“They live in Lonesome Dove”: Media and contemporary Western Apache place-naming practices

Abstract

This article treats a place-naming genre among residents of the White Mountain Apache reservation in which people use English-language mass media discourse to name newly constructed neighborhoods on the reservation, usually with humorous effect. It is argued that these names do not represent simple assimilation to mainstream discursive norms. Instead, they represent the deployment of media discourse according to locally defined speech genres and language ideology to comment on social changes brought about by the new housing developments. As a strategy for engaging with the dominant society, these names are acts of community self-definition that confound mainstream expectations for place names generally, and for Native American place names in particular. They celebrate participation in media discourse, but in terms that privilege reservation insiders. Use of these names constitutes the reservation as an interpretive community in which participation is defined not along nationalistic models of citizenship, but in terms of locally established idioms of sociality. (Discourse and place, genre, intertextuality, mass media, Western Apache, place names, Native American, narrative, joking, verbal play)* I N T R O D U C T I O N Linguistic anthropology has tended to focus on the analysis of narrative, oratory, ritual speech, and other very well bounded and easily identifiable speech genres; however, little has been said about the smaller, scattered pieces of formulaic language-for example, the public words of street signs, graffiti, and political parties, or the popular extracts from radio, film, and the world of advertising. I argue here that tuning into these smaller genres or "minor media" is one productive avenue for beginning an analysis of the linguistic intertextuality of contemporary societies (Spitulnik 1997:166).

Truth and Stories

“…Beginning with Basso's treatment of joking imitations of the Whiteman (1979), a great deal of work in Southern Athabaskan responses to colonialism has been written concerning poetics (Webster , 2015), place‐names (Nevins ), language shift (Nevins ), and popular music (Samuels ). Here I have attempted to imagine the creation of the context for those responses and that other work.…”

Dif’ G’one’and Semiotic Calquing A Signography of the Linguistic Landscape of the Navajo Nation

“…This is a part of a larger trend of reimagining and restructuring the lived space (and time) of Native peoples. On this point, see Nevins (2008) and Anderson (2011). 7.…”

Las ideologías lingüísticas sobre las lenguas indígenas americanas: una revisión sistemática de artículos de investigación

“…En una línea similar, Nevins (2008), a partir de un trabajo basado en la observación, destaca la influencia de il en la denominación de vecindarios en una reserva apache, prácticas que son motivadas por el deseo de visibilizar la diferencia.…”