>> [NOISE] Hello, everyone.
Welcome. I'm Kathy Wagner
in the English department
and one of the coordinators
of environmental research clusters.
It's been a wonderful couple of
days with all the participants in
the Virginia extinction,
contesting extinction symposium.
Thanks for coming out today.
We've had a wonderful tour
[NOISE] from
George iron strap in Keras Drosophila,
the center of the written work exhibition
that's over there right now.
If you haven't seen it already,
I really encourage you to go check it
out after this presentation.
Right now I'm going to welcome
Wesley Leonard,
who we are very delighted to have here.
He teaches at UC, Riverside.
He is a member of
the Miami tribe who happened to grow
in Oxford and is
a really fascinating scholar
who works on issues of extinction,
concepts of extinction,
contesting contexts of
extinction, both cultural, linguistic.
Especially with regard to
the Miami Tribe of
Oklahoma. Thank you very much.
Please welcome
Wesley Leonard
[APPLAUSE]. [FOREIGN].
>> Hello everybody. It's good to see you all
today. I'm Wesley Leonard.
As Kathy was saying,
I'm specifically a citizen
of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma.
I'm here to talk about language,
but I'm also here to talk about
broader issues
that surround language use or in
some ways can inhibit
language use if not corrected.
I think that most of you
already know the basic story
of language in my community,
but in case you don't, I'm going to give
a very quick overview.
It goes something like this.
Our community language Miami Outalenge went
out of use almost completely
in the mid-20th century,
due to effects of
colonialism and associated
policies such as removals,
land theft, and boarding schools.
Our languages then labeled
extinct by linguists and other scientists
who until recently have not
acknowledge that indigenous
peoples not only can,
but also do reclaim
languages from documentation.
Contesting this concept of extinction
or the E word as we sometimes say,
Miami people instead adopted
the metaphor of sleeping to
describe our language as it
existed during this period of dormancy.
As discussed in the first presentation
of this symposium,
which some of you were at yesterday morning,
the reclamation of
Miami form documentation has
been occurring at the community level
since the 1990s.
Today I'm proud to report
that most community members,
again have access to
Miami Toenge and many use
it to varying degrees.
A lot of what I've prepared for
this talk emerges from
my engagement in
my observations of this process.
But also a few points
about my personal background
that I want to be sure that
everybody knows since of course,
this presentation, like
all other presentations
reflects a particular experiential lens.
I'm a linguist by disciplinary training,
but I've long been a professor
of Native American studies.
Such a lot of my professional work
mixes these approaches.
Basically, I would say that I take
the lived experiences, the indigenous ideas,
and the decolonial aims
of Native American studies,
and apply those to the scientific study of
language which need not
exist in a colonial fashion,
but very often does.
I currently have the privilege
of doing this work,
as you heard, at
the University of California,
Riverside where I'm a faculty member and
also a guest in the lands of the Quea,
Tang, Serrano, and Lesano peoples.
However, as you also know,
a lot of my earlier experiences,
my foundational experiences occurred
right here in Oxford where I both
grew up and attended
Myaamia mihsi-nipwantiikaan Miami University,
from which I graduated in May of 1998.
I am deeply honored
to have been invited to come
back and to share my ideas with all of you.
It's also, I must say, very
nice to be here among
my tribal relatives and ENR,
original homelands of places
that I happen to know through a lot of
lived personal experiences
and a place with which I know
many other contemporary Myaamia people
also maintain strong relationships.
I wanted to mention
that point because it stands in
such contrast to a statement
made by American author William Dean House,
comment is 1897 book storage from Ohio,
where he reported on having witnessed
my ancestors in
the first Myaamia removal in 1846.
That removal, by the way,
took place partly on river
partly by canal, partly on foot.
But the area in question then
we're looking at is around Hamilton,
Ohio, a little bit east of Hamilton, Ohio.
The former Miami in Erie Canal.
Howells wrote that he quote,
"Saw the last of
the Ohio Indians passing through the town on
three canal boats out of
this land that was to know
them no more forever."
This land that we're on today,
that was to know us the Miami people
no more forever.
Now it's true as
this particular statement does
not use the term extinction.
But I certainly think that it
evokes a similarly,
if you will, final idea
with the term forever,
which directly aligns with
the United States Indian Removal Act
signed into law by Andrew Jackson in 1830.
I further observe that physical removal of
indigenous peoples from original lands then
discursively paves the way
for imagining indigenous peoples
as historical artifacts and
talking about us accordingly.
Framing, if you will, the original peoples as
others in our own land ironically enough.
The people who shall we say,
used to live here and under this logic,
don't live here anymore.
Of course, the problem,
not so much the problem,
but the reality is that we
not only live here,
we also thrive here and
we will continue to live here.
Indeed, many of us are
thriving in our community,
The Myaamia community is experiencing
a renaissance of
the cultural practices in a founder
line relationships that
colonial forces attempted to dismantle.
People have often come to refer to
this as [inaudible] ,
the mind is awaken or
sometimes translated as Miami awakening.
It's the story of the [inaudible] ,
a guide in many of my comments today.
Participating in my community's
cultural efforts have taught me a lot.
These experiences have provided
me with the tools to contest
the finality in house statement
and in many other similar statements.
In recognition that this
is a diverse audience,
I'd now like to provide an overview
of the broad and patterns of
indigenous language shift that
Myaamia Omulunge falls into.
These patterns are very often
talked about with the term extinct
and also a set of similar related concepts
such as death and loss.
Indigenous languages,
in my experience are very infrequently
in the broader global scale
and certainly in academia talked
about using indigenous conceptualizations
of those languages.
Instead, we find a partner
of using a lot of numbers,
such as they're about
7,000 languages in the world and indeed
there are about 7,000 as
demarcated and named within
the categories of Western science.
There's very often a trope in
this conversation of mentioning that
most people in the world speak one
of relatively few languages.
Indeed that's true.
This particular graph says
400 languages account for
95 percent of the world's population.
The remaining languages are spoken by
only five percent of people.
That in itself is relatively innocuous and
it is an accurate description
as far as I know.
Missing however,
is the larger discourse
that this tends to be used within,
which then states that it's normal
that the smaller languages
are going to die out.
That's just part of modernity.
Rather I would argue as part
of settler colonialism,
of colonization and of a whole host of
other reasons that guide
contemporary patterns that we find today.
But when we say something like
language disappears,
particularly as this frame
is often talked about
the issue of who
if you will disappear the languages,
why they are disappearing,
what the agents are gets
left out of the discourse.
I've also argued that what's really
neat is a verb that clearly
identifies the cause of
this alleged disappearance,
if you will, or at least of language shift
as the grammatical subject.
Because without identifying that agent,
all we're really doing then is
this triage to document these languages
before they are gone where the finality of
the so-called disappearance is understood as
a natural outcome of the world's evolution.
In fact, indigenous communities
shifts away from their original languages,
especially when it occurs very
quickly as has been the case recently,
almost always is enveloped
within a whole host of inequities,
which include outright in
egregious violations of human rights.
I talked about this particular slide with
a critical lens because I
think this is an approach that's called for,
partly because I've seen how
these unrelated ideas
work against the well-being
of indigenous individuals and
communities and also because
many of these facts
are at best alternative facts.
They are not really true except through
a particular logical lens and
the two weeks part is
outright true even through that lens.
More important, uncritically accepting
them leads to poorly-designed policy.
The examples I just showed
align with a deeper practice of referring
to languages that are not currently
known or spoken as extinct even
when there is potential for future
use because the language is
documented and claimed by heritage community.
In many of these situations,
as with Miami community,
this potential is being realize and yet,
our languages are sometimes
still referred to by the E word.
Even worse perhaps, is when
the whole indigenous nations
are called extinct
even when members of the group in
question actively are stating otherwise.
This is not particularly unusual.
I learned among other things last night when
I was revisiting some details
for this presentation,
that the folks at dictionary.com
seem to have missed the memo.
Take a look at this. I looked up Miami and
interesting I was pleased
that they noted that in
English it can be pronounced
Miami and also Miami.
Most commonly the town in
Oklahoma where our tribe is
headquartered is pronounced Miami by
locals and also by outsiders.
But I draw your attention to
the first definition that's given there.
"A member of
a North American Indian tribe of the
Algonquin family," So far, okay.
"Formerly located in
Northern Indiana, Southern Michigan,
and possibly Illinois,
now extinct as a tribe."
You'll see then that I retrieved
this on March 3rd, 2020.
Specifically, it was about
10:00 PM last night.
[LAUGHTER] This says something about
my procrastination
in preparing presentations,
but it also makes the point that this is not
old this [LAUGHTER] is very, very recent.
I follow many scholars
who've observed that controlling
how concepts are framed and named serves
as a means to assert and
maintain control of others.
When it comes to how the indigenous peoples
of these lands are talked about,
terms like extinction can be used
intentionally as
tools of elation and subjugation.
I further note importantly that
even when no such intention exists,
this idea of extinction
nevertheless supports elation and
subjugation by discursively reinforcing
a broader colonial goal of
relegating Native Americans to history,
rather than recognizing as it's
contemporary peoples who have histories.
That process, that in turn
promotes the erasure of our needs,
our rights, and our ways of
knowing, among other things.
Stated more generally, it's very easy to
take advantage of people if they don't exist.
In one of the ways then
to take advantage of people is
to use language to
pretend as if they don't exist.
The problem is that some people believe that,
because they're looking at
sources such as dictionary.com.
My goals for the remainder of
this presentation really revolve
around two interrelated parts.
First I want to critique and
deconstruct this,
what I'm calling damaging
discourse of extinction.
Both the term extinction itself as it's
applied with respect to
language and cultural practices,
but also the broader logics
that underlie it's contemporary usage.
My second and arguably more important goal is
to provide alternatives
to this damaging discourse,
specifically, ways of thinking and
acting that align with
indigenous ways of knowing.
I recognize and I hope you do as well,
that's simply contesting
problematic discourse,
this is only the start.
Ultimately, we need to replace them.
This process of replacing them is what I'm
calling a praxis of language reclamation.
This is the subtitle of my talk,
toward a praxis of language reclamation.
I've realized through my teaching that
the term praxis gets used a lot,
particularly in
the social sciences and humanities,
but sometimes gets misunderstood
or used in different ways.
I want to clarify
that I'm largely using it
in it's very generic sense,
where it refers to actual practices as
differentiated from theoretical ideas.
Or more generally, the process
by which ideas are enacted,
embodied, realized, and so on.
Working within the critical
social sciences however,
have been influenced by that particular lens,
and I also thus have
the same critical lens
where in practices come to refer
to an ongoing process
of active reflection that aims
to bring conduct into
alignment with desirable intentions.
Or as critical education
scholar Paulo Freire put it,
praxis is reflection and action
directed at the structures to be transformed.
Many of the structures in question
here are colonial structures,
very damaging colonia constructions.
That's what I mean by praxis.
But language reclamation is
the footpath that I really want to focus on.
It's come to my attention
for many years in linguistics,
that there's quite a bit of work
that's called language revitalization,
and much of that work is quite good.
Many members of my community
also use the term revitalization.
But it's also come to my attention
that too often so-called
language revitalization
focuses on the language itself,
on specifically linguistic issues.
Language defined to
a particular colonial ends
in many cases and then misses
the broader issues that
lead to language shift in the first place.
That broader response is
what I'm calling language reclamation.
Language reclamation thus goes
beyond identifying
the colonial structures and
other factors that underlie
language shift to instead
actively address
and ideally to dismantle them.
This includes, but is not limited to,
claiming and inserting the right to
speak and to describe a given language.
That's part of reclamation.
Describing of course, includes categorizing,
such as how my community
contested extinct and instead
asserted our linguistic sovereignty
by adopting the term sleeping to
describe me on the [inaudible] during
its period of silence.
Reclamation entails identifying and
breaking down the beliefs,
many of which emerged from the logics of
settler colonialism that work against
community language needs and goals.
Being able and ready
to respond to naysayers who opined
that our language efforts
are unimportant or uncritically
predict that they will not be
successful is part of reclamation.
Acknowledging that we who are
members of indigenous communities sometimes
also hold ideologies that impede
community language work and that we must
identify and move beyond
these obstacles is part of reclamation.
Reclamation is comprehensive and
calls for what sometimes in
linguistic science is called an
ecological approach or language work,
or an ecological approach to
studying language and engaging with language.
Of course, from an indigenous lines,
I don't know how else
we could engage with language,
but the idea of ecological approach
means study how language exists in
various environments and recognizing
those full-fledged environments
for what they are.
This includes, of course,
cultural, political, economic,
and other issues both historical and
contemporary that underlie language shift.
Reclamation entails
responding to all of them.
It's not putting a band-aid on the situation,
but rather is addressing
the underlying cause.
In a 2012 paper,
I gave a shorter definition,
so I wanted to show that with you as well.
I think it captures the idea.
Reclamation involves around efforts
by a community to claim its right to speak
a language and to set associated goals in
response to community needs and perspectives.
This community needs and perspectives part
from the lens of Native American
studies, as I said,
is the program in which I operate
now should be, well, common sense.
Certainly not something that
needs to be specifically
named with a framework
such as language reclamation.
This note and I imagine you've
all encountered this situation
where somebody will point
out that common sense
in many cases isn't particularly common.
This is one of those situations.
I found that to be particularly
true when the idea in question,
the thing that should be obvious
violates the power structures
within a given society.
Of course indigenous language work should
respond to indigenous
community needs and perspectives.
But in many cases, in
my experience, it has not.
Reclamation then
as a concept then is a way to
point out that process
and to try to change it.
I note within this statement,
there's also a theme of self-determination,
another major theme
of Native American studies,
and certainly a concept
that comes up in indigenous communities,
particularly here in what's
now the United States.
Self-determination is very much
embedded in this concept.
But I want to clarify, of course,
is that self-determination in
an indigenous way or in a Miami away,
self-determination does not necessarily
mean doing things just by community members.
It might entail that.
But certainly in the Miami experience,
it more often entails
beneficial partnerships with
non Miami people to
do the things that we need and want to do.
Important is that those partnerships
be done in equitable ways.
In fact, the notion of interdependence;
healthy interdependence is very much
an indigenous concept that I think can come
into indigenous notions
of self-determination.
In summary, then a praxis
of language reclamation,
is all of this and it firmly
contests the underlying issues,
the power structures, the
beliefs that discourse is and so
on of language "extinction."
I'm putting extinction there in
quotation marks and
instead fosters alternatives.
In the remainder of this talk, I want to
highlight some of the key themes and
associated practices
that I think are especially
important to this idea
of crafting alternatives.
I note that many of these have emerged again
from my own experiences and reclamation,
which includes experiences
in Miami community,
as well as quite a bit of
engagement mostly with
smaller indigenous communities in what's
now California and Oregon.
I also draw from
a number of other scholar practitioners.
Finally, following another tenet
of Native American studies,
I emphasize that everything that I
say is not meant to be absolute.
The imposition of a model is in
itself contradictory
to the notion of reclamation.
Others offer these as ideas and
emphasize that flexibility is
always called for because guess what?
Communities are not all the
same and they might have different values.
Point one, out of many.
Reclamation entails identifying and
contesting colonization
and settler colonialism,
which draw from and
reinforce the discourse of extinction.
Colonization, in a very broad sense,
the behaviors, the ideologies, institutions,
economies, and so on
that maintain the subjugation
of indigenous peoples or
that start that process,
settler colonialism being its counterpart.
Everything that I just said,
but done by newcomers to a given place that's
already occupied by original peoples,
as part of a practice of
replacing those original peoples with
both the individuals
themselves and particularly with
the ideas of the colonizing population.
There are a number of specific themes of
colonization settler colonialism
that become relevant here,
and I've chosen to list a
few as bullets in the slide.
One is asserting insufficiency in
indigenous people's cultures and languages.
This can occur in
the form of a comment that says,
"Well, that language can't be
used for whatever."
This, by the way, is a basic fallacy,
something that's outright untrue,
or insufficiency
in language reclamation efforts,
"They'll never really learn their language."
Something like that. This is quite common.
Genocide and removal.
Relatively obvious
and very relatively egregious.
The imposition of and
the naturalization of newcomers needs,
wants, and ways of engaging with the world.
This includes ways of
assessing language and what
counts as a language,
or what counts as valuable language use,
what a language is for, and so on.
I'll say a little bit more about this later.
Extinction, of course, in similar discourses.
Long with a notion then of empty lands.
Empty lands are easier to colonize than
lands that have nations already in them.
If we can't ignore the existence
of those nations, then maybe we,
the colonial colonizers,
can get what we want or so the logic goes.
I wanted to draw particular attention
to a couple of named concepts
that were described in
a 2017 paper by
Chickasaw linguists, Jenny Davis.
These are linguistic extraction and
the erasure of colonial agency
in indigenous language shift.
I could try to summarize this,
but Jenny Davis said it so well that
I'm just going to quote her at length.
Again, this is from her 2017 paper
known as or called resisting
rhetorics of language endangerment:
Reclamation through
indigenous language survivance.
This is what she has to say
about linguistic extraction.
She notes that linguistic extraction
is defining, analyzing,
and representing languages and
the people connected to
them separately from the
complex sociohistorical,
political, and deeply personal
contexts in which they actually occur.
Linguistic extraction then renders
languages into extractable objects
that can be collected,
preserved, utilized, and even admired.
Critically, linguistic extraction is
not solely the collection of
endangered indigenous languages in ways that
often render them
inaccessible to their communities,
but also the presentation of
languages as objects or data without
their complex and varied human contexts.
This little and metaphorical extraction
from context is itself
a colonial enterprise and
often a cornerstone of Western science.
One that removes people from homelands,
loots objects from graves in
the name of science and education,
and disassociates products from
those who are labored to produce them.
In other words, it celebrates
the empire in empirical.
I love that last line.
[NOISE] Davis further observes
that this linguistic extraction then
goes hand in hand with
the other rhetorical strategy that I named,
what she calls the erasure
of colonial agency.
This is a practice that draws
attention away from or even completely
ignores the causes of
language endangerment and dormancy.
Sometimes it goes so far as
misattributing recent patterns
of indigenous language shift
onto the indigenous language communities
themselves through statements, for example,
to the effect of, well, they
chose not to speak
their language to their children,
instead of saying,
why would they make such a choice,
and what is the context in which they have
the prerogative to make choices?
The whole languages disappear.
That use of the unaccusative verb,
is very much aligned with
this erasure of colonial agency.
Reclamation to continue the topic,
entails describing languages thoughtfully.
As I've already discussed to
the E word, they're extinct,
gets applied to languages that
lack living first language speakers,
sometimes even the languages that
do have first language speakers.
But certainly, the languages that have
never been irretrievably lost,
and in that an increasing number of cases are
widely being learned from
documentation and more importantly,
are actually spoken by
the members of their communities.
The whole E word
as applied to these contexts,
I believe really must stop.
It is damaging, it is offensive,
is also inaccurate,
and that's as good of a reason as any.
Beyond this E word,
which is especially extreme,
I also want to recommend avoiding what
in general terms might
be called, shall we say,
past tense descriptions when
referring to indigenous
peoples and languages.
Except of course, in situations where
one's intent is specifically
to talk about the past,
in which case it's fine.
We Miami's, talk about our history,
but we don't put ourselves into history,
and that's the part that's different,
or that's the part that's key.
This reminds me of a story
that I want to share with you.
Took place in Indiana at the Seven Pillars,
which is a place of
historical and contemporary Miami relevance
near Peru, Indiana.
Because of damming and because
of other ecological destruction,
as we heard about yesterday,
various parts along this river,
various areas are no longer accessible,
at least most of the time,
to Miami people or for
that matter to others as well.
But this particular site is.
It's important cultural to Miami people,
and everybody you see here and you see me,
three from the right.
Everybody here is a Miami person.
The context is that we were about to have
a language and cultural camp
in Northern Indiana,
and this was
a camp counselor training which was
taking place in this particular Miami site.
Well, I ventured away from the group
a little bit and I
saw two people swimming out in the river.
It was a younger male and an older male,
and I understood them as being
a younger brother and a much older brother.
The older brother might've been
a young father or perhaps
an uncle type figure,
but within the context of their interactions,
that was how they came across.
The older one then turned to
the younger one and he said,
"Do you know who used to live here?
Indians". I could
literally hear him say this.
The irony is fantastic.
There we all were a group of
Miami people literally an earshot of
this statement that was relegating us to
the past in our own homelands.
"You know who used to live here?
Indians". I invite you to imagine with
me what would occur if we were to reframe
that statement, perhaps as follows.
You know whose lands we're on,
the [inaudible] ,
who hold indigenous title to
these lands and serve as the lands past,
present, and future caretakers.
How might that broader discourse change?
Later on then I note that practice of
language reclamation is heavily guided by,
in fact embedded into
intellectual sovereignty.
[NOISE] This is a widely referenced topic
in Native American studies,
usually attributed to Robert Warrior.
But this particular example
that I'm quoting here applies
the concept of an intellectual
sovereignty specifically to
indigenous language work and
even more specifically to
indigenous language work in California.
Intellectual sovereignty as
defined by Sheri Tatsch,
is the right to create, interpret, evaluate,
and conceive without
the willful assault of
Euro-American languages,
values, and social norms.
Linguistic work can, and I would argue,
must occur in ways that
respect tribal intellectual sovereignty.
Linguistic work must be
grounded in tribal ways of knowing,
I should say community ways of knowing,
which will of course vary from
one community to the next,
but have some commonalities
across indigenous populations.
This language research,
other types of language work,
most certainly can and I think oftentimes
does draw effectively from
ideas that are non-indigenous.
But my point is that this must occur in
a thoughtful way where
those outside ideas have first been deemed to
be culturally appropriate
and potentially useful,
rather than just being
imposed as often occurs through
statements such as everybody knows
that and then some statement
that is only partly true.
This is hugely important to pay attention to,
especially given the context
that we tend to live in,
which is where
Western knowledge systems are hegemonic.
They are so dominant
that they go unquestioned.
I'd like to share with you a statement
[inaudible] ,
critically education
scholar Brenda Liebowitz,
who commented on this on
the hegemony of Western knowledge,
noting the following, "The hegemony
of Western knowledge is problematic
in five respects;
it is embedded in relations
of violence and imposition;
it is embedded in relations
of social inequality;
it is interwoven with dynamics of alienation,
it lacks a foil to counter
its own excesses and show up its weaknesses,
and it is inadequate on its own to
solve questions that require attention."
I hope that that speaks for itself.
By extension then, a practice of
language reclamation entails
centering indigenous knowledges,
especially I want to argue
community definitions of language.
That raises a question then,
well, what is language anyway,
and when language work is occurring,
whose definition is being used?
Western scientific tradition
establishes languages,
as objects to be described in
scientific materials such as texts,
corporal, technical publications, and so on.
These can induce, serve multiple audiences,
but normally are structured around
colonial categories and norms of description.
Specific examples include how
languages are classified, for example,
with numerical vitality scales,
because Miami was just off the scale
entirely because scales don't capture us,
are written or otherwise
represented symbolically,
even given what are known as
International Organization
for Standardization
639 codes,
which impose a taxonomy of
naming and demarcating these languages.
It is crucially important that we consider
instead indigenous definitions of language.
These vary from one context to the next.
The moral of my story is
that it's always appropriate to
ask what the local definitions
are in a given place.
But they tend to have
certain things in common.
We very often hear language is
power, language is us.
We would not be us without
our language, so counterpart.
Language is a gift from the creator
because it allows us to
communicate our culture with each other.
Very frequently in these definitions
is the concept of language as a verb.
In English, the word language is a noun,
but in many Indigenous languages
or many languages in general,
that concept is captured with a verb.
This is also true with the word
Myaamiaataweenki which is a verb,
to speak Miami, or
Miami speaking or something like that.
Given the theme of this particular talk,
which is [FOREIGN] ,
I'd like to now share with you
a specific example of language or languaging
that comes from Myaamia
language teacher, Jarrid Baldwin.
I'm pleased to say Jarrid's father,
Daryl is here in the audience.
Jarrid grew up speaking the myaamia
since become a language teacher
and also a cultural leader.
I had the opportunity to do
an interview based study of
Indigenous definitions
of language a number of years
ago and I interviewed Jarrid as part of that,
and this is what he shared in response to
the question, what is language?
He noted that it's how
a community connects to each other and
how they express themselves
and their culture to each other.
Language provides
within the Myaamia community
a mapping for us to
learn more about each other and ourselves.
Centering community views such as this one,
aligns to the practice
of language reclamation.
Let's consider what this definition means.
One implication is that
cultural norms and practices can
never be secondary as they are
part of language by definition.
Another theme that emerges here is to
focus on actual use.
By extension, language research materials
that follow this line of thinking,
are likely going to produce
resources that are going to help
communities members
actually use the language and
actually connect to each
other as opposed to resources,
for example, that might teach grammar in
a decontextualized way following
a more Western tradition.
Following reclamation framework also
means that a person applying
this particular definition
would probably consider how and why
contemporary Myaamia people
are geographically
scattered and often on
the individual level away
from our original homelands,
even though, of course,
[inaudible] comment about this land,
knowing us no more forever was incorrect.
A practice of language reclamation
also entails paying attention to
the wisdom that's encoded within
the language or within
the process of languaging.
I want to share with you a specific example
that's deeply guided my thinking.
It has to do with the relationship between
these two words which also
exist in a number of other forms.
Awen [FOREIGN] is to be related,
awentii to be related to each other,
so it has a reciprocal suffix.
We can take a verbose,
such as this one to be
related to each other or
allied with each other
and make it into a noun.
Myaamiaataweenki's verb heavy but it
does have nouns as well,
and many verbs can be nominalized,
that is to say,
made into nouns by adding the suffix on it.
To be related to each other,
when made into a noun means alliance,
or also is translated as peace.
Cultivating relationships and
recognizing those relationships thus,
is a way of producing peace.
I wish that the United
States leadership knew this,
but perhaps there'll be a shift soon.
Continuing on then, a praxis
of reclamation requires relationality.
By relationality, I'm using
this term as it's commonly
employed in indigenous studies.
Living and operating in
relation to others, including of course,
non-human relatives,
in recognition of our interconnectedness.
Often then with an ensuing idea,
that this interconnectedness is
part of a healthy interdependence,
as I mentioned earlier.
Throughout this symposium over
the last couple of days,
they've been a number
of discussions about problems,
major problems in the world that I
think in many ways are
tied to broken relationships,
or relationships shall we say,
get broken by some other agent who
often isn't identified that
really needs to be identified.
Where that unidentified agent
then develops and maintains
systems that
facilitate the continued domination.
Given the problems that
are occurring in the world now,
particularly with respect to climate change,
I'm not under
the impression that simply having
strong relationships would be
enough of a fix.
The problem is so severe,
the ruptures are so severe at
this point that I think we need
sort anything and everything
in terms of responses.
Still, an ongoing theme that I've observed,
that very often the fixes are about
mitigating a particular issue,
a particular process,
but not dealing with
the underlying issues that
beget that process in the first place,
such as colonization,
settler colonialism,
and broken relationships.
When people have
relationships with each other,
and when they have relationships with
particular lands and with
non-human relatives,
they treat each other in a way that ensues.
I also here emphasized the larger principle
that indigenous knowledges
and relational practices,
especially as they relate to place,
often provide models for
sustainable and healthy living.
Not just in the said community,
even though knowledge tends to be local,
but also for communities beyond.
Saying a little bit more about relationality,
I observed that many indigenous scholars
have noted how relationality
is just one of many,
many, what we call R Words.
That is to say words that at least
in English start with R,
such as reciprocity,
responsibility and respect.
I gave you a little while ago,
but I've considered to be
a relatively prototypical language definition
from a Myaamia person,
in this case, from Jarrid Baldwin.
In that particular statement,
he didn't explicitly mentioned land,
but certainly that theme was part of
that broader conversation I had with him,
and something that I know that he
thinks about and cares about
deeply from my many years
of interactions with him.
I want to emphasize
then the centrality of land.
Not just abstract land,
but usually from the specific lands
from which a given language comes.
Indigenous language projects that
fail to acknowledge the land,
serve to reinforce the legacy
of colonial violence that
dispossesses many indigenous peoples
from our respective homelands.
I don't pretend that any simple
land acknowledgment will fix this,
as their very clearly very strong pressures,
legal structures that prevent
indigenous peoples from
accessing your own lands.
But I do think it's
very important that all of
us recognize land itself,
or perhaps personified in some contexts,
is a stakeholder and
a collaborator in
indigenous language reclamation efforts.
Land provides wisdom about the world
along with the necessary
resources for us to live.
It's as part of that relationship,
our relationship to land,
that these other words, R words emerge.
As far as reciprocity,
we have the responsibility to respect,
to think, and to care for
the lands with which we have a relationship.
Data, of course, with respect to all of
our non-human relatives beyond land.
Finally, then I want to emphasize
that reclamation practice
entails direct action
in one's own communities.
Communities plural, because most of us are
members of multiple communities.
It also entails being
an ally to other communities.
Remind you that [FOREIGN] ,
the verb root changed [FOREIGN]
has to do with forming alliances,
and from those alliances comes peace.
I think we can apply that
to this notion of an ally.
As I feel the term ally used
particularly in western
academic institutions,
it tends to have a more narrow meaning,
usually referring to somebody who's
not a member of a given identity group,
but his professed some support
for members of that group.
That's a narrow definition of ally,
not sure that alliance in
the Myaamia sense would
necessarily equal that.
But there certainly is some relationship.
Reclamation praxis then, by extension,
entails being an ally.
In academic institutions,
I'm emphasize that this calls
for developing and supporting
structures that support reclamation work,
especially in contexts of
hiring, promotion and tenure.
Similarly observed that
a praxis of language reclamation
aligns with research that
reflects indigenous needs, values,
and sovereignty as might occur through
a community-based work that leads
to community authorship or co-authorship,
as well as community stewardship whenever
possible of the resulting products.
It looks like I'm about out of time here,
so I'd like to conclude with
some final summarizing thoughts.
Moving toward a praxis
of language reclamation.
If I were just talking about
specific indigenous language efforts,
I might not say toward a praxis.
I might just say a praxis
of language reclamation,
but here I'm emphasizing the broader context.
I don't think that most groups are here yet,
hence the notion of moving toward.
Summary Observation 1, fixing
indigenous language extinction in
a way that draws from
colonial discourses of extinction
can make the situation worse by
reinforcing the structures and
ideologies that
beget indigenous language shift.
Point 2, privileging
indigenous community definitions
of language aligns with
the praxis of language reclamation.
If I had more space on this slide,
I might've said privileging
indigenous community definitions of language,
which includes languaging,
the concept as a verb,
aligns with the praxis
of language reclamation.
Last but not least,
regarding this relationality concept
that I just spoke about,
and the related r words,
we might observe that allyship
is grounded in relationships.
Developing these entails deep listening and
points to other r words such as respect,
responsibility, reflection,
rights, and of course reclamation.
On that note, I will stop here.
[FOREIGN] Big thanks for
allowing me to speak to you today.
[APPLAUSE]
How are we on time?
[BACKGROUND] We have some time
for Q&A or comments,
or you can just go on, engage
in reclamation, that's okay too. Yes.
>> First of all, thank you. This is
wonderful and thought provoking.
One of the first slides you showed
about language
[NOISE]
[inaudible]
I don't know who the linguist was.
I think [NOISE] it was Robert Hall
who might have been quoting someone else,
who said a language doesn't
die when the last speaker dies.
A language dies when the second
to last speaker dies.
That you have to have
at least two people to have a language.
Otherwise, it's just a mental construct.
[NOISE] I think in a way,
that relates to a lot
of what you're saying about relationality,
that languages are relational,
that it involves a dialogue,
a way of communicating with someone else.
By extension, that would mean
between generations, between communities,
and between cultures so
that language is always
relational in a way and always stochastic,
because one speaker has to
adapt to the other speaker,
which involves always changing language.
I'm Italian, from a small Southern community.
Each little town has
its own unique language there.
I know the difference
between the way my grandparents spoke it
and my parents spoke it and
my sister and I spoke it.
So that, I think,
all supports what you're saying.
But ultimately,
when you talk about reclamation,
it seems to suggest
[NOISE] bringing some kind of artifact
as opposed to looking
at moments relational language.
[OVERLAPPING] choose which moment,
which relationship,
which aspect of the language
that you're going to oppose.
>> There's a number of points
that have embedded in here.
To mention one, is that I'll note then that I
actually gave a definition
of language from an Ionia person.
The definition itself was
intrinsically relational.
It's about connecting to each other.
By extension, if there is just one person,
that one person can connect
with non-human relatives,
that person might connect to ancestors,
that person can connect to land.
But the dialogic language use
that I think you were referring to,
indeed, would not occur.
So, perhaps, then a language
or a given code becomes a sleeping language
when the second to last
person who actively is
using it with somebody else dies.
But it would still be a sleeping language,
not of course, a truly dead language,
unless it has no documentation
and no reclamation potential,
which is normally not the case
in Native North America, at least.
As part of my early academic work,
I didn't develop, but I
codified or formalized
the notion of sleeping languages,
and one of the ironies of that early work
is that it is in some ways
based on language as an object,
a language that can be brought back.
In order for that concept to work,
it has to, in some way,
exist separate from the community.
It has to exist as some idea,
some intellectual combination of
grammar and vocabulary, if you will.
I would argue, however,
that even with
that particular conceptualization,
which has certain truths to it, I mean, yes,
there's something that's document,
it's a list of words,
the underlying relational practices,
I think, are still embedded there,
and that's what we're really reclaiming.
I want to make an analogy to a comment
made by Hupa scholar, Cutcha Risling Baldy,
who in her recent book was
talking about a certain Hupa ceremony,
specifically the Flower Dance,
which had about 100 years
of dormancy and then
was brought back into community use.
Risling Baldy observed
that although other people were
saying that it was extinct
or dead, that the spirits,
the people above, the ancestors,
always were practicing this Flower Dance,
it just wasn't being practiced
here on the ground,
and so perhaps that's another
way to think about it.
I like to think that our ancestors
were interacting in relational contexts.
Their voices got recorded
onto paper, in this case.
More contemporary documentation might
actually be audio or video recordings,
which would be better,
but we don't work with those.
What we're doing then is we're bringing
that back into the context.
So there is an element of language as
an object out there,
but it is still a
relational object that I think is in
some practice continually practiced.
With respect to this other question,
I think you're asking where within
the vast body of documentation
does one choose to draw from?
It's a practical question.
It also can occur in situations where
somebody's learning language
from a living speaker,
where, perhaps, there are different varieties
of the language in question.
Well, who do you go to?
People are different types
of teachers, and so on.
Well,
I think the short answer is that one would
make a critically-informed choice
about what is best,
given the situation, and whether
that choice is also
informed by what's available.
In the case of work
with Myaamia documentation,
that's not really my area,
it's really more of David Costa,
Daryl Baldwin, and a couple of others.
I'll say there that one has to have
a very critical awareness of
the lens through which language is being
documented, because the prototype,
at least with Myaamia documentation,
is that it's a non-indigenous person
who's recording the language,
and sometimes putting it into
non-Myaamia categories.
It's also the case, of course,
that that documentation spans
a great deal of time,
thereby reflecting language change.
It also, of course, reflects
particular geography's regional dialects
or ethnic dialects as
they might be thought about.
I do know that where there
are documented dialectal differences,
most contemporary Myaamia people will
choose the form that corresponds
to whatever particular group or
a particular family they come from,
and that's the pattern that I've most
commonly observed in California,
where I currently work.
In terms of making those decisions,
I guess that's how I would describe it.
It's of an intellectually-informed process
that's heavily
guided by what's even available,
and that all of those things,
even if there isn't a clear match between
a particular place or particular person
or a particular time period, eventually,
all of those things become
very Myaamia again because it's
contemporary Myaamia people with
our respective regions and so on,
who are practicing them.
It's a long answer.
Did I answer the main parts of your question?
>> [inaudible] question.
>> Yeah, two-part question.
Anybody else? Yeah. Go for it.
>> Thanks a lot for the presentation. I think
what you're bringing to
the conversation in terms
of shifting [inaudible] reclamation,
the one above [inaudible] extinction
when these languages and
the cultures have [inaudible]
Subject to a ratio of oppression
and forces of power,
not just state that is in some abstract.
There's such so many things
that I was reminded in,
in my own trying
to rebuild relationships with
communities that are trying to
reclaim certain types of
relationships to the land.
In Missile America and the Andes,
there are certain words that are particularly
significant to people as
they engage in movements for reclamation.
In Oaxaca the word
[FOREIGN], which is celebratory,
communal labor practice in
a shared reciprocal manner
on non-monetary basis and
on a compulsory basis,
on the land that is shared
and if the product is shared.
[FOREIGN] or thank you, or in the Andes,
[FOREIGN] or [FOREIGN],
all these terms that reflect
particular way of organizing community.
If people find sooner than later,
they cannot reclaim these terms
without necessarily reclaiming
the practice [OVERLAPPING] commonality.
>> Right.
>> If language is embedded in land,
then land reclamation must be elaborately.
>> Yes.
>> If language isn't better than community,
then language reclamation must
necessarily mean the reclamation
of commonality as a form
of organization governance.
At that very moment,
it hits those who are working in reclamation
directly against the interests
of those who control the land.
>> Right.
>> Because you need a place to practice
that language in significance with the land.
How do we confront
those obstacles when we know
that language reclamation cannot be
abstract reclamation of something and say,
"Oh, let's codify it.
Let's just transmit it in a
classroom and that's that."
These are like how Whyte's says,
what does indigenous knowledge do for
indigenous peoples once you just extract it,
you codify it and let it poor?
>> It helps the colonizers, yes.
>> Then you have colonizers practicing
the indigenous knowledge [OVERLAPPING]
on indigenous peoples' own land.
>> Yes.
>> Which is the ultimate settler colonialism.
>> It becomes part of our knowledge
where the our does not
include the original peoples it comes from.
>> What are your thoughts on
what once we come against that,
that we are not just reclaiming language
but its embedded with
all these other reclamations?
>> I think you raised a great point
about with a particular vocabulary item,
a particular word that has
particular connotations one can
teach those connotation in a classroom.
One can teach them in a decontextualized way.
In the absence of other possibilities
at a given moment,
or at a given time in a given place,
I think that doing so would be better,
at least for community members,
than not doing so at all.
But what you're pointing out then, of course,
is that there are really two themes that I am
thinking about as I process your question.
One is that reclamation is very messy.
It's very messy because it's responding not
just to a couple of people
or to a couple of naysayers,
but rather to an entire structure,
an entire legal system,
an entire all sorts of
things instigating and that's very complex.
Second, of course, emerging in my response
and this is something that's pointed out a
lot among younger people,
just that reclamation is
an inter-generational process.
It's not something that you
start and then finish.
Now indeed, certain steps,
certain particular events might
have a beginning and an end,
such as not having access to
a given place for
purposes of performing ceremony there,
and then perhaps using
some Western legal structure,
gaining access to that place
as some tribes are doing.
I would emphasize is that it's
a messy process.
It is inter-generational.
As practice, in terms of
really practical applications of that,
my advice for people is to
always work with what
they have and start there.
Always recognize the structures
that are preventing the other things that
are needed such as access to land and
then to concurrently do those things.
To concurrently work with
what they have while
also working to rebuild
the broader infrastructure, if you will,
that's a capitalist notion,
the infrastructure, the
places, the connections,
and so on, the
economic development that might be
necessary in
order to facilitate those things.
But it's not a clean process at all.
It's very, very difficult.
The other theme that
emerges, of course though,
is that, reclamation is
centered in the specific
communities in which it's occurring.
But of course, those broader
structures that you're talking about,
particularly inhibited access to land,
whether through particular legal
structures such as ownership
or through severe degradation of
that land such that perhaps
nobody can access it,
at least not right now,
is that it's the other entities,
the agents, the
unnamed agents of disappearance,
who need to step up.
That is a very difficult process,
but certainly,
the first part of it then is to
identify the need and to identify
the issue because right now I
would argue that most of the time that
the logics of colonialism are so
strong that
those patterns are largely invisible.
Everybody knows it's that's
just the way that it is.
The particular landscape that we live in now,
with all of its obstruction
becomes the norm, the new baseline.
People always must
remember that it's not that way.
Again, it's a weak answer,
but it's a very difficult question,
but thank you for posing it.
>> It's an amazing answer.
If I may say something is that I was
thinking specifically of
the Indian project that does in technologies,
it's trying to restore
the way in which people in
different cells of the mountain area
would exchange labor and goods.
They call it the Winedija.
People are saying, we want to restore this,
but the law proved doesn't allow
seed sharing because the seeds
are patented and they just write it off.
>> Again, that's a great example, as I said,
of a Western legal system that's causing that.
Such as, when indigenous folks
in what's now the United States have
to get a permit from
the United States in order to
hunt on their own lands,
to be on their own lands.
In the immediate moment,
if that's the situation,
I would encourage those folks
to go ahead and do that
so that they can be there rather
than to not do it at all.
But no, clearly this is
so astonishingly wrong.
Now for a moment, I'm speechless.
I don't even know where to begin
[LAUGHTER] aside from being aware of
it. Anybody else? Yeah.
>> Well, just to go with that,
thank you so much for this talk.
I think we're all so grateful for it.
It's [NOISE] incredibly helpful.
But I was really struck by
your way of framing in terms of potentiality,
that this course is
that extinction seemed to participate in
a flat notion of
time and then a linear notion of time,
that will [inaudible] senses
of potentiality that
might have to do with sleeping.
I thought about dreaming
[NOISE] in that context.
With the idea of the patented seeds,
if we think in terms of
alternative temporalities,
we don't have to suffice with
the idea that this is foreclosed.
There's a long potential horizon
[NOISE] addressing the problem of the seeds,
but also that needs to be
grounded and real work
on changing the material conditions
to continue to allow
the dreaming and the potential to be present.
>> With respect to the seeds example,
it's important to recognize laws.
However, everybody knows that
or however common sense.
They are sometimes understood to
be made by people.
These types of laws at least are made by
people in particular power relations
that can and do change,
and those laws themselves can also change.
In particular, if there's a broader
effort to make that happen.
I didn't talk about seeds
[inaudible] not my area of expertise,
but I think it's worthy of mentioning
that myaamia [inaudible] corn is also in
this realm of the E word
are people who are not growing it.
Some myaamia elders kept it,
had ears of myaamia corn,
which is a unique variety of corn with
eight rows and relatively big kernels.
White corn came to
our people several hundred years ago.
Unique variety of myaamia corn
that some people were
keeping hadn't been growing
for a long time, but it was planted.
What happened? Started growing.
We started engaging with it, planting it.
It has a ceremonial purpose.
Of course, people are also eating it.
It was a really very
actively, if this makes sense,
actively not practiced for a period of time,
and yet now there are whole fields
of myaamia corn.
I'm guessing
at least some people in this room,
even plants, grow some. Is that the case?
>> Yeah.
>> It's definitely not extinct. Yes.
>> Actually, [NOISE] I want to share
a little story about extinct languages.
[NOISE] I'm coming from China.
In the early years actually,
there's a lot of people learning English.
We are forced to learn English
when we are in primary school.
After a long time,
Chinese government recognize
that it is important
to let the kids who know
about China's culture stuff.
We have a long time of
culture and there's tons
of language evolved from the original stuff.
We start to force
the kids to learn the ancient Chinese
from high school and we are
forced to take those tests
to high school and even college.
I think it is really important
that the government is supporting that stuff.
When I was junior high school,
I was forced to learn that
and I think that really helps.
We actually have a lot culture connection and
a lot of stories connection,
and we also learn a lot of stuff
from the ancient people
that are really smart.
We're keeping learning that,
and I think it is really helpful,
and also because Chinese
is where [inaudible] really be.
There is a lot of tribes in the mountain,
and they are all spoken different languages.
They have their own identity and they
have [NOISE] their own stuff [NOISE],
those stuff that really is unique.
There's a lot of
young people in those tribes saying that
there's no future if I still
living in that tribe and
I need to go to the big city.
I come from Beijing and
there's lot of tons of people
that come from those tribes
or little villages to come to Beijing.
They are actually no longer related to
that nation or related to that stuff again.
Their kids won't be related to them.
There is an action
that Chinese government do.
They don't make tons of money to
the little villages and to
help them to connect to the big villages,
big city and help
them to come back to the Internet.
You can see the future in
those little villages and you
didn't need to go outside the [inaudible].
It's also really important to add
those [BACKGROUND] into
the education of the kids.
The kids need to know those stuff
and the government need to support us.
I think that is the true thing that
really is important for the extinct languages.
Also, I didn't know about
the American situation really well,
but I think it is
really important to the government know
that supporting those languages is
a really important stuff and it
would lead to a bright future
for those tribes.
>> Thank you for your comment.
There are a number of themes
that emerged in your comment.
I want to reinforce a couple of them.
One is that there was
a recognition of policy,
a particular government-oriented policies,
but policies also occur in the home level,
at the community level, in
official capacities,
in unofficial capacities.
Policies, in many cases, guide practices.
Therefore, we need to pay a lot
of attention to policies.
Second, of course, is that
a tool of colonization [inaudible]
colonialism is taking education away from
the community and imposing
a different educational system,
one that usually teaches that
the original community is limited,
is bad, is extinct, and so on.
Case in point, most United States education.
Indeed, governments of various kinds
often have the power,
the infrastructure to respond to that.
That's what the Miami tribe
of Oklahoma government does.
I do not really believe
that the United States government does,
although there have been some movements and
more critically-oriented education scholars
and practitioners in various
states to that effect.
One specific point to raise
here is that the notion of
having education in one's own language,
through one's cultural ways
of knowing and so on,
is recognized as a basic human right
by the United Nations.
I think sometimes it's been
useful for indigenous people to
call upon those larger principles,
those larger structures,
recognizing that many times,
the specific colonial governments
under which we live,
such as the United States federal government,
have missed the memo
[LAUGHTER] or continue to
miss the memo as
a more active thing, perhaps.
I think we probably have time for
maybe one more question if there are any.
Yeah.
>> Thank you for you talk. Thank you
also for your comments
addressing some of
the material structures
of universities themselves.
[inaudible] it's a smaller conversation and
massive that policy changes
that are a part of this conversation.
But I wonder if you could
either speculate or talk a little bit
more about what specific
economical material changes
that we see at universities right now.
[inaudible] can
that happen within the context
of the Western University as an institution?
>> General question is, is it
possible to decolonize the university?
[LAUGHTER] One of my colleagues and friend
is a Kaweah artist, Gerald Clarke.
He turned to me and he said, ''Wesley,
that's like decolonizing the museum.''
In other words, this is just so
fundamentally challenging given what
it is that we're dealing with.
Certainly individual elements of
indigenization of decolonization,
do work and have worked.
I'm in the process of engaging with
a number of those things at UC Riverside.
I have the privilege of leading
a faculty working group
that's framed around reclamation.
Not specifically language reclamation,
but rather that the broader tenets
of reclamation as it applies to all
of these faculty members' areas of
research in whatever they may be.
UC Riverside recently received
a grant from the Mellon Foundation,
a million dollar grant,
to boost indigenous studies
and to really center
California indigenous nations
within that process.
This just happened as of
January 1st and so
the results are still to be seen.
But certainly if I have
anything to do with it,
which I probably will, because I'm
a Co-PI on the grant.
I have found in
universities there
are some people who are resistant,
there are some people who get
it, at both ends.
There are quite a few people in between;
people are just unaware
that indigenous nations exist.
I realized this when I was promoting
indigenous ways of knowing
for doing linguistic science.
Real said, one of the obstacles
is that people don't know that
indigenous peoples have ways of
knowing that we have intellectual traditions.
Because of course, that's not part
of the colonial education.
Instead making that statement very clear,
emphasizing at least in
the United States context,
the nationhood and the
sovereignty of the nations,
recognizing that certain policies
of reciprocity,
of stewardship, of recognizing say,
co-authorship and so on,
of repatriation of a material items to
tribal communities actually follows
even the colonial United States system which,
despite its many problems,
does at least on paper,
recognize a government
to government relationship
between the United States
and the various indigenous nations
that are now located
within it or that original
to its current boundaries.
I found that it's important
to engage the administration,
and to specifically develop policies.
There'll be MOU type policies
or just things in the hiring guidelines,
and say, for example,
if you're going to do a hire in
something related to indigeneity,
one of the policies might
be to have members of
local indigenous communities meet
with the potential candidates and to
give feedback about those candidates.
It's very simple. But of course,
if that doesn't happen very often,
you will get the person who says,'' I
work with indigenous communities.
Went to that reservation that one time,
took a few things published on,
and then I never went back.''
Somebody like that is not likely to
make it through that particular
type of process.
Another issue that comes up a lot is that
sometimes I'll get this what I call,
[inaudible] blowing people off.
I'll point out how in academia
only certain types of products that are
sanctioned through
a particular knowledge system and
particular networks really count
and everything else is nice,
but it might be called service.
I'm thinking particular set of
intellectual productions that are not peer
reviewed in the conventional sense
in Western academia whereby other experts,
people with terminal degrees
in the same limited disciplinary area,
make a review of
the products such as a paper and say,
''Yay or nay or revise and
resubmit,'' as a recommendation.
One of the very important things
I think to do is to
institute community-based peer review.
Recognizing, well, especially when
you're writing about indigenous communities.
But also if you're doing research
in a particular place that needs
to be reviewed by and sanctioned
by the community-based experts,
the indigenous community experts.
As a matter of policy,
academia right now revolves
around a lot of unpaid labor or
at least the assumption
that the labor is occurring because
the other person has
a faculty position and there's
paid a salary and that that
labor falls into that salary.
This doesn't really work when
the person is an adjunct,
when they're unemployed or underemployed,
as I was for a period of time.
Therefore, I would emphasize
the importance to appropriately
compensate the indigenous community members
who engage in this type of review.
Beyond the academia,
it's not necessarily sanction it,
but I have found a lot of success
using the problematic principle of
interest convergence as written
about particular instead
of diversity scholarship.
Interest convergence being this idea
that a given institution,
a given entity will support something
in so far as doing
so supports its own interests.
Canonically, this shows up in
the United States Academy
whereby institutions will
support indigenous nations or
something to that effect
because it makes the institutions look good,
generally around some diversity
and equity frame.
Arguably what really needs to happen,
it's like, well, if you are in a given place,
certainly having responsibility to
the local indigenous group,
that should be a given.
That's not something you do
because it makes you look good,
that's something you do because
it's the right thing to do.
In the interim, however,
recognizing that that is not,
I think that the common line of thinking.
I have had quite a bit of success in
terms of getting particular things
through by
referring to that interest convergence,
not with that label, but
certainly to the idea.
Well, this is really going
to help the university.
This fully aligns with
the university's mission of
supporting this or supporting this,
of getting more students of color,
of having more tribal members
on campus or what have you.
It does work as problematic as it is.
I hope we can chat more about
this because it's a larger topic.
I'm assuming that we are in fact,
about out of time.
>> We are. Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE].
[inaudible]
>> [BACKGROUND]