Ways of Talking (and Acting) About Language Reclamation: An Ethnographic Perspective on Learning Lenape in Pennsylvania

ABSTRACT

The experiences of a community of people learning and teaching Lenape in Pennsylvania provide insights into the complexities of current ways of talking and acting about language reclamation. We illustrate how Native and non-Native participants in a university-based Indigenous language class constructed language, identity, and place in nuanced ways that, although influenced by essentializing discourses of language endangerment, are largely pluralist and reflexive. Rather than counting and conserving fixed languages, the actors in this study focus on locally appropriate language education, undertaken with participatory classroom discourses and practices. We argue that locally responsible, participatory educational responses to language endangerment such as this, although still rare in formal higher education, offer a promising direction in which to invest resources.

KEYWORDS:

• Endangered languages
• higher education
• Indigenous languages
• language and identity
• language and place
• language reclamation

Notes

¹ Starting point (Lenape translations courtesy of Shelley DePaul).

² We use real names of institutions and some participants, with their permission and encouragement. We are especially grateful to Shelley DePaul for opening the class to us and generously sharing her time and expertise.

³ Other terms include language regenesis (McCarty, 2013), regeneration (Hohepa, 2006), reawakening (Amery, 1995) and revival (Dorian, 1994).

⁴ That is, institutions founded by non-Indigenous people during or after the colonial period (e.g., federal, state, local governments, universities, churches, and schools).

⁵ Native American Languages.

⁶ We are here.

⁷ Let’s speak Lenape.

⁸ Materials produced by Jim Rementer and Nora Thompson Dean of the Delaware Tribe of Indians were especially helpful, including the Lenape Talking Dictionary (http://www.talklenape.org).

⁹ Ongoing support from members of Swarthmore College and the University of Pennsylvania has been crucial, in particular Drs. Ted Fernald, Robert Preucel, and Ann Dapice, as well as funding from Swarthmore College, an NSF grant, and support from the University of Pennsylvania’s Greenfield Intercultural Center.

¹⁰ A documentary following two linguists, one of them a professor at Swarthmore College, in their travels to document endangered languages in remote areas.

¹¹ Exceptions include long-standing Ojibwe programs at the Universities of Michigan and Minnesota and programs at the University of Oklahoma, University of South Dakota, University of Hawai’i, and others. Nonetheless, in the eastern United States and in private universities, Indigenous language teaching programs are almost nonexistent.

¹² We [inclusive] discuss it.