No abstract

This article examines an ideological shift related to and affecting language shift, focusing especially on children's experiences. I show that while elders retained their status as intellectual authorities responsible for passing their knowledge on to younger community members, their knowledge became limited to practices conceptualized as "traditionally Kaska," of which language was an integral part. As a result, the acquisition of Kaska became subject to the same social practices that organized other forms of "traditional indigenous" or specialized knowledge such that speaking Kaska became the domain of elders. Children's and youth's commentary and practices articulated and solidified this ideological transformation.

No abstract

Reversing language shift has proven to be difficult for many reasons. Although much of the literature has focused on educational practices, little research has attended to the visual presentation of language used in educational texts aimed at reversing shift. In this article, we compare language materials developed for two different language situations, finding that for both situations the minority languages continue to be framed by the matrix languages such that practices meant to interrupt matrix‐language dominance continue to reinforce current hierarchies.

This chapter is an exploration of how race and language become entangled in representations and ideas about what it means to be seen and recognized as Native American. Most conceptions of Indianness derive from scholarly European-derived representations and evaluations and from popular narrative media, the one often bootstrapping the other. In tandem, these public manifestations perpetuate the racialization of Indian languages and of Indianness, most ubiquitously in and through a discourse of “blood.” Several ideologies configure the racial logic that determines Indianness: purism (percentage of “Indian blood”), visibility (racialized—and cultural—manifestations of “blood”), continuity (maintenance of a pre-contact “bloodline”), and primitivism (expression of indigenous “blood” in and through language). I argue that this “ideological assemblage” (Kroskrity 2018) undergirds the processes of “racing Indian language(s)” and “languaging an Indian race” (H. Samy Alim 2016) that has resulted in propagating conflicts over and denials of Native American heritage.