As the Rez Turns: Anomalies within and beyond the Boundaries of a Pueblo Community

Abstract

After initial instruction in written and spoken Tiwa, young adult participants in the summer language program at San Antonio Pueblo began authoring their own pedagogical materials as a learning activity. Charged with writing pedagogical dialogues to aid in language learning, the students created "the first Native soap opera," as the students described it, which they named As the Rez Turns. In this paper, I analyze the processes of entextualization surrounding the creation of this text, its generic features, and its content, which provides a glimpse into the contemporary lived experience of community members in this community that emphasizes strict control of textual circulation and limiting access to local knowledge. I utilize Philip Deloria's (2004) analysis of Native Americans' engagement with popular cultural forms, and linguistic anthropological work on intertextuality and genre to analyze this example of representation, outlining the extra-and intracommunity generic and ideological "expectations" conditioning the creation of this dialogue to show how the students utilize associated "anomalies" as discursive resources to construct veiled political commentaries and assert the right to author indigenous language materials. By including stylistic and thematic elements outside of and in dialogue with the standard forms of pedagogical language dialogues and contemporary soap operas among other genres, the final text is an example of the ways that indigenous people continue to "creat[e] modernity in dialogue with others" (Deloria 2004:238). Pueblo language ideologies privileging indirection are honored in the creation of this covert political commentary supposedly created as a neutral language learning tool. Thus, As the Rez Turns is an example of a comedy of manners, highlighting membership issues, gender, and indigenous identity in this community.

Spatiotemporal, Geographic, and Linguistic Fixity: (Counter)hegemonies in the Pueblo Borderlands

“…I had spent seven years working as part of the San Ramón Pueblo 4 language program and have advised projects at Pojoaque and Nambe Pueblos, which provided me with knowledge of the grammar and phonology of Kiowa-Tanoan languages, the family to which Southern Tiwa belongs. Like my previous work (Debenport, 2010a(Debenport, , 2010b(Debenport, , 2011(Debenport, , 2012(Debenport, , 2015(Debenport, , 2017, I…”

The problematic concept of "native speaker" in Psycholinguistics: Replacing vague and harmful terminology with inclusive and accurate measures

“…As we can see, there is no clear, consensus definition of NATIVE SPEAKER/SIGNER or NATIVE LANGUAGE. This multifaceted concept can, but does not always, involve a constellation of factors relating to age, order, and context of acquisition (e.g., Abrahamsson and Hyltenstam 2009;Costello et al 2008;Quer and Steinbach 2019;Rothman and Treffers-Daller 2014), continued usage and/or exposure (e.g., Costello et al 2008;Benmamoun et al 2013), proficiency or competence (e.g., Chomsky 1965;Abrahamsson and Hyltenstam 2009), and socio-cultural identification or membership (e.g., Boltokova 2017;Debenport, 2011;Benmamoun et al 2013).…”

Boasian Legacies in Linguistic Anthropology: A Centenary Review of 2011

“…In the light of P. Deloria's (2004, 2011) critique of expectations placed on Native people as an exogenous limiting gaze, here we find detailed ethnographic attention to intertextual links, showing how quotidian life as well as high‐stakes indigenous politics is linguistically mediated and often explicitly focused on language. Articles in the volume address various ways in which the contemporary field of research in indigenous languages encourages immersed and engaged interconnections, such that the authors may themselves be agents in processes of film production, language documentation, and/or kinship relationality that they reflect on and write about (Debenport 2011, Leonard 2011, Meek 2011b, Peterson 2011).…”

“…The title of Debenport's (2011) “As the Rez Turns” is the creative product of teenage Tiwa language students who composed an English language soap operatic rendition of life on the reservation for eventual performance in the Tiwa language. The intertextual connections of this complex genre are the focus of analysis.…”

“…Consider that “rez” in the title replaces “world” in the indexed cotext of the “cheesy” daytime soap title “As the World Turns.” The reservation is cast as a world unto itself here, and as Debenport demonstrates, the text moves back and forth across framings and voicings that worry over and implicitly address relationships of Native youth to their community and to the outside. “As the Rez Turns” introduces politics of kinship, race, gender, and generational difference within the shifting boundaries of the tribe through the figures of the casino and tribal rolls; interethnic indigenous relations through jokes of decidedly non‐Pueblo “Buffalo Thunder” images of Plains‐style Indian identity; and figures of non‐Indian otherness through denomination of main characters as “Vivian, Chance, Skylar, and Peppa.” But for all of its social critique and boundary crossing (Rampton 1995), the most remarkably unexpected aspect of the text might be its cultural continuity, as its authors “uphold the norms of Pueblo propriety” (Debenport 2011:106), drawing on a Pueblo linguistic ideological framing of narrative as morality tale in which the responsibility that comes with authorship may be diffused (Kroskrity 2011a:166).…”