My tribal community has primarily spoken English for a very long time. Growing up, I learned a few words of our language from my grandmother and other folks in social/ceremonial contexts. As an adult, going to college and continuing to live in an urban area far from the tribal homeland, I made a conscious effort to seek out other people from sister tribes (long story, but the federal government moved our ancestors around and effectively split up one nation of people; my tribe is pretty small) who lived around and to go back home. I bought books on the language but never made the time to become conversant. My daughter, who is from a different tribe (she isn’t biologically my daughter, so we aren’t the same tribe), also grew up not knowing her language. Because her tribe coalesced from several tribes who were essentially refugees, it isn’t even clear what their language would be. Not having your language can feel embarrassing, and like you are missing out (because you are–there are many concepts that do not translate and can’t be spoken of without the language).
As others have long pointed out, tribal people in the U.S. have a measure of self-governing rights that the U.S. has continued to respect (to varying degrees over time and place). As individuals, we may be “minorities,” but, collectively, we belong to individual nations that are, in the words of the Supreme Court, “domestic dependent nations” with retained sovereignty. Most Native people do not look like Hollywood Indians. We have mixed ancestry. We dress and live like others. The public generally is not educated about our histories and it is not uncommon for my students to be surprised as they realize that we had governments before colonization. We are vulnerable to demands to end sovereignty from corporate interests, bolstered by a public that views sovereignty as special treatment. As Treuer points out in his book, living languages can be powerful leverages. They attest nationhood.
I read this book because I’m teaching a linguistic anthropology class this fall and was considering assigning it. Linguistic anthropology is the study of human language in social contexts, within the relationships created by anthropology’s focus on four dimensions of being human–culture/society, the material cultural past, language, and biology. I want students to take away from the class why languages and dialects matter, especially as more and more languages “go to sleep.” With their loss, knowledge, worldviews, and social practices that cannot transfer entirely and easily are lost.
Treuer’s book is aimed at language warriors, people who want to learn their language and use it, which requires a community of younger people who are also actively learning and using language. The book is divided into six chapters, most of them short. In “Finding Fire,” Treuer speaks to the experiences that led him to seek elders from whom to learn the Ojibwe language as an adult. In “The Importance of Language,” he makes an argument that many of his audience probably already have in their minds to some extent. However, he does so in a compelling way, using specific examples that can be used by language warriors in advocating for programs (more on that in a minute).
“What’s in the Way” steps through each of the many obstacles that have led to the current situation of Native languages in the U.S. and Canada. Using Treuer’s figures (other linguists have arrived at different ones due to different calls on when a dialect becomes a distinct language), the number of languages in the U.S. precontact was 500; 150 remain present today, with only 20 spoken by children and only 4 with a sufficient speaker base such “that they will definitely be here one hundred years from now” (Treuer at 31). In this chapter, the author addresses both external obstacles (systemic racism, oppression, the mass outflow of Native children into non-Native homes through the child welfare system, lack of funding, a U.S. public education system that largely prioritizes English) and internal ones (personal barriers, the time requirements of learning a language as an adult, tribal non-prioritization, internalized oppression).
Next, in “How I Did It,” Treuer discusses his journey learning Ojibwe as an adult, and then joining with others. Native languages aren’t and can’t be an individual journey. When I was in grad school, one of the other students was a “Czech Indian” (there are hobbyists in parts of Europe who obsess over recreating an imagined Native past, focused on the Plains nations) who spoke a particular Native language fluently; he had learned it from books. Although he could speak, he did so in a completely different context than that of speakers of that language. It was more similar to learning Klingon for Trek conventions than really learning and using the language as part of a living, breathing society. That is not what learning language should be for Native people, either. Although my language is also very well-documented and could be learned from books, to be alive, a language must be used, changed, associated to cultural and social texts. I found this chapter to both be reassuring (there are real barriers others have encountered to learning as an adult, and the work that Treuer put in was hard and temporally demanding) and a charge to stop making excuses.
The longest chapter, and the bulk of this book, is “How We Did It.” Treuer describes the specifics of various Ojibwe language vitalization efforts. He advocates for “target language-medium” education, or the creation of schools that teach all subjects in the target language, or language undergoing revitalization. While this practice can require updates to the language (gathering elders to add vocabulary to teach algebra, for example), it has been effective. As he points out, the approach used in some efforts, such as teaching kids the same few vocabulary words over and over in English-medium schools as an “enrichment,” does not produce speakers of the language. This chapter is a very practical guide to the process of language vitalization, covering what has been learned from several different Indigenous language projects. It is not an abstract look at linguistics, documentation of languages, etc. Instead, it is concerned with the nuts and bolts of how to build the program, how to strengthen it so it can outlive social and political changes, how to advocate for it, how to operate it, what to require. Some of the advice also concerns personal attitudes towards difficult obstacles and people one will encounter.
The last chapter, “Eyes Forward and Your Feet Will Follow,” is meant to inspire language warriors, telling the stories of several and what their work meant for the vitality of tribal cultures as a whole.
This is probably not the right book for my students, who are primarily non-Indigenous and not language warriors, because so much of it is concerned with the very helpful practical guidance on building a language program. I didn’t leave the book inspired to run out and devote all my free time to learning my language. I already have a lot of motivation and also a ton of excuses and demands on time that I know will prevail over that motivation. But it made me feel like I could, even as a middle-aged adult. It will, however, help me support friends who are involved in this type of work and explain the importance of the work to others, including my students.