Muted Tongues

If you think about just species that are most like us -other mammals- it turns out there are about the same number of mammalian species on the planet right now as there are extant languages -in the neighborhood of six thousand, give or take 500 or so. Your life [...] won't be any different if the bumblebee bat, for example, goes extinct. But biodiversity alone, I think, makes that species worth fighting for. And -you know, I bring up the bumblebee bat because it happens to be what is likely the smallest mammal in the world, which is an interesting fact about the bumblebee bat. It's just an inch long. And it, I think, enriches us to know that such a creature exists. Likewise, I think that even if an endangered language could be said to have nothing "earth-shattering" culturally or scientifically or linguistically -to use David Harrison's three pillars- nothing "earth-shattering" to impart, it's still worth the effort to document it because it... because it honors, in a sense, the effort of the people who spent centuries or more developing it. Language is such an incredible human achievement that to so cavalierly let such an achievement go undocumented seems verging on irresponsible!

The public, the media, and even the courts subscribe to the notion that Indians who change with the times 'lose' their culture. All cultures change, indeed they must if they are to survive, and change is constant in American culture. But some people feel that Indians cannot be Indians if they drive pickup trucks instead of riding horses, live in condominiums in town instead of teepees on reservations, wear business suits instead of buckskins, or communicate by e-mail instead of smoke signals. Such ideas freeze Indian people in an unchanging past that, for many Indians, was never part of their culture in the first place.

A language, unused, embalmed, and reposing only in a book, is a dead language. Only the people themselves, and never the scholars, can nourish it into life.

We will see ... that the causes for extinction of many of the American Indian languages - indeed of any language whatsoever - have little to do with its internal structure.

As humans, we arrived at language. Language came to us as much as we came to it. And when we lose it, we're losing part of ourselves.

Many of our people now are gone. But our children can still learn our language. They're our next generation. They need to know. We need to share all of this with them.

Significantly, the essentializing of a link between Aboriginal language and Aboriginal land, though of great strategic value in the struggle for language preservation, risks excluding certain Aboriginal groups from the language endangerment discourse. Among these are members of urbanized Aboriginal communities, created as a result of significant levels of migration of Aboriginal peoples to cities. While such migration has tended not to involve a complete de-territorialization of people from their Aboriginal homeland 'territories', given considerable movement back and forth between these territories and cities, it has nevertheless sparked the construction of new identities and new cultural and linguistic practices that are shaping new forms of community. Thus, new forms of place-making - not necessarily linked to dominant interests in traditional, territorialized 'nationhood' - are creating new forms of 'locality' and 'community' in which First Nations, Inuit and Métis in Canada can thrive. This makes the question of what Aboriginal language is being saved for whom a pressing one, which indicates the need to create a more inclusive and radicalized discourse of language endangerment, consistent not only with the need for political reconciliation and restitution, but with increasing diversity within Aboriginal groups.

This need for reconciliation stems from decades of assimilationist paternalistic policies and the need for the federal government to recognize: (1) past mistakes in the colonization process; (2) rights to land and territories that include rights to resources and economic development on these lands; and (3) the need to renegotiate new relationships between First Nations, Inuit, and Métis and the Canadian state - relationships that are rooted in the nation-to-nation relationships established in the treaty-making of the past.

Conklin and Graham argue that [...] the stereotype of indigenous people as natural conservationists forms a precarious foundation for indigenous rights advocacy because it misrepresents the realities of many indigenous peoples' lives and priorities (1995: 697).

...[W]hile environmentalists' primary goal is to promote natural resource management, indigenous peoples often seek self-determination and control over their own resources, a goal which does not necessarily align with the goals of conservation NGOs.

Braun (2002) has also analysed how a discourse of indigeneity dovetailed with environmental politics on Canada's west coast in the 1980s and 1990s. He describes how environmental rhetoric in the campaign to save the rainforest on Clayoquot Sound made First Nations people visible, but only by incorporating them within the terms of anti-modern preservationist politics. This left the First Nations in British Columbia with limited options, since participating in the region's resource economies means they risk losing what many non-natives consider authentic indigenous culture and as a result, their right to speak as indigenous peoples for their lands.