located where present-day New York, Québec, and Ontario intersect, Akwesasne means “Land

Where the Partridge Drums.”

22 Louellyn White, Free to Be Mohawk: Indigenous Education at the Akwesasne Freedom School (Norman:

University of Oklahoma Press, 2015).

23 Kate Freeman, Arlene Stairs, Evelyn Corbière, and Dorothy Lazore, “Ojibway, Mohawk, et
Inuktitut: Alive and Well? Issues of Identity, Ownership, and Change,” Bilingual Research Jour-
nal 19 (1) (1995): 39–69.

24 Ananda Marin and Megan Bang, “Designing Pedagogies for Indigenous Science Education:
Finding Our Way to Storywork,” Journal of American Indian Education 54 (2) (2015): 29–51.

25 Brayboy, “Toward a Tribal Critical Race Theory in Education,» 427.
26 Barbra A. Meek, We Are Our Language: An Ethnography of Language Revitalization in a Northern Atha-

baskan Community (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2010).

27 Audra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States (Durham, N.C.

and London: Duke University Press, 2014).

28 Julie Kaomea, “Dilemmas of an Indigenous Academic: A Native Hawaiian Story,” in Decolo-
nizing Research in Cross-Cultural Contexts, éd. Kagendo Mutua and Beth Blue Swadener (Albany,
N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 2004), 27–44.

29 Sam L. No‘eau Warner, “Kuleana: The Right, Responsibility, and Authority of Indigenous Peo-
ples to Speak and Make Decisions for Themselves in Language and Cultural Revitalization,»
Anthropology and Education Quarterly 30 (Mars 1999): 68–93.

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Dédale, le Journal de l'Académie américaine des arts & SciencesStorywork as Theory and Praxis in Indigenous- Language Reclamation
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