“Laxwalxwash Potamáay Súngaan ‘áawq // to be between the Blind Snake’s Teeth”

Meissner, Shelbi Nahwilet

doi:10.4324/9781003164869-22

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…In my experience, these protocols tend to defer to the speakers whose voices and images are recorded in said language resources, as well as to the descendants of those speakers. Some language activists have taken up practices of including their own metadata, keeping their own archives, and dealing with the access dilemma outside the confines of the linguistic sovereignty dilemma (Meissner 2021). Protocols regarding reciprocity in the exchange of Indigenous languages are also important and vary across language-reclamation spaces.…”

Section: Indigenous Philosophies Of Language: Some Key Conceptsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In addition to the sentiments expressed by theorists like Bastien, Jeffredo-Warden, and Spielmann, other proponents of impassable incommensurability spring from different motivations. Because of the aforementioned abuses by outsiders and continued attempts of non-Indigenous research institutions to establish and maintain control of Indigenous language archives and reclamation programs, claims of radical incommensurability may serve an agenda of linguistic and epistemic sovereignty (Meissner 2021). Novelist David Treuer says his characters' Ojibwe thoughts cannot be translated into English, but he expands this thought to include that even if the character' thoughts could be translated, Treuer would refuse to translate them because he wants to defy the tropes of ethnography and the constant calls from settler society for the labor of translation (Kirwan and Treuer 2009).…”

Section: Tule Canoes: Three Kinds Of Incommensurabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

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“World”-Traveling in Tule Canoes: Indigenous Philosophies of Language and an Ethic of Incommensurability

Meissner

2023

Hypatia

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Indigenous language activists talk about incommensurability all the time—in interesting ways that link language and knowledge as components of Indigenous lifeways that can't be disentangled. According to many of these scholar-activists, what is untranslatable about Indigenous languages is often what is incommensurate about Indigenous worlds. Drawing upon resources from Indigenous language-reclamation work, I outline here a nonexhaustive taxonomy of incommensurability in the literature about Indigenous philosophy of language, and gesture at the ways coalitional relationships might be built that hold space for these different varieties of incommensurability. For ease of explication and to honor Indigenous ways of knowing, I employ here an organizational metaphor rooted in my own communities’ traditions of canoe-voyaging to organize three forms of incommensurability that emerge from Indigenous philosophies of language: impassable incommensurability and strategic impassable incommensurability (big water through a rock garden), as well as incommensurability with technical passage: (heavy water through a rock garden). These forms of incommensurability, as they spring from Indigenous philosophies of language, lend themselves toward nuanced insights for careful and considerate world-traveling (à la Lugones) that holds space for epistemic and linguistic sovereignty.

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Section: Indigenous Philosophies Of Language: Some Key Conceptsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Tule Canoes: Three Kinds Of Incommensurabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%