Lessons from Fort Apache: Beyond Language Endangerment and Maintenance

Lessons from Fort Apache is an ethnography of indigenous language dynamics on the Fort Apache reservation in North America with implications for global concerns over language endangerment. Moving beyond a narrow focus on linguistic documentation, the author examines the ways in which the linguistic and cultural identities of indigenous populations are attributed with meaning against yet other sociocultural concerns and interests. While affirming the value of language documentation and maintenance, Nevins also provides a much–needed appraisal of the potential conflicts in authority claims and language practices bet The author argues that the debates surrounding the revitalization of indigenous languages need broadening to include larger questions of social mediation, shifting cultural identities, and evaluation of the politics intrinsic to the relationship between indigenous community members and university–accredited experts like language researchers and educators. This engaging ethnography examines these questions, and investigates the language dynamics of the Fort Apache Reservation, including unintended challenges that standardized textual models can sometimes pose to local interests. Nevins reveals the community’s historical and contemporary concerns for language documentation, maintenance, and revitalization. Her text provides perceptive commentary on the need for language maintenance programs and for flexibility in finding politically sustainable forms of collaboration and exchange between researchers, teachers, and those community members who base their claims to an indigenous language in alternate terms.

Acknowledgments viii 1. Introduction 1 2. Indigenous Languages and the Mediation of Communities 12 3. Learning to Listen: Coming to Terms with Conflicting Meanings of Language Loss 47 4. They Live in Lonesome Dove: English in Indigenous Places 79 5. Stories in the Moment of Encounter: Documentation Boundary Work 113 6. What No Coyote Story Means: The Borderland Genre of Traditional Storytelling 152 7. “Some ‘No No’ and Some ‘Yes’”: Silence, Agency, and Traditionalist Words 186 8. Sustainability: Possible Socialities of Documentation and Maintenance 215 Appendix A: Lawrence Mithlo 229 Appendix B: Eva Lupe on Her Early Life 237 Index 250

M. Eleanor Nevins is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Middlebury College, Vermont, USA. A specialist in linguistic and cultural anthropology, her work addresses the interplay of language, education, religion, globalization, and indigenous communities. An accomplished scholar of Western Apache poetics and rhetoric, Nevins teaches courses in linguistic and cultural anthropology, ethnography, and Native American literatures. Her work has appeared in a number of edited volumes as well as in the journals Language in Society , Language and Communication , Heritage Management , and Journal of Linguistic Anthropology .

“This realistic, thoughtful study should be regarded as obligatory reading for any linguist genuinely concerned with endangered language maintenance and revitalization.  Summing Up:  Essential.  All levels/libraries.”  (Choice , 1 December2013)