Native American linguistics and anthropology

Working with Northern Arapaho elders in Rocky Mountain National Park, Coloradao
Photo courtesy of Sara Wiles, Lander, WY

Annotated bibliography of my refereed articles,
book chapters, and conference proceedings.

 

1. “A Reconstructed Conjunct Order Participle in Arapaho.” With Alonzo Moss. International Journal of American Linguistics 68 (2002): 341-65.

Affirmative statements in modern Arapaho use forms that were originally subordinate clause structures - "conjunct order participles" in Algonquianist terminology. The article shows that once these structures were borrowed for affirmative statements, then new subordinate clauses structures, used in relative clauses, had to be innovated. The article explains these forms, undocumented at the time, and their diachronic evolution.

2. “The Poetics of Arapaho Storytelling: Voice, Print, Salvage and Performance.” Oral Tradition 17 (2002): 18-52.

The article examines the oral poetics of a long contemporary legendary/historical narrative performed for a native audience, and compares them to the poetics found in a much shorter narrative performed for a linguist in a elicitation context. It highlights the differences in structure and texture between the two texts, suggesting that the structures found in the latter texts may not be representative of full performance traditions.

3. “Bilingual Curriculum among the Northern Arapaho: Oral Tradition, Literacy, and Performance.” American Indian Quarterly 26( 2002): 24-43.

Argues that native Arapaho speakers have incorporoated traditional performance practices and expectations into their local Arapaho-language literacy practices. This has produced a unique Arapaho literacy which resists Euro-American models and offers the possibility of linguistic and cultural continuity through creative adapation of an external practice.

4. “A Note of Clarification on the Arapaho TA Verb.” Algonquian and Iroquoian Linguistics 27 (2002): 17.

Corrects an error presented in previous descriptions of the Arapaho verb inflection paradigms. Now superseded by The Arapaho Language (2008).

5. “The Arapaho Conjunct Order: Forms and Functions.” With Alonzo Moss. Proceedings of  33rd Algonquian Conference, Berkeley, CA, 2002: 162-80.

Documents for the first time the full range of inflections used in subordinate clauses in Arapaho. Now largely superseded by The Arapaho Language (2008). Also shows that certain elements of the affirmative verb paradigm (all plurals) were borrowed from iterative inflections.

6. “Arapaho Place Names in Colorado: Form, Function, Language and Culture.” With Alonzo Moss. Anthropological Linguistics 45 (2003): 349-89.

Examines place names recorded in and around the Rocky Mountain National Park area of Colorado in 1914. Shows that there are close connections between the names used and traditional myths, as well as with traditional motifs (beadwork, quillwork, painting) used on material culture items. The place names can be seen as a form of writing of Arapaho culture and myth onto the landscape, while the material culture items can be understood as maps as well, which echo the landscape.

7. “Arapaho Placenames in Colorado: Indigenous Mapping, White Remaking.” Names 52 (2004): 21-41.

Examines the way in which Arapaho place names were selectively adopted or rejected as part of the effort to establish Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado, and how the process of adoption reveals key prejudices of Euro-Americans of the time towards Native Americans, and thus writes a specific colonial relationship onto the landscape, replacing an original Arapaho cultural pattern that had been previously written onto the landscape (see paper #6).

8. “The Linguistic Structure of Arapaho Personal Names.” With Alonzo Moss. Proceedings  of 35th Algonquian Conference. London, ONT, 2004:61-74.

Shows that Arapaho personal names have preserved a unique grammatical structure, based on the earlier form of affirmative statements, which has since been replaced by entirely new structures (see paper #1) in everyday speech. This structural conservatism can be linked to ideologies about personal names, which see them as containing and preserving the power of earlier owners of the name.

9. “Report on the Status of Gros Ventre/Atsina.” With Alan Taylor. Algonquian and Iroquian Linguistics 29 (2004):41.

Reports that one fluent speaker of the language remained at the time (contrary to many reports), as well as several semi-speakers.

10. “Three Stories.” With Alonzo Moss. Translation and critical introduction of three Traditional Arapaho narratives. In Algonquian Spirit, Brian Swann, ed. Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2005:472-494.

Provides three reservation-era stories, recorded in 2001, from Richard Moss. The stories combine traditional and modern motifs, while preserving traditional patterns of organization (see paper #2).

11. “Arapaho Plant Names.” Proceedings of 36th Algonquian Conference, Madison, WI 2005:1-36.

A combination of ethnobotanical field research and archival examination of manuscript soruces, the paper provides names and identifications for all Arapaho plants documented up to the time of the paper, along with linguistic analysis of the names.

12. “Arapaho Imperatives: Indirectness, Politeness and Communal “Face”“. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 17 (2007):44-60.

Examines the multiple different Arapaho imperative forms, in the context of theoretical literature on politeness and face. Indirect imperatives are the most interesting form, as they index speakers, addressees, and third-party actors (as well as fouth-party patients). Their usage relies on complex judgements about relative agency and authority among the indexed participants. These judgements must be understood in terms of potential face-threatening not only for the addressee and speaker, but also multiple other parties and indeed the entire community present in certain situations, where ritual efficacy is at stake.

13. “Indigenous Language Use in Native American Education: Opening Spaces for Indigenous Ethnographies of Communication” in Language of the Land: Policy, Politics, Identity. Katherine Schuster and David Witkowsky,  eds. Information Age Publishing, 2007: 149-64.

An extended version of paper #3, this paper argues that local indigenous literacies and local indigenous language classrooms can be key sites for indigenous agency and resistance to Euro-American models of literacy and educational practices more generally. It argues that indigenous language classes can have more profound roles than simple language transmission, which should be recognized in assessing their full value in the curriculum.

14. “Indigenous Languages of the West: A Prognosis for the Future” in Remedies for a New West. Limerick, Cowell and Collinge, eds. 2009, University of Arizona Press, 47-65.

This chapter discusses the secondary implications and results of language documentation and revitalization efforts. It argues that a key role of documentation is to help provide additional and multiple choices to indigenous peoples, and that the effort to provide choice is - at least for documenters - more important than the question of what is finally done with that choice, which in any event remains eternally open-ended. It also suggests that collaborative efforts at both documentation and revitalization may need to be understood in some contexts as processes of mourning, and that such mourning can be a key positive outcome in situations of perhaps inevitable language shift. Thus the chapter argues for certain moral values in addressing language shift, which are active and valuable whether or not the shift is ever reversed. Both the provision of choice and the process of mourning can be understood as processes of historical, cross-cultural and collaborative healing.

15. “Arapaho Songs.” Andrew Cowell and Alonzo Moss, Sr. eds. Bombay Gin 37:1 (2011): Anthology of American Folk Music, 125-32.

Several Ghost Dance songs contributed to an anthology of folk music, with speculative interpretive comments suggested by the editors, along with cultural information.

16. “The Native Hawaiian Model of Language Revitalization: Problems of Extension to Native America." International Journal of the Sociology of Language 218 (2012): 167-93.

Examines models of individual and group identity in Hawaii and Native America (focusing on Arapaho specifically and Plains reservations more generally). Suggests historical reasons why "Hawaiian" identity has been more diverse in terms of indexical features and those claiming membership in the category than has been the case for Native American identities. Argues that these historical reasons and the differing conceptions of identity they have produced are key to understanding why language revitalization has been less supported by the general public in the Mainland than in Hawaii, and why there is much more ambivalence about the identities among the indigenous population on the mainland than in Hawaii. Based on experience in both settings, I try to clarify hidden diachronic differences in linguistic culture and experience, often not understood by either Hawaiians or Native Americans, which can be impediments to revitalization.

17. “Editing a Gros VentreText.” Terry Brockie and Andrew Cowell. Forthcoming in New Voices for Old Words: Editing Algonquian Texts. David Costa, Ed. University of Nebraska Press, 2015.

Provides the first publication of any full Gros Ventre text, with interlinear analysis. Discusses the challenges of such editing in a situation where no fluent speakers remain, and illustrates how knowledge of Arapaho by Cowell and availability of fluent Arapaho speakers can be used in part to elucidate problems.

18. “Editing Arapaho Texts: A Comparative Perspective.” Forthcoming in New Voices for Old Words: Editing Algonquian Texts. David Costa, Ed. University of Nebraska Press, 2015.

Discusses the process of editing two different Arapaho texts from manuscript, once of which represents a rich performance, while the other represents a fairly perfunctory telling (cf. paper #2). Also discusses all the available manuscript sources for Arapaho, and their various problems in terms of orthography and accuracy.

19. "Towards a Computational Database of Arapaho." With Tim O'Gorman. Forthcoming 2015 in Proceedings of 45th Algonquian Conference, Chicago, 2012.

Examines efforts by researcher and native speakers to rate speaker quality, in context of language shift and loss, and finds that native speaker judgements can be successfully relied on. The paper proposes certain morphological features which can be used in a corpus context, with statistical approaches, to identify speakers who show various degrees of language loss/failure of acquisition. It also provides a warning, however, that speech genre (traditional narrative vs. casual narrative vs. conversation) can produce much great statistical effects on certain morphological features than does language loss, so such approache must be used with extreme caution, and databases must absolutely be labeled for speech genre as well as speaker ability.

20. "Language Maintenance and Revitalization." In Handbook of Linguistic Anthropology, Nancy Bonvillain, ed. Routlege. Forthcoming 2015.

Argues that maintenance and revitalization are two quite separate issues. Maintenance involves issues of utility and motivation for language use, while revitalization involves first issues of language knowledge, and then secondarily even more severe issues of utility and motivation. Also argues that language shift is fundamentally a symptom of socio-cultural changes, and is thus an anthropological issue, not a linguistic issue. Unless socio-cultural changes occur that alter the language ecology, reversal of shift is unlikely, though in some cases maintenance and revitalization efforts can themselves be part of socio-cultural change.

21. “The Language of the Beesoowuunenino’”. Under consideration at Anthropological Linguistics.

Provides all known data on the Arapahoan dialect of the Beesoowuunenino' people, in modern phonemicization. Also provides a phonological history of this dialect plus Arapaho and Gros Ventre, and shows that the three speech forms made up a dialect chain, with the Bees. dialect intermediate between Arapaho and Gros Ventre, though closer to Arapaho. Suggests the dialect chain was broken by the arrival of the horse and/or pressures from the northeast due to the development of the fur trade, during the 18th century, before the Bees. finally united with the Arapaho, likely around 1837, due to demographic pressures from warfare and/or disease.

22. "Gros Ventre Place Names and Ethnogeography." With Allan Taylor and Terry Brockie. Under consideration at Anthropological Linguistics.

Provides documentation of all known Gros Ventre place names, from contemporary field work and manuscript sources, within the broader context of Plains Indian place-naming practices, including those of the Arapaho (see paper #6). Also shows that the end of nomadic existence led to important shifts in the larger Gros Ventre place-naming system, including loss of certain naming mechanisms connected to mythological and religious symbolism, and the creation of new ones related to sedentary existence, in a manner similar to changes in the Arapaho system (see paper #6).

23. "Symmetry and Asymmetry in Arapaho Collaborative Narratives." Under revision for Journal of Pragmatics.

Examines the formal features of Arapaho collaborative narratives. The paper shows that in terms of content contribution, the narratives often maintain very close symmetry, but in terms of micro-structural features, there is a strict asymmetry between a lead and a secondary teller. The paper is situated in the context of general studies of collaborative narrative and understandings of the relationship between formal asymmetries and symmetries on the one hand and social roles and power relationships on the other.