Indigenous Linguistics and Land Claims: The Semiotic Projection of Athabaskan Directionals in Elijah Smith's Radio Work

Abstract

In recent decades, land claims and language revitalization have emerged as prominent forms of indigenous activism in many parts of the world. Activists' indigenous language performances merit special attention since they commonly foreground the semiotic resources of their languages and reference the social structures in which they are embedded. This article examines a co-performance by Yukon native leader Elijah Smith and Southern Tutchone elder Solomon Charlie that epitomizes the use of indigenous linguistic resources to assert native rights and identity in innovative contexts. In particular, Charlie's account exemplifies the essential roles of deictic terms as bridges between micro-level narrative processes and the macro-level social fields of contemporary society in which indigenous identity is projected. [place, deixis, Athabaskan languages, indigenous activism, language ideology] O ver the course of many years work with native elders engaged in language revitalization efforts in the Yukon Territory, the authors became interested in the ways fluent speakers use the grammatical resources of their languages to promote indigenous identity and tailor their performances for contemporary social contexts. Pursuing these interests, we examined the linguistic details of selected public indigenous language performances and researched the history of indigenous activism in the region. While our studies have focused on the Yukon, they address topics of central concern in linguistic anthropology, including deixis, performance, cultural identity, and indigenous language ideology.The Yukon is particularly fertile ground for studies of indigenous languages and activism, and one of us (Tlen) has played a significant role in efforts to gain recognition of native rights and revitalize the use of native languages in the Territory. 1 Indigenous activism emerged in the Yukon as a response to the domination and marginalization of the native population by non-natives. The tumultuous influx of miners and settlers during the Klondike Gold Rush (1896-1898) brought sweeping social and economic changes to the Yukon, and the subsequent imposition of Euro-Canadian

Bringing Indigenous Kamchatka to Google Earth: Collaborative Digital Mapping with the Itelmen Peoples

“…By showcasing and translating places like historic and contemporary villages, fishing camps, hunting and gathering areas, reindeer migration paths, sacred sites, and place names, we show how indigenous practices are anchored to the land. Moreover, it is well established that emplaced language practices can serve an important mnemonic function in reinvigorating and revitalizing indigenous language and cultural practice (Afable and Beeler 1996;Moore and Tlen 2007).…”