Respecting the Language of Elders: Ideological Shift and Linguistic Discontinuity in a Northern Athapascan Community

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.

Scale: Discourse and Dimensions of Social Life

“…1 Grant writers deployed charts and graphs to demonstrate a profound need for resources in order to develop programming that would support child language learners-that is, those precisely in the promising fifteen-year-old-and-younger category. The projects they funded ranged from Aboriginal Head Start initiatives, such as the play that was developed and performed during my fieldwork with Liard's Aboriginal Head Start program (Meek 2010), to the genealogical charts that documented people's Indian names and social histories. Such proposals were especially keen on creating immersion programs, in addition to enhancing the territory's aboriginal language curricula.…”

“…High school students, for example, viewed the charts as evidence that the best speakers were older and that the speaking of Kaska was, in particular, synonymous with being an "Elder. " The fact that Elders became separated out as privileged carriers of indigenous language had many unintended consequences, such as a rift that was felt to be growing across generations (for details, see Meek 2007). So whereas bureaucrats scaled languages to garner support for young speakers, those speakers were primed to resist and resent precisely the kind of programs that might be instituted once funding was acquired.…”

“…In part, the more recent call to recognize a broader range of linguistic acts and varieties within an endangered language community (as part of revitalization, re-creation, or regeneration) is a reorientation toward superdiversity rather than loss (e.g., Ahlers 2006;Field 2009;Goodfellow 2003;Leonard 2011;Meek 2010). The subtle changes in the categories used and the interpretations offered in the diagrams above suggest a shift in how language endangerment gets assessed, speaker competence evaluated, and participant roles framed.…”

“…Recently, linguistic anthropologists have troubled the concept of "generation" within language endangerment discourses (Suslak 2009; see also Meek 2007). Henne- Ochoa and Bauman (2015) demonstrate how generational categories emerge in discourse rather than being a priori facts or attributes of an endangered-language situation.…”

Experiences of Simultaneity in Complex Linguistic Ecologies: Implications for Theory, Method, and Practice

“…Recent scholarship on the multilingual practices of Indigenous language learners (Hornberger & McCarty, 2012;Kral, 2012;McCarty & Wyman, 2009;Meek, 2007;Wyman, 2012;Wyman, McCarty, & Nicholas, in press;Romero-Little, 2012) has also examined how ideologies and policy making operate in complex linguistic ecologies in ways that influence the repertoires and practices of Indigenous peoples encountering language endangerment.…”