Lessons from Fort Apache: Beyond Language Endangerment and Maintenance - Softcover

Nevins, Marybeth Eleanor

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1496231465 ISBN 13: 9781496231468

Publisher: University of Nebraska Press, 2024

Synopsis

Lessons from Fort Apache is an ethnography of Indigenous language dynamics on the Fort Apache reservation in Arizona with North American and global implications concerning language endangerment. Moving beyond a narrow focus on linguistic documentation, M. Eleanor Nevins examines how the linguistics and cultural identities of Indigenous populations are attributed with meaning against 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 between community members and the educators and scholars who research their linguistic heritage.

Nevins argues that the debates surrounding the revitalization of Indigenous languages need broadening to include larger questions of social mediation, shifting cultural identities, and the politics intrinsic to the relationship between Indigenous community members and university-accredited experts such as language researchers and educators. This engaging ethnography examines these questions and investigates the language dynamics of the Fort Apache Reservation, including the unintended challenges that standardized textual models sometimes pose to local interests. Nevins reveals the community’s historical and contemporary concerns for language documentation, maintenance, and revitalization.

Lessons from Fort Apache demonstrates 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.
 

About this title

About the Author

M. Eleanor Nevins is an associate professor of anthropology at Middlebury College, Vermont. She is the editor of World-Making Stories: Maidu Language and Community Renewal on a Shared California Landscape (Nebraska, 2017).
 

From the Back Cover

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1496231465
• ISBN 13: 9781496231468
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 282